Line and Length - Times Online - WBLG

Mike Jackson RIP

The King of Pop was not the only Michael Jackson to pass away last week. Sad news reached me today that Mike Jackson, No 3 bat for the PG Wodehouse Society cricket team, lost his battle with lung cancer last Friday.

Regular readers will recall that I often play for and against the Wodehouse Soc, whose cricket team are called the Gold Bats after a 1904 novel by Wodehouse. Mike was a valuable member of the team, a fine batsman and talented footballer in his youth and a lovely man to have in the dressing room.

It helped that he could play cricket as well as anyone in the team, but Mike would have been in every XI regardless of talent because of his name. When Bob Miller, the Gold Bats captain, first met Mike, he was astonished to discover that he shared a name with one of Wodehouse's most famous characters, who made his debut in literature precisely a century ago.

Mike Jackson is the sidekick of Psmith, the monocle-wearing dandy, and one of the illustrious Jackson brothers, who are trained by a cricket pro called Saunders during their school holidays and go on to play county cricket. Mike, the youngest, is unable to go to Cambridge - and thence to the England team? - because of a collapse in the family finances so he has to take a job in a bank. In one memorable story, he bunks off work to go and play at Lord's because his brother's team is a man short. How could his namesake not be an automatic selection for the Gold Bats?

He had been ill for some time but although he did not feel strong enough to play in last year's charity match at Audley End between the Gold Bats and my Kirby Strollers side, Mike still came to umpire the fixture. I remember the last thing he said to me was after I took three wickets in that match: "What's happened to your game? You were hopeless last time I saw you bowl." Some days you get lucky; some days, alas, you receive the finger from the eternal umpire. Mike will be much missed.

That all you got?

Could Nathan Hauritz be the new Jason Krejza? And when will Australia realise that picking players with a Z in their name for comic effect isn't enough? Remember Tim Zoehrer? Or Andrew Zesers (look him up)? Not since Garth McKenzie in the 1960s has there been a great Australian cricketer with a Z in his name. They'd have won at Edgbaston in 2005 if their last man had been Mike Kasprowics.

Hauritz marked his debut bowl in England today with the astounding figures of 18 overs, nought for 98, against Sussex. Figures that made Graeme Swann lick his lips at a Times event in the Long Room at Lord's tonight. "I'd like to hope that they're scraping the wicket at Cardiff with a rake now," he said, but while it is expected that Cardiff will take spin, the organisers will not be so kind to Swann and Monty Panesar. Cardiff bid £3m to get this Test and they don't want it over in three days - even if it could for ever be marketed as the place where England won the first Test.

And yes, we're getting carried away. Aussie readers may well start to prepare their "eat your words, Kidd" emails for after the first Test. But you don't know how good it is to begin a Test series and know that we don't have to face Shane Warne.

Speaking of whom, Swann was asked tonight about whether Ravi Bopara would have taken much heed of Warne's criticism of him in his Times column recently. "I don't think Ravi reads the Times to be honest," Swann said. "He has difficulty enough reading the menu at Nando's."

Warne said that Bopara cares too much about how he looks to be any good at cricket. This from a man who has proudly had hair-replacement therapy...

When Australia went to Waugh over Wimbledon dress code

I had a chat with Adam Gilchrist, the former Australia keeper, this morning, the fruits of which will be in tomorrow's paper, but there was one story that he made when the tape recorder was switched off that is worth sharing now.

With Wimbledon on at the moment, Gilchrist was asked about the trip that the Australia cricket team made to SW19 in 2001 to cheer on Pat Rafter in the men's final against Goran Ivanisevic. As a sign of their loyalty to their fellow Aussie, most of them wore their Baggy Green caps (although not Shane Warne).

That final, you will recall, was postponed to the Monday by rain, which was lucky for the cricketers because they had managed to sew up victory in the first Test against England before lunch on the Sunday. As they sat in the dressing-room pondering what to do with their day off, Steve Waugh, the Aussie captain, thought it would be a good idea to try and get tickets for the final. As it happened, Gilchrist knew Rafter's brother and gave him a ring.

"He asked how many tickets I wanted," Gilchrist recalled this morning. "'Er, any chance of about 25?' I asked. He said he'd see what he could do."

Rafter rang back a while later having called in a few favours. "Good news," he told Gilchrist. "I've got you 25 tickets in the Royal Box. Only thing is, you'll have to wear jacket and tie."

Gilchrist relayed this message to the team, which was met with a volley of abuse. There are some things that an Aussie will not do for the sake of a good sports ticket. "We told him 'no chance' and asked if he could get us some cheap seats instead," Gilchrist said. And so they ended up sitting with the public, wearing their own far more important dress code.

375 up for Stanford

I wonder whether when he heard yesterday that he faces 375 years in jail for fraud, Allen Stanford had the same first thought that I did.

Did he think: "375, well there's an irony. 375 was the world record score Brian Lara made in my beloved Antigua around the time that I was starting to get interested in cricket. Gosh, life can be funny sometimes."

If he didn't, he's not a proper cricket fan. Wonder whether he'll be able to watch much of the Ashes in Sing-Sing.

How to improve Twenty20

As Tillekeratne Dilshan and Chris Gayle were playing their game of "which team is more dependent on one man" last night, I was playing my own Twenty20 match in the genteel surroundings of Dulwich College, South London, at the annual game between the PG Wodehouse Society and the masters of the College, where Wodehouse had been a pupil.

I'm not sure what Wodehouse would have thought of the professionalism and razzmatazz of the World Twenty20, but our game had enough eccentric quirks to ensure that it matched up to the old-fashioned belief that cricket should be enjoyable to play first and foremost. For a start, everyone got a bowl except the keepers. Two overs each ensured that we all felt involved.

Batsmen had to retire at 25 as well, so almost everyone got a bat. As a nod to the game's origins, two of the overs had to be bowled underarm, which presented an interesting challenge for bowler and batsmen. Dulwich included two female geography teachers in their XI, while we had a septuagenarian wicketkeeper. All in all, it was a game designed to be jolly, not that that prevented me having the usual sick-in-my-stomach nerves on the drive to the game. Tea, as is usual in these games, was the most important thing.

We lost by 41 runs, but everyone had a great time. Personally, I had one of those days that with my very limited abilities will be remembered in old age. Bowling, I took one for 10 in my two overs as Dulwich made 155, then, coming in at No 10 when we were 75 for eight, I made 16 and took the score on to 98 before trying to chivvy the score along I hit the ball high to mid-off. The last pair got us up to 114 before defeat came. Cider was drunk afterwards in the beautiful red-brick pavilion where the names of Wodehouse and other Dulwich alumni (Trevor Bailey, Arthur Gilligan, Andrew Sheridan) winked down at us from their gold-lettered perches on the honours boards. This is how cricket should always be played.

39 off six balls

The last thing you probably need as a bowler after sending down three consecutive no-balls is to see the next six legitimate deliveries disappear over your head for six, but this is what happened to Damion Grosscel, of Catford Wanderers, in a division 3 Kent League match against Linden Park last week.

Grosscel, who is averaging a respectable 24 this season, had the misfortune to be bowling to Abhijit Kale, who played one ODI for India in 2003 but, with a first-class average of 53, is clearly no slouch. Kale took a run off the first no-ball, his partner took one of the next and Kale hit two off the third no-ball. Then the fun started. 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6 and Kale had 39 of the 40 43 runs conceded by the hapless Grosscell, who conceded only 22 in his 13 previous overs that afternoon.

Kale's feat, though impressive, was three shy for the record in one over, held by Jonathan Hughes of North Leeds, who hit 42 in a club game in 2005.

The sad footnote is that Kale really should not be playing at this level. Five years ago he was fined and banned from playing for six months by the BCCI after allegations were made that he had tried to bribe the national selectors to pick him. He denied bribery but apologised for "trying to influence the selectors". Presumably the Linden Park selectors need no sweeteners to put Kale in their first XI.

Saving Grace

Congratulations, if that is the right word for something you have no control over, to Henry Allingham, who has become the world's oldest man at the age of 113 after the death of Tomoji Tanabe, a Japanese.

Allingham, one of two surviving veterans of the Great War in the UK, is remarkable not so much because of what he can now relate - he talks with difficulty now - but because of his mere existence. He is a link with a near vanished world, one of the few surviving Victorians. When he was my age, Wall Street had yet to crash. He had retired several years before the assassination of JFK. He has known a time when England won the Ashes back-to-back. Yes, he is that old.

I met Allingham two years ago when he was a mere 110. He had been invited to the Oval, where he delighted the Surrey members by reminiscing about the players he had seen. “Jack Hobbs was my pin-up boy,” he said of the batsman who made his Test debut in 1908. “There used to be a clock in the pavilion at the Oval and I remember Hobbs always tried to smash its face with the ball. I never saw him do it, but he had a good try.”

But more astounding than that, Allingham recalled seeing WG Grace, who died in 1915. “I was about 4 or 5 and I saw him at Leytonstone,” Allingham said. “He was big, square-built with a beard, but he walked like an old man and I recall him wearing pads that were too big for him.” Delightfully, Allingham admitted that what he most remembered about the day was the quality of the lunch and the sunshine.

The world has changed immensely in two years, let alone 113. When we spoke, the Indian Premier League was not even a gleam in Lalit Modi's eye. The first World Twenty20 had not been held. Games were not broadcast in HD. "Everywhere has changed," Allingham said, looking around the Oval. "The only place I recognise is the Bank of England."

A-podding we will go

The first podcast of summer, like the first pop of a champagne cork at Lord's, is something to be cherished. We recorded our opening salvo this afternoon and you can listen to it here. Hope you enjoy it. I know we did.

And what a stellar cast we have assembled: why, in the studio alone there was Mike Atherton, Andy Zaltzman, Mark Chapman (not the guy who shot John Lennon) and myself. Between us we boast 115 Test caps, 16 Test hundreds and even a couple of Test wickets.

Then there is Shaun Udal, joining us hot and sweaty on the phone from the changing room at Lord's, such a pro that he is. Udal tells us about the joy of swapping texts with Shane Warne, the temptation to run over Phillip Hughes in the car park and why we are in danger of Twenty20 overkill.

Go and download it on to your gramophone now.

Vincent Price's cricket coaching...

I had flippantly suggested yesterday that Vincent Price had no interest in cricket. How wrong I was... Thanks to Paul for alerting me to this. God bless YouTube!

The Line & Length Monday XI: England v Windies special

With England about to play West Indies this evening for what is either the 14th, 15th, 16th or 17th time in 2009, depending on whether you include washed-out ODIs, sand-infested Tests and Twenty20 warm-up games, the theme of this week's quiz is their clashes this year, what can you remember?

As Paul Collingwood said yesterday: "It feels as if we've been playing the West Indies for half a year." Erm, you have Paul... 

Question 1 The first match between the sides was the embarrassing Test defeat in Kingston when England were dismissed for 51. Who was the only England batsman to reach double figures in that innings?

Question 2 And which Windies bowler took five for 11 in that game?

Question 3 How many balls were bowled in the abandoned second Test in Antigua?

Question 4 In the only Twenty20 international between the sides this year, England were dismissed for 121. Which opening batsman made 59 for West Indies as they chased the total in 18 overs?

Question 5 Four of the England XI in that Twenty20 match will not be available for selection for today's game, who are they?

Question 6 Andrew Strauss is England's leading run-scorer in Test cricket this year, but he is only fifth in the averages. Who, in order, are above him?

Question 7 Who has taken the most wickets for England in all matches against West Indies this year, with 35?

Question 8 Who is the only England bowler to take two five-wicket hauls against West Indies in 2009?

Question 9 What role did Scott Borthwick play in England's Test series win this summer?

Question 10 At which ground did poor drainage mean an ODI was abandoned despite the rain having stopped?

Question 11 Two England batsmen were not dismissed in any of their games against West Indies this year. Who were they?