I Don't like Cricket! (I love it)

This morning I saw that New Zealand Cricket had made a few changes to their squad to meet the touring West Indians and I was hoping that they had not dropped Iain O'Brien, whose excellent blog I had recently discovered. So I went across to his site and left a message. After doing so, I noticed that my message carried my name and a link here to this page. Eeep! I hadn't posted for a while, I thought I'd better get something down for the thousands of Iain O'Brien fans who might end up on this page.

So. Cricket. What a marvelous game! It is absolutely unique, blending talent, courage, intelligence, hand-eye coordination, stamina, power and mental resolution.

At school I hated it.

At the school I went to each boy had to show evidence of having played 4 sports during the week, or be punished, and come Saturday afternoon I would end up wondering down to the cricket fields to see if any cricket team was short in order to escape a beating. Inevitably I ended up fielding at longstop, too far away from the action to be a participant and bored out of my skull.

It was only once I went to university that I would toddle down to the Wanderers with my mates and get to know this great game, sitting in the sun and drinking copious quantities of Castle Lager. After that, I joined a cricket team.

Unfortunately I was never any good. I could not rid myself of the first instinctive movement away from the ball if it were hit towards me, which meant that I was mostly going in the wrong direction if a catch needed to be claimed. My batting was alright, though, having a good eye as a field hockey player and a good straight bat, but I was never able to muster the power to hit sixes and my throwing arm was weak.

Many people, mostly soccer players or Americans scorn cricket as a game. It's boring they say. It lasts too long and there is never a result. It's not a sport because nobody does anything. All the fielders stand around doing nothing all day. You don't need to be fit, any old codger or his granny could stand around on a field and do nothing; cricket does not require skill.

These people are missing out; if they don't have the patience to learn the game they will never know it's rewards.

In soccer, I once saw a free kick taken again against Manchester United in a game against a Portuguese side (Porto?). Anyway the Portuguese player drilled the ball at ankle height straight at the Man U. 'wall' and they all instinctively jumped out of the way leaving the 'keeper no chance. Well, I just couldn't stop laughing. The Man U. supporters were outraged. "Do you know how much a football hurts if it hits you?" they asked. Not as much as a cricket ball bowled into your ribs, I wouldn't mind betting.

Each time a cricketer takes a catch, he knows it's going to hurt his hands. Watch international cricketers, they all have fingers strapped up. Cricket is a game which takes courage.

That it takes talent is now self evident. That is the beauty of the shorter games, the 20-over pops and the 50-over ODIs. To me the shorter the cricket game becomes the moore it's like a lottery, so a side like Zimbabwe has a fair chance of beating what is acknowledged as the best side in the world, Australia in a twenty-twenty match. The shorter games should be considered more as showcases for cricketing talent; in the shorter game you cannot hide players who do not have all facets of their game up to scratch.

That it takes hand-eye coordination is also pretty obvious, for the same reasons.

It takes stamina. Someone like Makhaya Ntini is very valuable in a side because of the workload that he can shoulder. When a bowler starts his 'spell' he is generally fresh. He can be a bit 'loose' and might bowl a few 'loose' deliveries before he gets himself 'into a groove'.

Power: a powerful batsman is normally capable of scoring very quickly. This gives the fielding captain and the bowler a bit of a headache, because such a batsman is capable of beating the fielders or going over the top of fielders to reach the boundary.

But that isn't the only advantage of being powerful.

Cricket has a very strong mental component, with the batsman trying to impose his will on the bowler and the bowler trying to make the batsman lose any desire to stay in the middle. Mind games are frequently played between the fielding side and the batsmen in an attempt to unsettle the opposition and introduce insecurity or perhaps a loss of concentration that will perhaps gain a wicket or see a boundary.

And it's a lot easier to play these mind games if you are six-foot-seven and built like a brick dunny....

So you need to be mentally resolute. As a batsman you know that the fielding side will be happy to see the back of you and that they are very unlikely that they will be welcoming. Even amateur sides get niggly, and, when I was playing I didn't like to let a batsman get the feeling that he was welcome.

Intelligence. As a batsman you need to play every ball on it's merits. You have to work out when a ball needs to be hit or when it needs to be blocked or left alone.

As a bowler or a fielding captain you need to be able to access a batsman's weaknesses and his strengths, and hopefully take advantage of his weaknesses and avoid feeding his strengths. You need a plan for getting a batsman out, or for containing him according to where you are in the game.

And you need to know where you are in the game. Some situations call for attack, others for stolid defence.

The other thing that people complain about as regards cricket is the time taken and the lack of action in that time.

In most sports you can get to the point where one side is dominant, and there is no way back for the trailing side. In cricket, three quick wickets can turn the game on it's head, so you can never really relax, it's always tense.

And just to finish. We were playing a game once and were short, so we managed to get some guy who was passing to play. Well, when his turn to bat came he went in and when the innings was over he said "What a rush." And it's true. When you go out to face your first ball, the attention of both sides and the umpires is on you. The adrenaline starts to pump as you realise that the guy pacing up to his mark is going to be bowling as fast as he can to hit you, hit the wickets or get an edge to 'keeper or slip, and you know that your team depends on you to acquit yourself well.

The BBC

A couple of days ago I posted a comment on the BBC 'Have your say' section of their website.

Today they phoned me to ask if I would take part in an on-air discussion. The researcher, a very nice young woman called Ellen asked me a bit more about my comments. Basically the 'have your say' topic was about literacy in Africa, and whether it was in decline. I said that Robert Mugabe had presided over the betterment of education in Zimbabwe which had made that country's citizens the most literate in Africa and this should have been his legacy.

However, this also made his subjects more difficult to rule and he has since set about dismantling this achievement.

I also said that the ANC in South Africa has not done enough to improve education in that country and I hinted that this might be deliberate.

Ellen asked me to explain what I meant, so I had to explain that I didn't really think that the failure of the ANC government to improve education standards in South Africa was a deliberate ploy, and was making a point.

She further asked me about the accessibility of books in South Africa, and in particular in Durban and I told her that there are libraries here, but they are very disorganised, books are dog-eared and tatty and are not properly sorted, shelves and trolleys indiscriminately piled high with books.

Furthermore, books here are extremely expensive, often costing double to buy as the dollar RRP printed on their jackets.

There are three reasons for this, I guess. Firstly, there is the additional cost of transport. Secondly, the major bookstores have a nice little racket going and very little independent competition. And thirdly, the ANC government charges Value Added Tax on books.

Anyway, I went home this evening and awaited the call from the BBC prepared for a heated debate and the chance to express my opinions live on the BBC World Service.

In the event I was simply asked if I was reading a book at the moment. To which I said yes, I was reading Michael Palin's Python Diaries, and that was it.

What an anticlimax.

So do I think that the ANC Government in South Africa is deliberately keeping the populace down by ensuring that they are not informed enough to question their rulers? I guess I don't. Well, not deliberately, anyway.

What I do think is that the ANC's priorities, particularly under Thabo Mbeki, have been largely self serving for the political elite.

The priorities have been about building business empires for themselves. BEE regulations (Black Economic Empowerment) have been about granting competitive advantages to companies with substantial black ownership. In order to comply, companies have been co-opting politicians and big wigs onto their boards.

Education has largely been neglected.

The internet has been made prohibitively expensive by the Government monopoly telco (Telkom), thus restricting access.

So there you go. As Mugabe learned, you don't really want your population to be too well informed if you want to be able to rule them effectively.

the start

Forgive me if I'm a little disjointed.

I play field hockey socially and occasionally get a game on a Sunday morning. Generally this means around an hour of exercise followed by a shower and then numerous bottles of beer after which I wend my way home in a semi-inebriated state. Or fully inebriated state depending on how the game went.

To be honest, I got home this evening and there was a programme on SABC TV this evening on blogging and I thought: 'that's what I need to do'.

When Apartheid fell in the mid nineties, South Africa was full of hope. It was called the 'Rainbow Nation' because it was anticipated that all sides of the racial spectrum would pull together to make a go of, what is, after all a rare phenomenon; a third world country with a first world infrastructure.

In the event, as Bishop Desmond Tutu said, the ANC government stopped the Afrikaner gravy train just long enough to change drivers.

So, having resolved to post the benefit of my insight, I suppose I must declare any conflict of interest which might colour my musings.

I suppose I AM opinionated. And I do want my opinions to be heard. But at the same time, I want people to understand where I'm coming from. So let me introduce myself.

My name is David Graham Coventry. I am of a white skin. Some black people I know, if they are feeling disparaging, might refer to me as a pink. If I was to suggest to them that referring to me as a pink might be considered racist, they would laugh at me. However, were I to refer to the colour of their skins in a similarly disparaging way, they would no doubt be forthright in their condemnation.

No matter. If I stay out in the sun for too long, I do go pink. Red, even, if I overdo it.

I was born in a small town in what is now known as Zimbabwe in 1954. I have no problem with calling it Zimbabwe. The Rhodesian bush war was a nasty, vicious affair with atrocities committed by both sides and I'm glad it ended.

And if the people of Zimbabwe elected Robert Mugabe as their Prime Minister, that was an issue for the people of Zimbabwe. The minority white population might believe that Robert Mugabe was not a very good choice, but the point about majority rule is that the majority will promote their own champions.

The problem with Robert Mugabe is that Prime Minister was not enough for him. He wanted to be President. Hell, I'm sure that if Zimbabwe were not in the mess it is right now, he would have found a way to appoint himself King. Or Emperor.

Speaking of which, I developed a theory a few years ago that the reason Mugabe had not appointed a successor was that he was hoping that his son would be able to take over the dynasty.

Not that I think current events in Zimbabwe allow Mugabe many options. I do think that he will do his utmost to retain power and is very unlikely to cede any meaningful power to the opposition.

I always felt that the end of August would prove very difficult for Mugabe and I'm keen to see how it pans out.

With hemorrhaging inflation he was bound to find it difficult to reward his army for their continued loyalty, and so it has apparently proved.

I also noticed a report in the Guardian suggesting that Mugabe's senior army officers were approaching the South Africans with a view to securing indemnity from future prosecution for crimes against humanity.

It would be nice to think that they may be aware of the possibility that they might actually be pursued by the law.