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Why England’s talisman is at a career crossroads

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THE BAT REVOLUTIONARE YOU READY?

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2010SPIN

2010COUNTYPREVIEWFull team-by-team guide to the new English season

T HE I NDEP ENDEN T V O I C E O F CR I C K E T

WORLD T!"

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win it

+ JACK RUSSELL STEVE FINN MARK ROBINSON

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EYE-WITNESS IPL3

Just getting

Thoughts of the IPL bubble bursting or of overseas players opting to stay away proved very much premature. SPIN’s man in India, NICK SADLEIR, on 10 lessons of IPL3

MAY 2010 SPIN 59

1 Sachin is still king Any way you look at it, Sachin

Tendulkar is still the best there is. After 21 years in international cricket and despite choosing to distance himself from the shortest format when he retired from Twenty20 internationals before the inaugural World Champs in South Africa in 2007 (he only ever played one T20I, in 2006), Tendulkar is still the Master Blaster.

Tendulkar has been single handedly been responsible for most of the Mumbai Indians victories in IPL3 so it is no small wonder that the atmosphere in the marvellous Brabourne CCI ground has been so extraordinarily good. Sitting in the stands, a girl attending her first-ever live match, asked me, “Why does the

crowd cheer Sachin… Sachin when he’s not even doing anything? What about the other players?”

2 Money really does talkPre-IPL3, the Australians had said

they weren’t happy with the security measures in place and threatened not to come. A spat ensued between Ricky Ponting and Lalit Modi after Modi told IPL-contracted players that if they chose not to come then their contracts would be cancelled and they would be replaced by other players. Ponting held the view that Australian players should either all go – or all stay at home. Imagine trying to tell that to Shane Warne. Modi tweeted, “(I’ve) been told Ricky Ponting is pressuring players not

to come. Maybe it’s due to the fact he was dropped from Kolkata Knight Riders.”

The dispute turned out to be a storm in a teacup, as Modi’s people upped security and re-assured the Aussies. But was it too cynical to think that, in weighing up a trip to India for the IPL – rather than, say, an international series with India – the loss of a £20-30k a week pay packet would also, ultimately, be a consideration?

3 Maybe that Mongoose thing works

I laughed when I first saw the Mongoose bat. It looks like a ten year old’s size three with a double-length handle. The makers claim that it can generate 15 per cent more bat speed and 20 per cent more power. The big question was: if this new-fangled contraption has been around for a while and it does what it is supposed to, then why isn’t everyone smashing sixes with it?

It seemed a great gimmick to many of us until Chennai were in trouble away to Delhi and Matthew Hayden called to the dressing room for his little Mongoose. A couple of wickets had fallen and Chennai were in trouble chasing 190 on a slowish pitch. The result was almost immediate as Hayden sent the ball all over the Feroz Shah Kotla Park knocking up a brutal 93 from 43 balls, including three enormous sixes from as many balls off the bowling of Tillakaratne Dilshan.

4 Indians like going to IPL matches

Many respectable pundits warned of IPL fatigue. The tournament is 64 games long and we have seen it all before. Many BCCI Champions League games attracted only half-full crowds, despite cheap ticket prices. With each team playing eight home games in IPL3 in five weeks, it seemed a safe presumption that there would be empty seats at most games.

But again the IPL has proved everyone wrong. Virtually every match has been packed to the rafters. And the ticket prices aren’t cheap. Considering tickets for an ODI in India can often be bought for as little as £6, the fact that Mumbai Indians home tickets range from £15 to £100 comes as quite a surprise. Furthermore, they were all sold out a week before any game.

The Rajasthan Royals played their first four matches in Ahmedabad, which is not in Rajasthan at all but in Gujurat. The large stadium there is in Motera, some distance outside the city. But still the Gujurati cricket public came out in full force to support their neighbouring state. The same went for Dharamshala, Nagpur and Cuttack, where the Kings Punjab XI and the Deccan Chargers played home-from-home games. Fans apparently cannot get enough of the cricketainment

warmed up

EYE-WITNESS IPL3

Tendo and Gilchrist: the old order of international cricket rules the roost at the IPL

28 SPIN MAY 2010

STORY WAYNE VEYSEY

THE BIG QUESTION KEVIN PIETERSEN

Not so long ago, he was England’s undisputed talisman: the best batter by

far and the captain too. But Kevin Pietersen has had a tough 12 months and now has to prove himself all over again.

SPIN asks mentors and opponents…

Wherenextfor KP?

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THE BIG QUESTION KEVIN PIETERSEN

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CulturesuccessofSussex have won six trophies in four seasons – yet they start 2010 in Division 2 of the championship. George Dobell traces the inside story of England’s most successful club

COUNTYPREVIEW Sussex

MAY 2010 SPIN 43

Who has been the most successful coach in the modern era of English domestic cricket? Bob Woolmer, perhaps, who led Warwickshire to a

treble in 1994? Or John Bracewell, who helped Gloucestershire to seven limited-overs trophies between 1999 and 2004? Or maybe Keith Medlycott, who harnessed the talent of his Surrey squad so well that they claimed seven trophies between 1997 and 2003.

But what about Mark Robinson? He’s led Sussex to a clean sweep of all the trophies since taking charge at the end of 2005 yet, perhaps due to a modest personality and the high profile of some of his players, his personal success has possibly not received the celebration it deserves. Away from Hove, anyway.

Yet 2009 was an odd season for Sussex. They won a limited-overs double – the Twenty20 Cup and the NatWest Pro40 – and, with Somerset, became the first English side to compete in the BCCI’s Champions League Twenty20 tournament. But, for a side that had won the four-day title in 2003, 2006 and 2007, the lasting impression of the season may yet have been their relegation in the LV County Championship.

Monty Panesar, is now, like many before him, coming to Sussex in a mid-career lull. (There was no clamour for Mushtaq Ahmed’s signature when he arrived in 2003; yet he went on to be the top wicket-taker in the country for four seasons in a row.) How, though, to weigh the arriving ex-England star against the departing England prospect? Rory Hamilton-Brown’s move to Surrey, enticed by Chris Adams, was a dark cloud over the close season – and surely, along with some choice Adams quotes in February’s SPIN, went some way

success

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Bats are bigger and better in the T20 age and Matthew Hayden’s success with the Mongoose at the IPL upped the stakes again. SPIN asks batmakers and players: what next?

ideas man, working with an independent bat-maker and an ambitious business plan. “So why not pack all the weight into the edges, so if you hit it, it goes a long way?”

As bats change radically, we asked representatives of four new and established bat-makers to discuss the state of the art (and of the market). Then we asked four players from Teddington CC of the Middlesex Premier League to try out some new bats – both from brands new to the game, to new shapes, like the Mongoose, to ‘conventional’ handmade shapes like the Salix and one of the latest versions of the Newbery Uzi.

SPIN: How have ‘normal’ bats have changed over the last 10 years?ANDREW KEMBER, BATMAKER, SALIX It’s the pressing techniques largely – bats from the sub-continent, with the big bow in them and thicker, lower middles, have been seen more in the UK and have started to influence the shapes British players want.

At Salix, we developed the plant and the machinery in our workshop to allow us to make the bats in a different way. We saw we could improve the pressing technique, which enabled us to get the extra bow in the blade. We worked on it over three or four seasons and gradually found what we could do in terms of moisture content and the way the presses were set up. And once there is that shape in the face you can start leaving more wood further down and still get a very good pick-up.

The other thing that has made our bats better than they had been was starting to sand the bats across the drum-sander, so you started to get this hollowing across the back of the bat. That’s key in getting a bat to

look as though it is 2 pounds 12 when it actually weighs 2 pounds 9.5.

Most manufacturers are now trying to perfect those two techniques, right across the market-place, because when you get them right, the bats pick up so much up better.

Where did the bow come from originally?AK I think, having seen some of the pressing machines used in India, it was something that happened accidentally, with the way the bats rocked through the pressing machines. The makers would find the bowed bats pleasing on the eye and realise they actually made the bats play better... I don’t think anybody sat down and said, “Let’s put a bow in it”. The machinery I saw when I was there, it would have been hard to keep the face flat even had you wanted to.

Is the Mongoose really the biggest innovation in bat-making in 200 years?AK Marcus [Codrington Fernandez, Mongoose CEO] was absolutely right when he said was that bats hadn’t changed for a very long time – he said 200 years – but they have changed a lot over the last five years. Before that, I think batmaking had been fairly static, though the weight ranges might have gone up when people like Gooch started using heavier bats in the ’80s. But the actual weights and styles were very very similar. You could take a bat from the ’60s and they are to all intents and purposes the same as what was being made even in 2005.NEIL LENHAM, NEWBERY CEO The first bat like that was the Excalibur, which Newbery produced for Lance Cairns in the early 1980s. It had cut-off shoulders but the same theory applied as the Mongoose. And six years ago

MASTERCLASS SPECIAL FUTURE OF BATS

Matthew Hayden’s 93 from 46 balls with the Mongoose at the IPL in March seemed like a watershed: the first time a major innings had been

played with the short-bladed bat, first introduced to SPIN readers last June. The innings – against a Delhi Daredevils attack including Dirk Nannes and India spinner Amit Mishra – gave a sudden jolt of credibility and publicity to a company that has set its sights on the Indian market, and signed up a roster of high profile Twenty20 stars, from Andrew Symonds to Dwayne Smith to Ian Blackwell, to use and endorse their bats.

Yet Mongoose is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the increasing influence of Twenty20 and India have changed bats: the willow wielded by today’s top players (and club players too) is generally a world away from that of even 10 or 15 years ago: many ‘conventional’ bats now sport an Indian-style bowed shape with lower middles and massive thick edges. As long ago as 2004, Newbery introduced their Uzi – slightly short in the blade, more meat on the back – ostensibly designed for the power shots demanded by Twenty20. Multinationals like Puma and adidas have come into the market and ambitious cottage industries like Woodworm have risen on the back of the 2005 Ashes and fallen soon after, only to be reborn.

Established bat-makers have tried new shapes and maverick one-offs like the Black Cat company have come in, post-Mongoose. The Black Cat Joker’s USP? It’s 3mm narrower than a ‘normal’ bat. “You don’t use the 1.5mm on the edges very much,” reasons Black Cat founder Charlie Munton, a lone

BOWLERS’ NIGHTMARES

MAY 2010 SPIN 63

MASTERCLASS SPECIAL FUTURE OF BATS

BOWLERS’ NIGHTMARES