The Shorter Wisden 2013 (30 page)

Given London 2012’s immense drain on resources and space, most of the dailies deserve praise for operating a near full-strength cricket service. Coverage of the county game was generally
threadbare, though there was nothing exceptional in that. But when the national press gathered at Headingley for the Second Test against South Africa, they were rewarded for their fidelity with the
story of the year.

On August 6, Usain Bolt destroyed the field in the 100 metres, Jason Kenny triumphed in the men’s sprint cycling, and Britain’s showjumpers won their first Olympic gold for 60 years.
But it was a measure of the gravity of the Pietersen saga that, the following morning,
The Sun
,
Daily Mirror
and
Daily Star
all found space for it on their back
pages.

Pietersen’s collision with the media had been brewing all summer. It began in July with an interview in the
Daily Mail
, when he spoke for the first time about his retirement from
one-day internationals. “I’ve read and seen that we had heated discussions,” he said. “Well, that’s a lie. Whoever told the media that is a liar.”

The suggestion that Pietersen had demanded to be excused from Test duty to play in the Indian Premier League had generated a tranche of negative comment. “It takes a vaulting arrogance to
believe you can return to a forum that has made its negotiating position extremely clear with a new set of conditions,” a seething Derek Pringle wrote in the
Daily Telegraph
.
“By doing that, he brings his mercenary instincts, which many feel were his prime motivation when first qualifying for England, to the fore.”

Now, after it emerged he had sent questionable texts to the opposition, it was open season. Suddenly, all the old preconceptions began to resurface. “Suggestions that Pietersen is not the
only one seriously at fault are far from convincing enough to enlist sympathy for the transplanted South African,” wrote Hugh McIlvanney in
The Sunday Times
. And in the
Daily
Telegraph
there was this from Peter Oborne: “Pietersen is the latest white South African to use his selection for the England cricket team to promote his personal ambitions. Ultimately,
Pietersen has not much idea of what it means to be British.”

Perhaps the most astonishing philippic came from Michael Henderson, a long-standing and now gleeful detractor. “Those of us who have never accepted him as a bona fide Englishman,” he
trilled in the
Daily Mail
, “have been expecting this balloon to go up since the moment he made his Test debut against Australia in 2005.”

But the best was yet to come. On a late-night discussion show on BBC Radio 5 Live the following week, Henderson embarked on a deeply addled, barely comprehensible, hugely entertaining ten-minute
tirade that began as a broadside against Pietersen and ended up insulting virtually the entire cricket-loving public. “Everybody loathes Pietersen,” he asserted confidently, before
turning on Pietersen’s defenders, who included fellow guest Paul Burnham of the Barmy Army. “I think people know who I am in this game,” he continued. “I know seven
ex-England captains. I spent three days in the MCC president’s box – no riff-raff there.” It was a bizarre outburst, characterised by frequent interruptions and curt answers, and
it ultimately told us a good deal more about Henderson than Pietersen.

There were rare voices of calm amid the collective lunacy. Vic Marks wrote a considered defence of Pietersen in
The Guardian
: “There has been a whiff of witch-hunt about his
omission, as a cricketing establishment closes ranks on an outsider. Some seem to be relishing his comeuppance.” But it was a measure of Pietersen’s estrangement from the media that,
when he chose to break his silence, it was via his personal YouTube channel. In September, omitted from England’s World Twenty20 squad, he flew out to Sri Lanka to work as a pundit for ESPN
STAR Sports. It felt like a divorce, and in more ways than one.

Of course, we know how Pietersen’s story ended too. His match-winning century at Mumbai completed a bizarre cycle of disintegration and reintegration, with his celebrity friend Piers
Morgan among the first to exult. “He’s a consummate professional,” he wrote in his
Mail on Sunday
column. “He’s also a great, loyal friend, someone
who’ll go the extra mile to help you if he can. We had breakfast together in Chelsea a few weeks ago…”

As the year ended, the media were forced to contemplate their own relationship with Pietersen. His talent had never been in doubt; nor had his flaws. But which outweighed the other? The answer,
it seemed, was almost entirely determined by events. Even as the praise flowed like wine – a
Guardian
leader marvelled at the “concentrated focus that produced a dazzling,
inventive, brilliant series of strokes” – there remained a suspicion that Pietersen’s next peccadillo would see the tide turn against him yet again. One fancies it will ever be
thus.

The fixation with Pietersen may also be seen as a symptom of the increasingly narrow purview of newspaper sport desks. England or nothing; KP or nothing. It is certainly true that the wailing
over Pietersen drowned out a number of worthwhile stories. The climax of the County Championship was one notable example.

But in cricket’s foothills, the shires were fighting back. The
Daily Mirror
website and ESPNcricinfo launched county blogs for the first time, their coverage augmenting existing
online offerings from
The Times
,
The Guardian
and the
Daily Telegraph
. In May came the launch of
The Cricket Paper
, a new weekly offering from Greenways
Publishing priced at £1.50. Its tone was refreshingly sober, its scope – “from Test match to village green” – satisfyingly broad.

Even in the traditional outlets, there were frequent affirmations that cricket journalism need not be hewn from the same changeless rockface. Peter Hayter’s moving interview with James
Taylor in the
Mail on Sunday
, in which the young England batsman shared his memories of his friend Alex Wilson, who died in a tragic accident in late 2009, was touching and brilliant.
Scyld Berry’s lament on the decline of state school cricket in the
Sunday Telegraph
, meanwhile, was superbly researched and powerfully argued.

On such fare does the goldfish bowl roll on: dwindling but defiant, frequently vilified but unstintingly vital. One fancies that this, too, will ever be thus.

Jonathan Liew writes for the
Daily Telegraph.

J
AMES
C
OYNE

“Where the English language is unspoken there can be no real cricket, which is to say that Americans have never excelled at the game.” It’s hard not to
chuckle at Neville Cardus’s classic put-down, whether you agree with it or not. But even he failed to foresee the impact globalisation would have on his beloved sport.

On a second-floor office above a bank in downtown Belgrade, Cardus’s axiom is being spectacularly undermined. England are collapsing to India’s spinners at the World Twenty20, and
two Eurosport commentators, Predrag Vukanovic and Vladimir Ninkovic, are telling the Balkans about it in Serbian. Their language varies only minimally from Bosnian, Montenegrin and Croatian,
something Eurosport takes advantage of by screening its Serbian coverage across the former Yugoslavia. Albania have to make do with the feed from Germany – who knows what might have happened
if C. B. Fry had accepted the throne?

On holiday in Sarajevo a few days later, walking past the Catholic cathedral impeccably rebuilt after the siege, I notice something on a TV screen in one of the many indistinguishable
café-bars on the main drag – it’s England v New Zealand in the Super Eights on Eurosport 2. I ask a waiter (in English) if he can turn the volume up, and what he thinks of the
game. “Very weird,” he fires back.

This is the third time, after England 2009 and West Indies 2010, that Eurosport has purchased the World Twenty20 feed from ESPN STAR Sports – and given 18 different languages the keys to
the kingdom of cricket. It costs Eurosport a pittance by modern broadcasting standards, but then cricket has to compete with snooker and Polish football in the schedule. Cricket aficionados,
usually high-ranking officers in the national associations like Ninkovic – general secretary of the Serbian Cricket Federation – are brought in to provide expert analysis, and spread
news of their crusade. Ninkovic knows what he’s talking about, and proudly shows off an Essex cap collected from Reece Topley on the boundary at Chelmsford. For enthusiasts like him,
Eurosport, Facebook and YouTube have been a revelation.

Naturally, there is the odd cautionary tale: in Romania, the lead commentator is a football man, who speaks in terms of points rather than runs, and hollers every time a run is scampered, let
alone when a boundary is hit or a wicket taken. The Romanian cricket authorities are lobbying ICC Europe and Eurosport to have him gently moved aside for the next tournament.

Vukanovic, though, is a consummate broadcaster, blessed with a deep, authoritative baritone. He knows who all the players are, and what they do – which, in the case of Irfan Pathan opening
the batting, is not very much. As Jade Dernbach is whacked for consecutive fours by Gautam Gambhir, Ninkovic ribs England about the number of South Africans playing for them. Vukanovic has called
five tournaments to date, so perhaps a touch of Twenty20-weariness has crept into his commentary. “The Champions League is a nice competition,” he tells me later. “I expect a few
surprises, because the top cricket stars look like they are on holiday in South Africa.”

As England slide to defeat in Colombo, it doesn’t take long for the duo to diagnose that young English batsmen struggle to read spin bowling out of the hand. By the time Jonny Bairstow is
cleaned up trying to slog Piyush Chawla, foxed by a googly, mild mirth has broken out in the commentary box. It’s strangely reassuring that, even in Belgrade, English cricket is capable of
being a laughing stock.

CRICKET AND BLOGS, 2012

S. A. R
ENNIE

In 1956, Len Hutton – newly retired and hired by the London
Evening News
to give his thoughts on the Ashes – was barred from the Lord’s press box
because he wasn’t deemed a proper sportswriter. E. M. Wellings, the paper’s cantankerous cricket correspondent, objected to Sir Len’s use of a ghostwriter, forcing one of
England’s greatest captains to go and do his work outside, like a naughty schoolboy. The landscape has changed considerably: nowadays, bloggers get press passes, while ghosted columns and
autobiographies are old hat. But the debate over what constitutes cricket journalism continues.

Some regard today’s bloggers with the same disdain. Last year, evidence came in a tirade from an employee of the United States of America Cricket Association against ESPNcricinfo writer
Peter Della Penna for his criticisms of the administration – or, as USACA’s unofficial Facebook page put it, his “unethical, journalistic bias”. Ending up with a verbal
pitchmap that resembled Mitchell Johnson’s bowling on a bad day, the page administrator – USACA executive secretary Kenwyn Williams – sprayed his invective in the direction of
anyone who dared register disagreement (and, in many cases, their disbelief). This broadside was also directed at Cricinfo’s executive editor Martin Williamson: “In the USA, journalists
need to be QUALIFIED and belong to an organisation that endorses their profession… I beg Peter and Martin to prove to me they are qualified as journalists. They are internet bloggers and
have NO journalistic privilege. NONE!!!”

Williams was dismissed for his role in this social-media meltdown, and the Facebook page deleted. But when the worst insult that can be aimed at a journalist is to call him a blogger
“using the internet to spew venom”, it reflects the common view that a blogger is a mere hobbyist, undeserving of consideration or courtesy.

Even if you
are
a blogger whose work is deemed worthy of inclusion on, say, the website of a national newspaper, there is no guarantee you’ll be paid. With the print media
scrabbling around for a viable business model, newspapers are now “partnering” with bloggers. In the case of
The Guardian
, this means reproducing articles from blogs on a
section of their website called the Guardian Sport Network. Cricket blogs include “99.94” at
nestaquin.wordpress.com
,
and
theoldbatsman.blogspot.co.uk
. This has ruffled a few feathers in the blogging community. One of the writers of
“99.94” was forced to defend himself against the accusation he was taking jobs away from professional journalists, and admitted he felt uneasy. Others wondered if the failure to pay
people for their work was rather un-
Guardian
.

And yet one man’s “open journalism” is another’s free content. Exposure and increased site traffic are the carrots dangled in front of aspiring journalists, even if
exposure won’t pay the bills. As Ant Sims pointed out at
wicketmaiden.com/cricket-bloggers-write-free-profit
: “Next time you’re at the shop, rattle off all the sites
you are writing for for free, tell them about the exposure it’s getting you and try using it as currency.”

If remuneration is seen as one validation of a blogger’s worth, recognition by the sport’s great and good is another sign that the genre is being taken more seriously. In March,
Sky’s Mike Atherton interviewed Mohammad Aamer on his release from prison after the Lord’s no-ball saga. I wasn’t entirely satisfied by some of Aamer’s responses, and wrote
an article about it at
www.legsidefilth.com/?p=634
. I was pleasantly surprised when Atherton not only responded in the comments
section, but was happy to answer questions raised by others.