Reverse Swing

Watching the TV coverage of England v India you could hear Matthew Prior groan every time the batsman played a shot. I found it vaguely irritating after a while. According to Steve James. who clearly had the benefit of a stump mike this was what he was saying to Karthick and then Dhoni.

Clearly it spurred Dhoni onto better things and saving the game. It strikes me there’s not much point to sledging unless it contains some mordant wit or an essential truth, and “Yuvraj Singh is batting brilliantly in the nets,” slips into neither category. And as Prior found out it can backfire against you. It’s obviously not just Lara that you don’t sledge.

India First innings - 201 all out

Looking at England’s second-string bowling attack and India’s star batters before the game began I was apprehensive. But Anderson and Sidebottom bowled with a consistency that has escaped Harmison, for instance, over the last couple of years. With Anderson and Sidebottom in tandem it was good to see some conventional swing bowling from both ends. Whether this is the Alan Donald effect it’s difficult to say, but Anderson looked relaxed and in control, with no free gifts for the batsman. I can’t recall him bowling like this since he came into the team in 2003. On this performance you’d pick the bowlers to hold their places for the next test

Despite being behind on first innings, India must fancy knocking over the English top order. If they can get the home side out for less than 150 that would leave a gettable 250 in the fourth innings.You sense that this will be a low-scoring test with a result in prospect.

Dravid must have been thinking it was a good toss to lose at Lords with the cloud cover and movement and England at the crease. But Sreesanth and Zaheer Khan have been bowling some unthreatening lines, failing to exploit the conditions, and RP looks accurate but of no great pace. Just the thing an out of form batsman like Strauss needs. I’m sorry to have seen Munaf Patel so unceremoniously dumped - I bet he’d fancy a bowl on this.

As Matthew Hayden scores his third century of the World Cup against New Zealand his old opening partner, Justin Langer, not to be outdone, scores a triple century for Somerset against Middlesex. Makes you wonder whether they kept an eye on each other’s score.

You feel that over the last few months England have been quietly getting better at this one-day cricket business. In the World Cup so far they’ve looked competent against the lesser teams, and while the faults in the England team have been obvious - poor starts by the openers, a lack of overall quality in the bowling - you never felt they were totally out of things.

Against Sri Lanka today they looked they’d worked on the game: plenty of variation in the bowling with slower balls and different lengths, accuracy at a premium, and the fielding was sharp. They looked like they’d come together as an outfit, and when they dismissed Sri Lanka for 235 you felt they were in with a good shout.

It looked like they were purposefully chasing down the target when Pietersen and Bell were together, and the latter was narrowly run out. The wickets that quickly followed of Pietersen Flintoff and Collingwood seemed to put England right out of the game. The best batsmen disappearing together in the space of a few overs.

Enter Nixon and Bopara. ” I don’t know why you’re watching this,” said my wife.” Forty-five minutes later she was cheering on Nixon, as he wickedly improvised, reverse sweeping Murali for 6, and Bopara standing there, calm at the crease, looking like it was his destiny to win this game. In one way when you come as close as this and lose heroically you’ve won whatever happens: after playing all day it comes down to what happens off one ball.

But I felt sorry for Bopara at the end, especially when Fernando ran in for what should have been the final ball and it never left his hand. The actual final ball that was delivered bowled him, and you wonder whether he had been disturbed by Fernando’s failure to deliver the ball. Perhaps it was nerves in the Sri Lankan bowler, but I wouldn’t like to see this non-release of the ball become an established tactic in the close moments of a game.

During the rain in Antigua Sky showed the batting highlights from Australia’s matches against South Africa and the West Indies. This double-dose of centuries from Hayden as he clubbed the attacks of the next strongest teams in the competition was an awesome sight.The one-handed six off Samuels when he found his feet in the wrong position must have been a first in any form of cricket. Even when you take modern bats and boundaries out of the equation, his hitting has been pretty spectacular.Not so long ago there was talk of the end of his international career when Hoggard was getting him early in the tests - there was a sense that he’d been worked out. The thing is, have he and Australia peaked too early in this competition?

Watching Bob Woolmer pack his folders into his bag on Saturday, just after Ireland had hit the winning runs, you could see what he was feeling. The meticulous preparation had come to nothing, Pakistan’s loss to Ireland was painful. There had been quite a few shots of him during the game with Shahid Afridi alongside him, the camera searching for his grimaces as the game slipped away. Usually he’s one of the few coaches who acknowledged the cameras, at least with a smile but often with a laugh.

I remembered when he broke into the England team, working his way into the test game via the one-day county route, and made the 149 against Australia. An all-rounder who could make big runs - you expected him to be around for a long time, but it was the Packer stuff that stymied his test career.

He was a great coach with Warwickshire, innovative, getting them to practice in new ways, leading them to titles and then he got the South Africa job where he was successful. At the time you were asking why isn’t this guy the England coach - England always seemed to struggle for coaching talent of the top order, and the opposition have got Bob Woolmer. No disrespect to Duncan Fletcher but you always wonder what Woolmer would have brought to England. And now we’re never going to know. Like his test career it’s an imponderable, a might have been.

When he took on the Pakistan job you felt he was probably the only overseas coach who could make a success of it, that it needed someone of his stature and authority, as well as someone with vision. And as Pakistan has rumbled through one crisis after another over the last nine months it’s Woolmer who emerged with his dignity intact, negotiating his way through the political minefields surrounding the team.

Bob Woolmer was a one-off, irreplaceable on the international scene: someone who took coaching to new heights; someone who made the game more interesting. But in the end it was about his love of the game and the enthusiasm he brought to it . As he said himself: “There are times when the players are going to find it tough; you’re the one who has to push them and you’re the one who’s got to first show the enthusiasm.”

As someone who has got into difficulties in pedalos in the past, my sympathies go out to Andrew Flintoff. At best they’re fiendishly designed contraptions, traps for the unwary at any hour, but particularly so at 4a.m. in the morning. I had a particularly painful experience in the harbour at Aiguablava a few years when I was jeered by rich Catalan families from the decks of their yachts. I just hope that Freddie’s experience was not of this magnitude.

It was quite something to watch the ruthlessly professional West Indies squeeze Pakistan out of the game at Sabina Park. Tight bowling, spattering the spot, nothing down the legside, and definitely no extras, as they were backed up some athletic fielding, culminating in Bravo’s astonishing left-handed catch off his own bowling to dismiss Gul.

The last sight of the West Indies was in their warm-up game against India when they were giving catching practice. And then there was Tony Cosier’s commentary: does anyone shout more loudly for their own team than Tony Cosier?

Today I shall be cheering on Scotland against the Aussies. Strange how these things work out. If this was a football match then I would be cheering on Australia rather than Scotland.

It takes some time to get used to the idea of winning a ODI series in Australia, but it’s generally a good feeling. Today in Sydney, it was the pleasure of watching Plunkett and Mahmood’s improvements as bowlers as the weather provided some seaming conditions. Suddenly, England has an attack with these two backed up by Flintoff, and with Panesar spinning and Dalrymple and Collingwood providing the pace off the ball stuff. The latter of course somehow managed to out-shine even his own recent efforts, top-scoring with 70, a couple of wickets, and somehow contriving to provide a clone of himself at backward point when Dalrymple took a stunning left-handed catch.

But of course the real pleasure of today has been gently pissing on the parade, and in particular on the script of the Commonwealth Bank series, designed to celebrate yet another Australian triumph. The king-size cheques and the trophy which resembles something used by an illegal car-clamper in Deptford, and Ponting promising to win it for the Commonwealth Bank next year, showed how a genuine contest like the Ashes doesn’t need hype like this.

Talking of hype the last thing England need at the moment is the English media talking up the team’s chances. It’s good to win against Australia three times on the trot but the team is some way from achieving the consistent levels of performance needed for success in the World Cup. For at start they need to do some work on the problem of run-outs.