Polished portrait of great year for English cricket

With the cricket season upon us, Yorkshire Post’s Chris Waters looks back over a glorious winter and at a selection of the sport’s recent releases.

A new book by Gideon Haigh is as much a part of the modern Ashes experience as Glenn McGrath’s routine prediction of a 5-0 Australian whitewash.

Whereas McGrath’s forecasts are usually more Septic Peg than Mystic Meg, Haigh’s musings can always be relied on for exactitude and excellence.

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After McGrath was once again left with egg on his face as England triumphed 3-1 last winter, Haigh, inevitably, emerged unblemished.

Ashes 2011 is an immaculate record of England’s record-breaking series victory, their first in Australia for 24 years, and is Haigh’s fourth Ashes book for Aurum Press.

Marshalling heavenly writing skills, Holmesian observation faculties and inherent wit and wisdom, Haigh unfolds the story of a series that warmed the cockles in a withering English winter.

As Britain shivered in sub-zero temperatures, the coldest since records began, Andrew Strauss and his players defied not only McGrath’s prosaic prophecy but even those who hold dear the flag of St George.

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Although many thought England might retain the Ashes, far fewer thought they would win the series outright and fewer still that they would prevail in convincing style.

Indeed, as Haigh opines in the introduction: “Had you envisaged such a prospect this time four years ago, you would have been laughed out of whatever hostelry you proposed it in – because you would have needed a few drinks to work up the bravado to say it.”

Of course, in 2006-07, England had been on the receiving end of their first 5-0 Ashes whitewash since that inflicted in 1920-21 by a team led by Warwick Armstrong (incidentally, another of Haigh’s subjects in a superb biography entitled The Big Ship).

Okay, so Mystic McGrath got lucky that time.

But a raft of Australian retirements helped England beat a much-weakened side 2-1 at home in 2009 in a series that lacked the quality – if not the quivering tension – of four years earlier.

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The gulf widened appreciably during the winter just gone, which witnessed if not quite a complete role reversal then certainly a sharp shift in the Ashes’ tectonic plates.

Haigh ruminates expertly on the sometimes subtle, sometimes spectacular swings from four years previously and notes England’s triumph had much in common with that engineered by Yorkshire’s Len Hutton in 1954-55.

“Like Strauss’s men, they had beaten Australia by the odd Test with a win at the Oval fourteen months earlier.

“Like Hutton, Strauss is a seasoned opening batsman. Like Hutton, Strauss arrived with the prior experience of being towelled up in Australia.

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“Like Hutton, Strauss learned from that misfortune. Perhaps because they were accustomed to bearing its brunt at the top of the order, both saw the solution to Australian conditions as pace bowling.

“Hutton’s solution was Frank Tyson, who took 28 wickets at 21 on his tour of a lifetime.

“The 24 wickets at 26 taken by Strauss’s solution, James Anderson, are actually the best in Australia by an England bowler since.”

It is not only Haigh’s analyses that resonate but also his prose.

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Ugly sentences are as alien to him as ugly strokes were foreign to Bradman.

Of Shane Watson’s propensity for squandering good starts: “At the moment he is like the self-improving reader who makes an annual promise to get through War and Peace, only to lose track of all the Rostovs and give up at about page 100 each time.”

Of Watson’s opening partner Phillip Hughes: “Hughes may be the first opening batsman to arrive in Test cricket without a front-foot defensive stroke, the absence of which in England last year made his batting look like a combination of a sharkskin suit with a Hawaiian shirt.”

Of Jonathan Trott’s fidgety behaviour in between deliveries: “He sets to marking his guard, over and over, deeper and deeper, like a hairdresser obsessing over the neatness of a parting or a dry-cleaner fretting over a trouser crease.”

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A particular delight is the way Haigh takes the rise out of platitudinous press conferences and the propensity of cricketers and coaches to talk of “skill sets”, “processes” and sundry vomit.

Beautifully produced, Ashes 2011 is a collection of daily match reports written for Business Spectator and daily columns composed for The Times.

They were filed within an hour of stumps and are unaltered from the form in which they were sent, which makes their quality even more remarkable.

“Yet so heavily does the accent now fall on instantaneous judgement,” warns Haigh, “that the scope for considered journalism cannot but dwindle, with an impact on the way that cricket is perceived, understood and interpreted. Caveat lector.”

In the meantime, let the reader enjoy.

Ashes 2011, Gideon Haigh, Aurum Press, £12.99.

Good reads for cricket lovers

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STAYING with the Ashes, The Official MCC Ashes Treasures, edited by Bernard Whimpress, (Carlton, £30), is the perfect way to celebrate cricket’s greatest rivalry. An authoritative account of Anglo-Australian cricket from its beginnings in 1877 to England’s regaining of the urn in 2009, it contains reproductions of rare memorabilia including scorecards, match tickets and letters.

IN A League Of Their Own by Freda, Malcolm and Brian Heywood (Upper Calder Valley Publications, £10), is a splendid trawl through the Todmorden cricket scene. The book examines how Todmorden people spent their leisure time in the 20th century.

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