The writing outweighs the cricket

The weekend papers have been full of resounding injunctions to inaction, recommending that England's selectors take a kind of Hippocratic Oath: `First do no harm.' It is hard to make interesting copy out of `don't just do something, stand there', but it does make a refreshing change from the usual `sack-this-lot-and-pick-a-fresh-bunch-of-kids' approach standard at around this point in Ashes summers. Matthew Engel in the FT, rather predictably, invokes Corporal Jones: `Don't panic! Don't panic!' Better than Private Frazer, I guess: `We're all doomed! Doomed!!' But Engel does heave one very worthwhile sigh, wishing everyone would just play; quite so, for the ratio of column inches to actual cricket is still vastly out of proportion. Engel has been known to cite Sherlock Holmes in his columns, and might well have had recourse to one of Holmes' timeless maxims: `It is a capital error to theorise without data.' The selectors have met the press's entreaties with an unchanged England squad. But who'd have thought we'd ever be complaining about too little cricket?

The Lightning were earthed by the Sabres © Getty Images

The last time I saw a county cricket match at the Oval, spectators could have been alloted a stand each. Today each of those stands brimmed with boisterous, partisan supporters. Admittedly, there were four counties involved; admittedly, too, the fixture's resemblance to cricket could have been disputed. The occasion was the semi-finals of the Twenty20 Cup, contested between Lancashire Lightning and Surrey Lions, then the Somerset Sabres and Leicestershire Foxes. The Sabres ended up conducting and earthing the Lightning by seven wickets during the final.

For the uninitiated, and that includes Australians, whose states do not compete in the inaugural domestic Twenty20 tournament until January, the phenomenon is essentially 50-over cricket with its unseemly midriff liposuctioned away. There was some efficient slogging, with the biggest blow, from Ali Brown, almost in need of a Zone 1 and 2 Travelcard. There was some effective fielding with probably a bit too much falling over, some rather unambitious running, and some generally forgettable bowling. The whole thing coasted along at some 10 an over. Defensive shots - and there were a few - seemed heretical. In the abbreviated game, everything is somehow magnified.

Perhaps the day's deftest stroke was a reverse sweep by Mal Loye off Doshi, sweetly-struck for four; by far the worst was a reverse sweep by Rikki Clarke off Crook, the ball in perfect position for an orthodox sweep and hitting leg stump half way up. Such, I suppose, is the nature of the shot, which seems the most brilliant jeu d'esprit when it succeeds, the most humiliating faux pas when it fails.

With 23,000 present, the whole affair was a big straight six for the marketeers the ECB have let loose. The games were interrupted by a steeplechase by the county mascots over inflatable obstacles attended by scantily-clad npower girls. You may wonder who this is aimed at, but it certainly held Andy Flintoff's attention during his man-of-the-match press conference, and the crowd were indubitably entertained.

Today may not have been the best day to judge it. Rain interruptions made for a very long day for the cheery, chirpy, steadily-getting-pissed audience. One of the rationales for Twenty20 is that it brings in children; whether families would have felt completely comfortable around 9pm as the effects of a day's drinking took their toll on behaviour is another matter.

Personally, I didn't mind it. I've no doubt it will sweep the world. My reservations remain the same. My fear is that, as in indoor cricket where you play basically every game that can be played within a few years, it will run short of variations, and begin repeating itself. There already seem basically two kinds of innings: one where your top four get runs, the other where they get out and you have to hold on to wickets in order to use the full complement of overs. And...errr...that's it.

I wonder, too, whether anyone in authority has thought through how this game will work in lower levels of cricket. One of the joys of the grass roots game - and one of the advantages that cricket enjoys at grass roots over the various football codes - is that it can accommodate so many different styles and characters of player. Twenty20 defines the cricketer narrowly; it excludes many to whom the game has been a welcoming home. I don't know why I'm wondering, of course, because no one in authority gives a twopenny damn about much that happens below first-class level. The same people who insist that they must `give the people what they want' are seldom if ever around when the people actually want something.

Belinda Clark: ready to resume the rivalry against England © Getty Images

The time may be ripe to mention this summer's `other' Ashes: the Australian Women's team arrive next week for their two Tests against England, a suite of one-day games and a Twenty20 international. I report this, I might add, with some sense of ground to make up. At Wisden, we were a bit slow to realise that women actually played cricket. The inaugural women's Test between Australia and England, in Brisbane in December 1934, went unreported until the Almanack of 1938, and it was another 20 years before coverage of the distaff side of the game became a regular feature; Wisden missed altogether Australia's first series victory against England in 1948-49.

Mind you, in comparison with some cricket institutions, Wisden has been a gushy, broad-minded liberal. When the first edition of its Australian offshoot was published in 1998, its choice as International Cricketer Of The Year was Belinda Clark, in recognition of her leading Australia to victory in the Women's World Cup of December 1997. The latest iteration of the Wisden Book of Test Cricket, too, incorporates scores and records for all women's Tests: belated but thoughtful atonement for earlier omissions.

Like men's cricket, the women's game has revolved historically on an Anglo-Australian axis, with some figures important to both countries. England's first captain Betty Archdale, for example, made Australia her home after World War II, becoming one of this country's most distinguished headmistresses, and in 1997 one of its 100 `living national treasures' (Archdale's CV also included writing about women's cricket for Wisden). The early Anglo-Australian contests are strewn with unlikely heroines: the dexterity of Peggy Antonio, a tiny teenager working in a cardboard box factory when first her legspin baffled England almost 70 years ago; the pluck of Amy Hudson, the police matron who used a nine-year-old bat and only one batting glove while resisting England at The Oval in July 1951; the might of Betty Wilson, whose 100 and 11 for 18 could nonetheless not quite bring Australia victory at St Kilda in February 1958. It was a big deal, too, when English and Australian women were first welcomed as players at the sanctum sanctorum of Lord's, on the golden jubilee in August 1976 of the foundation of England's Women's Cricket Association.

Women's cricket in Australia has lately had closer links with, and more genuine competition, from near neighbour New Zealand, both in their annual Rose Bowl meetings, and in the World Cup. The New Zealanders were Australia's victims in 1997 and their vanquishers three years later. Recent encounters between Australia and England have been - not uniquely - rather one-sided.

The Australian team that has ripened so fruitfully, however, is mature. The wonderful Belinda Clark and Cathryn Fitzpatrick, such fine players and great ambassadors for their game, have more cricket behind than in front of them; stalwarts Melanie Jones and Louise Broadfoot have been left behind to bring on juniors Kirsten Pike and Sarah Edwards. Is the empire crumbling? Is this a team at an autumnal stage in danger from ambitious young local challengers? (Stop me if you've heard all this somewhere else recently.) The First Test starts on Tuesday week at Hove; the Second is scheduled to finish at Worcester, perhaps auspiciously, on the anniversary of Sir Donald Bradman's birth. Good luck to all the participants; Wisden will be reporting the series, one trusts, with appropriate zeal.

Have been reading Third Man to Fatty's Leg, the thoughtful, free-ranging autobiographical reflections of Steve James, an opening batsman twice capped by England who did yeoman service for Glamorgan. Its tone alternates between light-hearted anecdote and brooding, almost sorrowful self-deprecation. James quotes back every slight he ever experienced with a kind of nodding approval. He recalls, for instance, being sledged while representing Cambridge by Phil Tufnell: "I can't wait to play Glamorgan this year. They must be crap if you can get a game for them." Robin Smith confided in one of James' county team-mates in 1994: "Jeez he's an ugly batsman, that James." Says James: "He was right. Around that time I was awful."

The confession struck me forcibly. I actually saw James bat in person only once, at Fenner's, in the early 1990s. The 30-odd he scored in a distinctly ordinary side contained several shots of a unusual fluency and timing. Perhaps it was the mediocrity of the company, but I thought he would make something of himself. In fact, I harboured precisely the thought: "He will play for England." Yet by his own reckoning, it would seem, this could not have been further from James' mind, and my opinion at the time had almost no aesthetic or statistical basis. I was in the end, moreover, barely right: he played his two Tests only as a last-minute inclusion. But I was. This is not to claim any particular intuition or prescience.

I well remember my first impression of Brett Lee after watching him bowl some awful rubbish for New South Wales against Queensland in 1999. "What's all the fuss about?" I thought. "He bowls two bouncers and four half-volleys every over." Good batsmen would take him apart, I imagined, as one had that day in Martin Love, compiler of an attractive double-century. But first impressions matter, and to those runs and wickets we see ourselves, we tend to attach disproportionate weight. And in extreme cases, as little as a single stroke can seem to hold forth the promise of some differentiating quality. Duncan Fletcher apparently sensed Michael Vaughan's promise merely from the way he shaped: the first two Vaughan innings that Fletcher saw produced two runs. James' reflections exemplify, too, how different is the cricket world at close quarters, on the pitch and in the mind, to that experienced by the fantasising spectator, and how the mind games played by oppositions are nothing to those we play with ourselves.

Allan Border's birthday; Jack Iverson's too. Allan is 50; Jack would have been 90. Both cricketers about whom I have written books, and perhaps as convincing an argument as I know of against astrological determinism. AB was a born survivor, Wrong Grip Jake a casualty in the making.

There's something a little disconcerting about the fact that the date touches off such a ready response in me. I'm inclined to penetrate to the cricket layer in everything. Dates, for instance, come to be defined by their cricket relations. A couple of days ago, my friend Stephen Fay told me he was reviewing a book about Venice in 1848. "The year of the Communist Manifesto," I said, "and of W. G. Grace's birth." At least I knew the former, but I'm damned if I can work out why I know the latter, or indeed quite where it gets me.

I also have a strange propensity for detecting otherwise unsuspected cricket content. Yesterday, in an attempt to avoid Ashes thoughts entirely, I went browsing in a secondhand bookshop on Charing Cross Road, looking particularly for some additions to my collection of company histories. My eye was caught by the 1931 volume published on the centenary of the confectionery dynasty Cadbury. When I flicked it open at random, I learned that the first thing that company patriarch George Cadbury read in the newspapers every day were the cricket scores. I hardly dared touch anything else, lest I learn that Lord Leverhulme bowled left-arm googlies, or that the Rothschilds cornered the market in cricket ball leather.

One of the great traditions of English defeat used to be `naughty boy nets': the penance served by players on the days they had been scheduled to play the Test they'd just lost by several thousand runs, even as the tabloids crafted their faces into turnips. Remember the grand old days when there would be pictures in the papers of the grim-set features of Micky Stewart or Keith Fletcher supervising the players serving their detentions? It seems to have fallen into disuse; nowadays the players don't even play. While Australia heads to Worcester for a game they barely need, the English players disperse and are either rested or given a run-around in one-day cricket. Freddie Flintoff's preparation for Edgbaston will be playing in the Twenty20 finals on Saturday, while Michael Vaughan is slated for one-on-one sessions with Duncan Fletcher ahead of a totesport League game on Sunday.

This is in keeping with what Vaughan says in his diary of last year: `If I have a bad day or hit a bad shot, I'll think about what has happened, analyse everything and then work on eradicating the flaw or problem. Once I wake up the following morning I am ready to move onto the next issue.' Easy really. Mind you, one wonders why he hasn't done this already when his form for the last six months has been so erratic. An illuminating piece in the Guardian today by my colleague Alex Brown describes Warne's pre-match practice ritual with Terry Jenner. Since they were introduced fifteen years ago by Rod Marsh, Jenner has come to know Warne's technique in intimate detail. His arrival also has a talismanic quality for Warne, who associates him with the feeling of being on top of his game. With England, by contrast, games seem not so much built as constantly under repair. At least one local tradition is intact: that of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.

A day at my digs in Islington writing, and also reading some very good words, including Simon Barnes in The Times: `Kevin Pietersen's cheerful six-hitting at the end was like the V-sign you give the headmaster ten minutes after you've left school. It makes you feel a bit better, but it doesn't affect the balance of power'. And it's still the case that nobody crafts a more waspish metaphor than Martin Johnson in the Daily Telegraph: `He [Geraint Jones] has a pair of wicketkeeping gloves that appear to have been hewn from a trampoline, and his attempt to catch Jason Gillespie by sticking out an arm was less like watching a professional athlete as one of those old Morris Minors with a semaphore trafficator.' Say what you like about England's cricketers, they are superb sport for columnists.