Long distance cricket

I followed most of the Ashes, the one-dayers against Australia, and the Champions Trophy games via the ball by ball coverage on cricinfo, so I was amused to read an account of the so-called ’synthetic broadcasts’ constructed by the Australian broadcaster ABC to cover the Ashes in Australia in 1934 and 1938. (I’m indebted to Gideon Haigh’s excellent book Inside Out for this).

A panel of broadcasters convened in the studios in Sydney and reported more or less as live the ball-by-ball information sent by means of coded telegrams by Eric Scholl at the Test match grounds. Sound effects were provided by a pencil and a block of wood; crowd noises came from a gramophone record. The listening public was enthralled, staying up to listen until the small hours of the morning. Employers complained.

And how unlike the coverage on cricinfo, much as I depend on it in the absence of a Sky Sports subscription. Reading between the lines of some of the summer coverage, they have a team of writers based in Melbourne, who watch the television coverage and transcribe it into ball by ball updates. In 70 years we’ve updated the technology but the method seems all but identical. Cricinfo, it should be said, does have a journalist at the ground. He (almost invariably he) feeds colour into the ball-by-ball commentary from time, but his main role is to write the Bulletin, the analysis pieces at the end of each session of play. To describe the action, it doesn’t really matter where you are; to understand it, well, you still have to be there.

Dreaming of perfection

I can’t think of a better way to mark the beginning of the new football season that with a quote from Jorge Valdano on the teams which fans remember, which I found in Jonathan Wilson’s fine book Inverting the Pyramid, on the history of football tactics:

People often say that results are paramount, that, ten years down the  line, the only thing which will be remembered is the score, but that’s not true. What remains in people’s memories is the search for greatness and the feelings that engenders. We remember Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan more than we remember Fabio Capello’s AC Milan even though Capello’s Milan was more successful and more recent. Equally, the Dutch Total Football teams of the 1970s are legendary, far more than West Germany, who beat them in the World Cup Final in 1974, or Argentina, who defeated them in the 1978 final. It’s about the search for perfection. We know it doesn’t exist, but it’s our obligation towards football, and maybe towards humanity, to strive towards it. That’s what we remember.

The image of Johann Cruyff is from Pitch Invasion, with thanks.

Managing genius

One of the stars, for me, of Jonathan Wilson’s geeky but entertaining global history of football tactics, Inverting the Pyramid, is Bela Guttman. The career of the Hungarian manager spanned both sides of the war, and he escaped the Holocaust by being interned in Switzerland. He’s best known for his Benfica side of the early 1960s, which beat Barcelona and Real Madrid in successive years to win the European Cup. Wilson describes him this way:

He represented the final flowering of the great era of central European football; he was the last of the coffee-house coaches, perhaps even the last defender of the game’s innocence.

“I never minded if the opposition scored” he said, “because I always thought we could score another”. When Benfica beat Real Madrid 5-3 in the European Cup Final in 1962, with two second-half goals from the young Eusebio, they came back from 2-0 and 3-2 down. He was also a man who had a Clough-like hostility to interference.

Three stories from the book from a career which involved managing dozens of teams on three continents.

• At Ciocanul in Romania, a director tried to interfere his team selection.  “OK, you run the club, you seem to have the basics”, Guttman told him, and promptly left.
• Managing Kispest in Hungary, he decided to take off a full-back who was having a poor game, thinking (in the days before substitutes) that the team would play better with ten men.  His captain, Puskas, told the player to stay on. Guttman sat out the game in the stands, reading a paper, and didn’t return to the club again.
• At AC Milan he was sacked after taking the club to the top of the league. He told a news conference, “I have been sacked even though I am neither a criminal or a homosexual”. Thereafter he insisted on a clause in his contract which said he could not be sacked when the team topped the table.

In Portugal he won the league with Porto, and was hired by Benfica, with whom he won the league in 1960 and 1961. After he’d won the European Cup for them for the second time, he asked the directors for a bonus. They declined, and he quit. Benfica fans, apparently, say that he cursed the club never to win another European Cup. Not true, of course, but they have appeared in five finals since then, and lost the lot.

Gideon Haigh on the Ashes

The Australian journalist Gideon Haigh is probably the best living cricket writer, certainly in English, and during 2005 we had the luxury in England of having him write a column in The Guardian – later edited, quickly, into one of the best books on that epic series.

Sadly, the advertising downturn means that there’s not a repeat performance for this year’s series. Happily, though, the internet means that we can still access his coverage is Australia’s Business Spectator (and if that seems strange, it’s worth noting that Haigh also wrote, pre-crash, one of the best books on the dizzying corporate greed of the last 20 years).

Here’s a couple of good moments from his coverage so fa, three days into the first Test of the five-match series:

From his preview (which also includes a characteristic flourish about Churchill and the Dardanelles):

The five-test series was for a century the standard unit of international cricket rivalry.  Now it is only played by the format’s pioneers over the course of Ashes.  Late last year, England played West Indies in a Twenty20 match that lasted less than three hours for a grubstake of $US20 million.  For England to now spend seven weeks playing Australia mainly for honour and glory seems almost unpardonably decadent.

On Pietersen’s dismissal by the Australian  spinner Hauritz in England’s first innings:

The beneficiary of Pietersen’s largesse was a deserving one: Nathan Hauritz, said so often not to be Shane Warne that he must sometimes feel like issuing a pre-emptive public apology.  Hauritz would have been an onlooker had Brett Lee maintained fitness, and still seems to lack the variation necessary to prosper at the top level.  But the delivery in question could hardly have been improved on, drifting away toward slip and dragging Pietersen so wide that he almost ended up on the neighbouring pitch.

And on Hughes’ dismissal by Flintoff in Australia’s first innings:

Taller, stronger, Flintoff’s first over to Hughes almost justified his selection on its own, five deliveries from round the wicket bouncing sternum-high, a sixth veering past the outside edge, bowler following through down the pitch with his jolly jacktar’s swagger.  The ball hit Prior’s gloves with a satisfying whack rather than the clang that sometimes emanates from them.  Hughes was in Year 10 when Flintoff made the Ashes of 2005 his own: this must have been like living out a still-fresh schoolboy fantasy.

More daily at the Business Spectator.

Some of the best books on bike racing

I’m never sure about posts which are basically lists, but I have been mulling this one over for a few months now, and there will never be a better moment than this year’s Tour de France ‘Grand Depart’ in Monaco to share them. So here it is:

Best introduction to the Tour de France: Inside the Peloton by Graeme Fife.  Fife – a prolific cycling writer – manages to combine both the sense of the sport and how it works, as well as the history of the race and most of the ‘grands’, the riders who have dominated it.

Best inside account by a professional: Paul Kimmage’s book A Rough Ride. Kimmage, now a sports journalist, was a successful amateur who never won a race as a professional. His book, published in 1990, was the first to break ranks on the sport’s drugs culture in the ’80s, and he was ostracised for most of the ’90s. But the book does more than this; it gives a feel for the life of the journeyman pro (in the same way, say as Eamonn Dunphy’s Only A Game did for football in the ’70s).

Best Insight Into being a team domestique: Domestiques are the team riders who can’t win for themselves, but ride for their leaders, preventing breakaways, chasing them down, keeping the pace high in the mountains, and so on. A Significant Other by Matt Rendell (based on Victor de la Pena’s diaries of the 2003 Tour) catches this better than any other. There’s a splendidly geeky section on the physics of the peloton, and a fine chapter in which de la Pena explains his team role in detail on one particular stage.

Best fictional account: Tim Krabbe’s The Rider – a novella about an amateur race, seen from the perspective of one of the riders. Almost existential.

Best book written by an insider about a pro team: A tie here, and both are about professional British cycling teams, about fifteen years apart. In Wide Eyed and Legless, Jeff Connor (a former fell-running champion-turned-journalist) is sent to ride the Tour stages ahead of the race and also report on the ill-fated ANC-Halfords team, under-prepared and under-financed, as it falls apart during the race. Team on the Run is written by John Deering, the press guy of the Linda McCartney team, funded by the vegetarian food company, and by Paul, who comes out of the story well. There are some highs – an unexpected win in the Giro d’Italia, for example – before the money goes astray.

Best book about racing as an amateur - or maybe just the best book about racing: The Escape Artist by Matt Seaton, a wonderful account of the slightly obsessive nature of the amateur rider. It sets the tone with a well-judged description of a tricky but exhilarating part of a favourite training run, and also of his first experience of riding fixed wheel at the Herne Hill velodrome (which ends calamitously). This is about cycling as a way of life – which comes up hard, later, against his wife’s illness and early death. I’d say it’s the best of all of these books.

Other cycling posts:
Reaching the heights, touching the void

In praise of Mark Cavendish

Cycling and painting

Doping, cycling and the Olympics

Sporting records, limits and technology

Doon Toon

OK, schadenfreude is an ugly emotion, but I am a Sunderland supporter and some small pleasure at Newcastle United’s relegation last week is only to be expected. Of the many tributes, I think I liked most this parody (which I’ve slightly rewritten for public exposure) of the great Petula Clark standard:

“When Kevin Keegan flounces out of your ground, you can always go…

Doon Toon,

When Ashley’s debts, and his cronies, abound, you can always go..

Doon Toon,

Just listen to the traffic on the way to Bristol City,

You’ll have to sell old Micky so your squad won’t look so pretty,

Bad times next year, how do you get to Oakwell?

Europe is a memory – but Plymouth’s on the Channel.

Doon Toon.

You will find Fat Freddie’s there to help and understand you

Dennis Wise is up the stairs to scheme and stuff and scam you

Doon Toon, It’s right deserved as well,

Doon Toon Look at how far you’ve fell,

Doon Toon Doncaster’s waiting for you.

If you want more in the same vein Salut! Sunderland points in the right direction.

Update 29 May 09: Perhaps strangely, perhaps not, there are at least four different Newcastle United-relegation related parodies on you tube based on the last-days-of-Hitler film Downfall – with revised subtitles.  The best are here (written by the author of the ‘Downtown’ parody, I’m told; there are clues) and here. There’s probably a whole dissertation waiting to be written on football fans and recursive post-modernism, especially since there’s a version from earlier in the season on Sunderland’s expensively unsuccessful excursions into the January transfer market. and another from elsewhere in the film on the pools panel. Warning: strong language all round!

The picture is from the big soccer blog.

Failing slightly less badly

After Newcastle’s relegation on Sunday, John Motson trotted out the well-known cliche about what ‘an unforgiving league’ the Premiership is. It’s hard to see how you can reach this conclusion. The bottom five clubs – a quarter of the teams in the league – all failed to manage to average a point a game over the entire season – which let’s face it means that they have played extremely badly since last August. They’ve won between seven and nine games out of a possible 38.

Disclosure, as they say: the five include Sunderland, whom I support, lucky to stay up after some poor results and worse performances.

In fact, having a quick look across Europe’s league tables, using the ‘point a game’ yardstick, this year Spain is the most competitive (‘most unforgiving’) league, with Italy, France, Turkey, and Portugal less forgiving of under-perrforming teams than the English league. Only in the German league could you play worse this year with better outcomes.

On the final day of the English top division, only one of the five, West Brom, who were already relegated, managed not to lose. as most of the games went according to league form. As Harry Pearson put it recently in a piece on Middlesbrough’s impending relegation, re-phrasing Gore Vidal: ‘When it comes to surviving a relegation dogfight it is not enough that we fail – others must fail worse.’

The picture is from the website Who Ate All The Pies?

A Toon for the times

It seems that it may be utterly appropriate that Newcastle United’s players have ‘Northern Rock’ [opens in pdf] emblazoned across their chests. According to the sports journalist David Conn, the way the clubs has been run is a mirror for our times:

Newcastle United’s boom had the lot: borrowing, increased ticket prices and mass replica shirt buying which the fans often paid for with credit cards. There was a failure, [Bobby] Robson complained, to invest adequately in long-term infrastructure like the academy and training facilities. Directors’ pay ballooned, with thumping annual bonuses for Freddy Shepherd, who became the chairman, and Sir John’s son, Douglas, who became a tax exile. In his final year, to June 2007, Douglas was paid £448,654 in salary and a £1.2m pay-off for resigning, all via a Newcastle United company registered in Gibraltar.

And apparently Mike Ashley was so keen to buy that he didn’t bother doing a proper due diligence – only to discover almost immediately that there was debt everywhere, as Conn also explains. You couldn’t make it up.

The wrong genre

Kelly Sotherton, by Phil McElhinney

You get so used to the routines – or cliches – of sports interviews that it’s always refreshing when something breaks out of the frame. In this week’s Sport magazine, the heptathlete Kelly Sotherton is asked:

If you were writing the novel of Kelly Sotherton’s life, how would it end?

Of course, what the question is supposed to do is to invite the athlete to imagine themselves in the classic ’sports biopic’, where they come from behind to clinch an elusive world title against their long-standing arch-rival.

What she actually answered was this:

It would be a horror – like Steven King – and I’d be found dead, half-eaten by my cats in my living room. Or something like that.

The journalist was so surprised they had to ask the question a second time, a different way around (“Let’s phrase that another way”). Definitely more John Carpenter than Any Given Sunday.

The great photograph at the top of this post was taken by Phil McElhinney – see his photostream on Flickr here.

Reaching the heights, touching the void

Although I love professional cycling, despite its flaws, I have delayed reading Matt Rendell’s biography of the Italian climber Marco Pantani, who won the Tour de France and the Giro in 1998, and died of a massive cocaine overdose in a hotel room six years later, dogged by (well-founded) drugs scandals. The book got fine reviews, and Rendell knows the sport well (he is (co) author of one of the best books about being a team domestique). The reason I put off reading it was that I knew it would depress me.

The best way to summarise this is through a couple of lines in the final chapter:

Looking back, Marco’s successes, like any number of world records, gold medals, and winning sequences in recent sporting history have a phantom quality. … They weren’t events at all, but phantasmagorical experiences with no clearly definable reality that existed chiefly in the emotions they caused in millions of indivdual minds. The emotion most associated with Marco is euphoria, yet we know now that it was triggered by the poisons that flowed through his veins and made his flamboyant style possible.

It’s worth exploring this further. One of the most exciting sights in cycling is a climber attacking the field and gaining the minutes he needs to win – and Pantani’s stage win at Les Deux Alpes in 1998, when he attacked on a climb in atrocious conditions, descended recklessly, then climbed again, to make enough time on Ullrich to seal his Tour victory – was one of the most exciting days of racing in my lifetime.

But in a (literally) forensic analysis, Rendell demonstrates that Pantani had been blood doping through the use of EPO almost from the start of his professional career. At the same time, he kicks away one of the cycling fans’ supports. Almost all of the successful cyclists in the 1990s used EPO (Bjarne Riis, tour winner in 1996, has admitted it; Ullrich hasn’t but the evidence is against him, there are still questions over Armstrong’s win in 1999). So the fan’s defence is that EPO use must  have levelled the playing field – while quietly disregarding the talented but non-using Charly Mottet, who never finished the Tour higher than fourth. Rendell suggests that athletes respond differently to EPO, and that Pantani’s success might just suggest that his body was better attuned to the drug.

So far, this ia familiar story about 90s cycling – or even modern professional sport. But there are two other stories in Rendell’s narrative as well. The first is about the nature of cycling in Pantani’s native region of Emilia-Romagna, with its strong Communist traditions. The first chapter of the book places cycling, and Pantani, deep in their social milieu.

The second is perhaps more revealing. Rendell suggests that Pantani’s sporting success disguised a pattern of mental illness that might have otherwise been recognised more clearly – and which seemed to be inherent in his growing cocaine abuse after 1999. More: this might have been part of his make-up as a sportsman which enabled him to take the risks on descents which contributed to some of his victories, and also to some of his crashes. The other half of this, of course, is that some of the experts who tried to help Pantani identified this problem – but the cyclist’s fame and wealth, and some of his advisors who lived inside this bubble and benefited from both, meant that it was always impossible to address it.

The initial newspaper article, which led to the book, can be found here.