A very English cricket blog by Patrick Kidd. Subscribe to a feed of this Times Online blog at http://timesonline.typepad.com/line_and_length/rss.xml
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As someone who loves to read about cricket touching previously uncivilised countries, this article in the The Seattle Times about the Worcestershire Over-50s side touring the American northwest caught the eye. Although I am baffled by the sidebar, which refers to the batting crease as "home base" and describes there being three wickets behind the base, I hope that it will attract a few extra Americans to the game.
Just one thought, though: given that Worcestershire has suffered more from this season's horrendous flooding than any county, wasn't it tempting fate to tour the city that has a reputation for being America's wettest?
The things you miss when your mind is elsewhere. How could I have overlooked the Croatia cricket team's magnificent triumph in the European Third Division Championships final on Saturday?
 The mighty Croats, the runaway leaders during the competition's pool stage, managed to make only 220-5 against Spain (who had qualified for the final by losing fewer wickets in a tie with the Isle of Man) and must have been fretting a bit when the Spaniards were 118-1 and then 196-5. Fortunately, a chap by the name of Siljeg bowled like a dream to help them to win by four runs.
So Croatia enter a play-off with the weakest team in the Second Division (to be announced) for the right to compete against the likes of Germany, Guernsey and Israel, who yet again have to compete in a European competition because the Arabs won't play with them. One feels that if only the Arab nations did learn to play cricket and regularly had matches against Israel (with a good tea thrown in), everyone would get on a bit better.
How did I stumble across this magnificent story? Thank Angus Bell, traveller, cricket-lover and author of the excellent Slogging the Slavs, in which he treks across Eastern Europe finding outposts where cricket survived Communism and the freezing cold. As Angus says about the Croatians: "Croatian cricket grew out of the diaspora after the collapse of Communism and with soldiers coming over to fight in the Balkan war from Australia. They also have a team of Adriatic winemakers, some of whom play in the national side. Their wicket is a helicopter landing pad, and their ground is beside an old minefield."
And Worcestershire think they have it tough.
 With the rugby union World Cup due to start in a week and a half (and me back in a frenzy of blogging after editing our World Cup supplement), here is a little-known crossover fact I've dug up: Graham Henry, the coach of the All Blacks, is one of only two New Zealand coaches never to have worn the famous black jersey himself but he did play half a dozen games of first-class cricket in the 1960s - with a pretty feeble batting average of 1.66. Mind you, to judge from this picture his ability to drink would match any Test cricketer of the 1960s.
Henry was a wicketkeeper for Canterbury in 1965-66 and scored a whopping eight runs in six innings for them. Understandably, even in those days when a keeper didn't need to bat like a Gilchrist, he was soon dropped but then showed up two years later for Otago, who rather oddly asked him to open the batting against his former side. Henry was dismissed for 0 and 2, both times being the victim of Dick Motz, the New Zealand Test bowler who died four months ago, and his second attempt at first-class cricket ended there. I suspect his second sporting career may end in rather more success.
A rather baffling decision has been made by the ICC for their annual awards night next month. On the long list of 20 candidates for Test Player of the Year are the likes of Ponting, Hussey, Yousuf, Warne, Muralitharan etc. All quite understandable. Pietersen gets a mention, naturally, and so does Monty Panesar, with rather less merit but nonetheless he has developed into a fine Test bowler if not quite yet of the top drawer. The list goes on: Jayawardena, McGrath, Hayden, Sidebottom...
Sidebottom? Ryan Sidebottom? Surely some mistake? His haul of 24 wickets at an average of 26 this summer is pretty good, but why does he get on the list when the likes of Kallis, Younus Khan and Shane Bond miss out?
 "Ponting, Muralitharan, Sidebottom" has the same ring as Del-boy Trotter's "New York, Paris, Peckham" slogan, but good luck to him. It would be a victory for unfashionable bowlers over big names everywhere.
And he wants it: just look at how he dealt with Dwayne Bravo when he heard the West Indian was in the running for a nomination.
I may have finally found my level as a cricketer. Playing my fifth match of the season at the weekend for a fourth different club (have bat, will travel), I was all that stood between humiliation and record humiliation for Big Hammer CC, a team whose name I thought had something to do with Hammersmith but may instead come from the fact that they get hammered by all opposition.
I was asked to play by my brother-in-law, who once worked with Hammer's captain (it was one of those games where you have as much chance of knowing someone on the opposing side as on your own). We fielded first and let Old Manhattans CC ratchet up 203 for four by tea. In reply, Big Hammer lost wickets steadily and were on five for three when I strode out to bat.
Realising the win was probably beyond us, I got my head down and tried to bat out time. Anything that was on the wicket was blocked, anything wide was left, anything bouncing high I allowed to hit me (there is a nice chain of bruises across my upper thigh). I stayed out there for 15 overs, making a massive ten runs and was the only person on our side to hit a boundary. Until my brother-in-law came out at No 11 and made 11 runs, I was the top scorer and between us we did enough to take the team past the previous club record low score of 34 to the promised land of 39. Sadly, both of us lost our wickets and the team fell a mere nine overs shy of saving the match. But who would have thought that being boring could be such fun?
As seems to be the theme these days, we have been compiling more lists for Times Online: this time, it is the best county cricket XIs. Eighteen of our writers were invited to pick the greatest players to have represented their favourite counties - and then to pick their favourite players.
It was easy to feel inadequate as an Essex fan when I saw lists that began "Sutcliffe, Hutton, Vaughan..." or had a bowling attack featuring "Marshall, Roberts, Warne", but I discovered that my own county had some pretty fantastic players and not just from the past 25 years of success. Even unfashionable counties have XI excellent ambassadors: Gloucestershire can boast Grace, Hammond, Jessop, Abbas; the Northants selector was able to leave out Lillee, Ambrose and Hussey.
Read my introduction here and then go to your favourite counties to see whether you agree or leave comments here.
As if I didn't have enough to do this week, what with trying to find out who is representing Portugal in the rugby World Cup for our forthcoming supplement, the Times Online sports editor asked me to concoct a list of the 50 greatest sporting scandals.
Cricket-lovers may be interested in my highly personal choice for No 1, but if you disagree or think I've missed any good ones out do drop me a note by clicking "comments" below.
It was only after publishing the list that I realised I had missed out a glaring scandal. Obviously Duncan Fletcher's decision to pick Giles over Panesar for the last Ashes series is far more contentious than any doped-up Canadian sprinters or bent Italian football clubs.
Blogging will be light this week as I am busy editing our rugby World Cup supplement, but to keep you occupied while I'm off rucking and mauling, take a look at the Third Umpire blog, where Tim is gathering votes for the greatest Test XI in the past 100 years. His shortlist of 56 is here, while my own pick from the list is here.
And indeed here too: Hobbs, Sutcliffe, Bradman, Hammond, V Richards, Sobers, Gilchrist, Warne, Marshall, Ambrose, McGrath.
But they were only from the players on Tim's list. Here is who I would really like to see: Gooch, Slater, Dravid, Compton, Jardine, Flintoff (at his peak), Knott, Dev, Benaud, Thomson, Tyson ('54 version only)
Scatter your comments liberally, both by clicking "comments" below and visiting Third Umpire.
The economic crisis in Zimbabwe has got so bad that Andre Nel had to queue for pizza during South Africa A's tour of Bulawayo this week, according to this report.
On their way back from a visit to the Matopos National Park, the team felt peckish but found that all the local restaurants had run out of ingredients. So had most of the fast-food franchises. All that was open in this corruptly-run country was a pizza restaurant, with a long queue snaking round the block. Most of the team gave up and went back to their hotel, but Andre Nel and Andrew Hall decided to wait in line. Apparently, the team were also unable to get any beers after their match in Harare at the weekend.
Thabo Mbeki has so far shamelessly managed to ignore the sight of starving Zimbabweans, but perhaps if Hall whinges about being thirsty and Nel's stomach rumbles loudly it will be enough to make the South African president finally criticise Robert Mugabe's tyrannical regime.
I know that Andre regularly reads this blog. It would be interesting to know his take on all this - and I'd particularly like to know his favourite pizza toppings.
News reaches me from Derby where Essex played Derbyshire in the unremarkable Twenty20 Floodlit Cup (a bit of a gimmick that is only contested between those two counties and the PCA Masters XI) yesterday. Unusually, all the bowling in the first innings took place from the Grandstand End because light from the setting sun was getting in the batsmen's eyes when looking towards the Scoreboard End.
Derby suffered from "too much light" earlier in the season, too, with the Pro40 match against Leicestershire being held up for an hour and a half while the sun set - necessitating a reduction in overs and a consultation of Duckworth-Lewis. Play was also stopped in their Friends Provident Trophy match against Yorkshire, but the ECB refused permission for all the bowling to happen from one end.
At least because of the less than serious nature of the Twenty20 Floodlit Cup play could continue, but this is clearly a problem for Derby, who have done work to their ground recently. Could they plant some quick-growing Leylandii by the new press box to block out the sun? Or maybe they should give up cricket and play baseball?
It wasn't just England who were engaged in a thrilling battle to see out time for a draw this weekend. Look at this fine collection of athletes (click the picture to see them in more detail). Have you ever seen a more impressive body of sportsmen? This is the inaugural, and possibly final, team photograph of the Kirby Strollers, a team that I created for the purpose of playing a charity match yesterday at the beautiful Audley End ground in Essex against the PG Wodehouse Society team, also known as the Gold Bats, who have been mentioned on this blog before.
History was made as my crew of overweight, untalented but generally happy cricketers fell an agonising three balls short of saving the match, giving the Gold Bats a rare victory. In our mitigation, we were a scratch side that consisted of a couple of club cricketers, players like myself (second from left, front row) who have three or four games a year, and some outright novices. Julian Rees (back row, fourth from left) last played a competitive match in 1954, when Churchill was still PM. Our wicketkeeper was asked to field behind the stumps in borrowed kit, largely because his name was G Jones (Gareth, not Geraint) rather than any previous keeping experience. All the team excelled themselves, however, in terms of enthusiasm and post-match drinking, but a few rather let the side down by being quite good. Fortunately the rest of us compensated.
 Out of respect to the Gold Bats, however, I should point out that even with septuagenarian Julian in our side, the Strollers were about 15 years younger per man than our opponents. Well, at least we made a bunch of 50 and 60-year-olds feel young again. The Gold Bats made 188 for seven (I think) and we were bowled out for 110. Your blogger batted badly and bowled worse, although at least the bowling figures recovered after conceding a six off my first ball. I was out for 4 when batting, having mistimed a pull into the hands of slip. Fortunately, a friend was able to capture the moment of my departure should anyone be producing a coaching manual.
 The important thing is that the match was played for charity and more than £1800 was donated via our Just Giving website (anyone who wishes to donate can still do so) and £500 was raised on the day from players and guests.
I have posted before about how miserable it is to watch Test cricket at the Brit Oval these days. Not only are the views from the cheap seats pretty poor, but you have to spend most of the game with four or five grim-looking fluorescent jacket-wearing stewards standing in the way, ever on the look-out for possible bad behaviour.
The worst thing is the heavy-handed way they apply their alcohol policy, rummaging through bags on the gate (and thus causing delays for everyone gettin in) lest someone be trying to smuggle through some booze. Once they are in, obviously, they can get as drunk as they want on things they buy from the bars. The final straw for me last year was when I saw three - three - gate stewards standing around a bottle of what an elderly gentleman was calling squash last year, sniffing it to see whether he had dribbled some alcohol into it. It really is pathetic how little the Oval trusts its paying customers.
News now reaches me from a reader of Line and Length that it is not only alcohol that is banned but soft drinks too, if they are in the wrong containers. "I noticed that the people ahead of me had had two cans of Coca-Cola confiscated," my correspondent writes. "Thinking it was another of those dastardly sponsorship scams where people can only bring in the drink of the sponsors choice I asked what the objection to cans of Coca-Cola was. 'They're weapons', said the chap. 'We have to take them off them'. 'Weapons?', I said with some incredulity. 'We've been told they're weapons', he said."
Lunacy and completely disrespectful to supporters. How often do you see a member of the crowd, even when they are fully beered up, chucking cans at players or other spectators? Yes, it happened once to Michael Bevan about ten years ago but I have never seen such behaviour. In any case, if anyone really wanted to be wantonly violent, couldn't they chuck coins or mobile phone? Preferably at the stewards.
As my correspondent says: "Wait until they get around to the wine decanters they are issuing to members on the top deck of the Pavilion."
As India cruise towards victory in the Oval Test and a 2-0 series win that will make them the joint second-best team in the world (level with England, lest we beat ourselves up too much), criticism seems to be heaped primarily on Matt Prior, whose wicketkeeping skill has slumped over the series. He let 33 byes past him and dropped Tendulkar and Laxman as India rattled past 650.
This is reminiscent of the criticism that was aimed at Geraint Jones in the first stage of his career, before his keeping became actually quite good and his batting slumped. Prior can't have helped his cause by making a duck today as England lurched towards the follow-on. Two fifties and a hundred in his first seven Tests is not bad for a keeper, but if his batting starts to slide then the attention will focus even more strongly on his keeping.
Bob Willis moaned in typical Willis fashion about there being 15 keepers better than Prior in England. No one challenged him to name them, and it would be cruel to say how many analysts there are who are better than Willis, but it does create an interesting debate about who England should select for their winter tours. Prior will go - he deserves that - but England must take another keeper who offers skill with gloves as well as bat and theremust be genuine competition between them.
The obvious candidates to my mind are Chris Read, James Foster and Tim Ambrose. The first is still the best glovesman in the country, the last is averaging 54 this season (still ten fewer than the supposedly untalented batsman Read) and Foster offers perhaps the best balance (and like Read has made a maiden double-hundred in the county championship this season). There are other candidates (Nic Pothas, Jones, Steven Davies, Luke Sutton, Ben Scott) but whoever the ECB selects, they must not just be a drinks carrier for the tours.
 Some former cricketers, such as John Wisden, Frank Worrell and Viv Richards, become honoured for all time as trophies; others, such as Border-Gavaskar or Chappell-Hadlee, have to share a trophy (in the case of the Chappell-Hadlee trophy for series between Australia and New Zealand it may commemorate seven cricketers, the three Chapelli and Walter Hadlee and his three sons); while others (Jack Hobbs, WG Grace) have to make do with just having a pair of gates named after them.
Added to their number is a new trophy, which has been commissioned this season by MCC, and commemorates a great cricketing family as well as marking 75 years since India first played a Test series against England. The Pataudi Trophy will be presented to Rahul Dravid after India win this Test series (sorry to be pessimistic, but India are 1-0 up in the series and 82-1 off 19 overs as I type so it doesn't look good).
 The Nawab of Pataudi Sr is the only cricketer to have played for England and India. He made his debut in the Bodyline tour of 1932-33, scored a hundred in his first Test innings and was then dropped for disagreeing with Douglas Jardine's tactics (would Jardine have dropped him if he was not Indian? I doubt it). Pataudi then captained India on their tour of England in 1946, averaged just 11 in the Tests and died five years later during a polo match.
His son, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, pictured, had his eleventh birthday on the day his father died. Only ten years later he would captain India and he led them in 40 of his 46 Tests, averaging 35 and winning 12. He made the headlines for the wrong reasons two years ago when he went on the run from police who wanted to question him over alleged poaching. He was bailed by a judge and looks to have got off, as Pataudi Jr will be at the Oval to present his eponymous trophy when the match finishes.
 I was at Lord's yesterday for the first international archery competition to be held at the home of cricket. Great Britain's men won the inagural MCC Cup, while India won the women's version. You can read my report of the competition by clicking here.
It felt a very natural place for an archery competition, which is just as well as Lord's will be the venue for the archery event at the 2012 Olympics. A hundred or so people were there to watch yesterday, but I would expect the Tavern and Allen Stands to be full by the time the Oympics comes, especially if archers such as Larry Godfrey, who I am claiming to have been the first to dub "the Kevin Pietersen of archery", catch the imagination.
I got to have a go after the serious business was finished and having adjusted my sights when the first two arrows went in the blue circle, I got two golds in a row. Having played archery for six years as a teenager, and represented Cambridge (rather badly, I must admit) in the Varsity Match, I hadn't picked up a bow for about 12 years, but am defintely tempted to take it up properly again.
 Our photographer, the esteemed Graham Morris, then decided to get in on the action, removed his jacket, let fly with an arrow and it settled cleanly in the gold first go. The jammy so-and-so decided that would be a good moment to declare his innings closed and preserve his average.
While there is a bit of gloom over the senior side, the future looks bright for England, particularly in the spin bowling department, after Tom Westley, the Essex off-break all-rounder, and Liam Dawson, the slow left-arm bowler from Hampshire, ran through the Pakistan Under-19 order in Scarborough today and allowed Ben Wright, the England Under-19 captain, the luxury of asking the visiting side to follow on on the second day of the first Test.
Wright, the Glamorgan batsman, had done his bit earlier in the day, sharing a third-wicket stand of 218 with Adam Lyth before the Yorkshireman was out for 122. Wright reached his own hundred, making three in the match for England after Alex Wakely, from Northamptonshire, had made 112 on Saturday, and England reached 532 with ease. It should still have been a difficult task bowling at the side that had won the Under-19 World Cup last year.
Although James Harris, of Glamorgan, took a wicket with his second ball, Pakistan progressed at almost five runs an over to 132 for two at tea. The introduction of spin proved critical, with Westley taking a return catch to dismiss Taimur Ali for 41 and set a collapse in motion. Westley took three more wickets and Dawson had four of his own as Pakistan were bowled out for 214 in 56 overs. Umar Amin, who was the last man out, leg-before to Westley for 113, provided the only obstacle.
Pakistan survived seven overs unscathed before stumps were drawn, but they need another 301 runs to make England bat again.
 The papers have scandalously overlooked the big sporting news story of the weekend, giving scarcely a mention to Bomber the Spifire's magnificent run in the Twenty20 finals day mascots' race, but this blog is not afraid to break the big stories.
The Kent mascot led from the start of the 19-man race but stumbled when it came to scaling the inflatable pads. He got back on his feet, overtaking Lanky, the Lancashire Giraffe, and passing Sid the Shark, from Sussex, just before the line, going on to win by a length.
Oh, and Kent won the cricket final too.
 One of the more bizarre sights of the race was the former England cricketers Chris Lewis and Jason Gallian attacking Sid the Shark while wearing outfits that made them resemble ghosts from Pac-Man. Or possibly jellybeans. With eyes.
(Photos: Nick Potts/PA)
If you haven't already caught up with it, I wrote a highly subjective list of the 50 greatest sporting insults for Times Online a few days ago that you may want to read, not least for the hilariously outraged comments beneath it from Italian football fans. They got the wrong end of the stick about me naming Marco Materazzi's insult against Zinedine Zidane as the most important, thinking I was dissing Materazzi when in fact I'm praising him (it was an insult that had a result that cost France the World Cup, you don't get more important than that).
Anyway, as you would expect there are a fair few cricketing insults in there, helped by Simon Briggs's book of Ashes insults. I've gone for Eddo Brandes's famous "every time I f*** your wife she gives me a biscuit" to Glenn McGrath at No 2, although part of me really likes Michael Vaughan's "Who do you think you are, Steve Waugh?" to Ricky Ponting in 2005, if only because it demonstrated as strongly as Steve Harmison's bouncer that cut the Australia captain's cheek in the first over at Lord's that this side was not going to roll over.
But what have I missed? Share some of your favourite cricketing insults by clicking comments below.
Nothing to do with cricket, but I thought I should pass on this post from the ever-excellent Spectator Coffee House blog: "The Spice Girls have set up a website allowing fans to vote for one more city to be included on their world tour. But I fear they might be in for a surprise. You can enter any city you want and, oh so predictably, the internet campaign to send them to Baghdad is already under way, which seems a little unfair on the Iraqis."
Lost among all the newsprint about the Trent Bridge Test was the antithesis to Mr Cialini's pyrotechnics in Suffolk (see previous post). The South Africa women's team played their first Test in the Netherlands and comfortably won by 159 runs. But what was notable was the slowness at which the Dutch ladies batted. Chasing 232 in the first innings, they were bowled out for 108 off 123.3 overs.
Six of the South Africa bowlers conceded less than one run an over - and Johmari Logtenberg can feel bashful about being walloped for five runs off her three overs. Ashlyn Kilowan, a left-arm medium pacer, returned the figures of 11-10-2-0. She didn't even get a bowl in the second innings as the Netherlands were bowled out for 50. "This game has bore draw written all over it" said Cricinfo after the second day of the Test was washed out, proving that even the best of us can get it wrong.
Enough of these jellybeans (which I am told is the way The Times must spell the sugary missiles), time for some tales from elsewhere in the cricketing world. Such as the adventures of one Damian Cialini, the captain of the Suffolk club Yoxford, who made 342 not out in a 45-over match at the weekend. Cialini's explosive hitting, which featured 39 fours and 20 sixes, helped his side to 557 for three and victory by the small matter of 359 runs. In other words, even if he had been out for a duck, his side would have won.
Poor old P Thomas, of Elveden, the opponents, had 12 overs hit for 191 runs, and A Flack conceded 61 off his three. Astonishingly, despite such a big score, Cialini's average for the season is only 72.
 Patrick Kidd is a sports writer for The Times.
He first fell in love with cricket when he saw Graham Gooch swat successive balls over his head for six and on to the same red Cortina's bonnet
at Castle Park, Colchester.
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