Sport England v Pakistan: second Test
4 2GS Saturday August 15 2020 | the times
It was a beauteous Thursday evening
in Southampton, calm and free, even
for those who don’t know their
Wordsworth. The sky had thickened,
and there had been rain, so we were
not in Elysium. But Test Match
Special, for one blessed day, sounded
free of agitation. Could it be that
Michael Vaughan had been handed a
24-hour pass marked “off games”? It
could! Wahey, let’s have a midnight
feast!
There was less look-at-me japery (a
charge that, in fairness, cannot be laid
exclusively at Vaughan’s door). There
weren’t even many glottal stops,
though Isa Guha and Ebony
Rainford-Brent tried hard to fulfil the
quota. High marks, therefore, to
Jonathan Agnew and Simon Mann,
who told listeners what was going on,
and to Mark Ramprakash and Azhar
Mahmood, who interpreted the play
with a pleasingly light touch. It was
the TMS of memory, almost.
Yesterday, as Pakistan resumed
their innings, Vaughan was back from
his Irish golfing trip, sounding
subdued. “Ishy” made up for it. She is
so determined, ha ha, to tell us about
her life, hee hee, that the cricket
becomes incidental. The south pier at
Blackpool surely awaits.
Ramprakash is a real find. His
gentle manner can’t disguise a
searching mind. For all his gifts —
and my word, how gifted a batsman
he was — “Ramps” struggled to carry
his overwhelming talent into Test
cricket, and consequently he has an
understanding of human frailty that is
very appealing.
Cocking an ear to his considered
sentences, rather than the cask-
matured bluster of Geoffrey Boycott,
whose unbridled scorn had become a
freak show of “Elephant Man”
proportions, feels like bathing in cool
water after an afternoon of raging
heat. He listens to his colleagues,
avoids speaking in capital letters, and
is often amusing, though not in a way
designed to elicit admiration. Carry
on, Ramps!
Perhaps he could have a word with
his former Middlesex team-mate. PhilOafish TMS just not
as funny as it thinks
Tufnell took a decision many moons
ago to play the oaf, and has resisted
all requests to moderate the act, for
an act it is. Tufnell is not stupid. He’s
a sensitive chap whose mask has
worn so deeply into his face that he
now sounds like Old Man Steptoe
getting out of bed.
Vaughan’s performance is no act.
An exquisite batsman, and a fine
captain, he behaves like a bumptious
prefect. The manner is vulgar.
Common, even. When he goes on one
of those state-of-cricket riffs he
sounds like Bernard Manning
rewriting Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in
Ulysses: joeroot head wrong stubroad
goodpace topman bigrevs classact
realpumped I said yes...
Prefect Vaughan doubles up each
evening on BBC Two’s highlights
show, which, to put it charitably,
needs more work. TMS, we know,
carries a burden. Listeners lean in,
hoping to catch the cadences of the
great broadcasters who forged the
programme. John Arlott led the way,followed by Brian Johnston and
Christopher Martin-Jenkins: a
countryman, a jester, and a tolerant
schoolmaster. It’s hard to live up to
and, in any case, times change.
It’s Christopher they miss most, for
nobody could ever replace Arlott,
who was a man apart. CMJ brought
an even-handed judgment and, no
less important, a professional rigour
that is not always evident today. Why,
for example, is there so much
tittering, at times laugh-out-loud
guffawing, at the back of the box? Not
even Isa is that funny.
The cricket used to be sufficient.
Now TMS too often gives the
impression it is a form of light
entertainment. To restore order the
programme needs a different kind of
prefect, who will produce the show
rather than indulge the narcissism.Tufnell took a decision
many moons ago to
play the oaf, and will
not moderate the actMichael HendersonButtler, who
struggled in
the first Test,
put down
Rizwan on 14STU FORSTER/POOLAlthough it was frustrating that about
three hours of play was lost yesterday to
bad light — or, some may argue, to the
umpires’ interpretation of bad light —
without floodlights there would
possibly have been no play at all on this
second day of the Test.
A lot of Test cricket this summer has
been played under lights. The first two
days of the first Test of the West Indies
series at the Ageas Bowl were played
with floodlight assistance and on that
occasion it was England’s batsmen who
struggled to cope. Jason Holder swung
the ball handsomely to return figures of
six for 42 as England were dismissed for
204, a passage of play that ultimately
determined the match’s outcome.
In every Test since then at least two
days have been played under suffi-
ciently heavy skies that lights have been
needed. In addition, two full days of
play were washed out in Manchester,
meaning that more than half of the 21
days of play so far have been severely
affected by the weather.
Perhaps, rather than bemoaning how
much play has been lost, it would be
worth giving thanks for what play the
All hail attritional cricket
use of lights — introduced to Test crick-
et in the early 2000s — has allowed.
What the lights have done, though, is
permit cricket of a certain sort —
cricket overwhelmingly favourable to
the faster bowlers who seam and swing
the ball around, because by definition
the skies are overcast when the lights
are called upon, and these conditions
tend to suit ball movement. Indeed, the
first ball England had at their disposalswung throughout its entire 80 overs
and Pakistan have done well to keep
their innings going for 86 overs.
Bowlers such as Stuart Broad and
Chris Woakes have made hay. Broad’s
haul in four Tests this summer now
stands at 25 wickets at an average of
12.88 and includes seven straight hauls
of three or more. The only other En-gland fast bowler of the past 40 years to
do that is Darren Gough. Broad’s only
comparable haul at home is 33 wickets
at 22.30 in 2011. Broad said that he
thought the ball hooped around too
much yesterday. “It has done too much.
We’ve beaten the bat a lot more than
catch the edge.”
A measure of just how tough it has
been to bat is that the overall tempo of
scoring is — at 3.12 runs per over — the
lowest in any English season of Test
cricket since 2000. There have been
some eye-catching cameos with the bat
but these were the exceptions to the
rule.
The only three centuries were all
painstaking efforts — by Dom Sibley,
whose hundred was the third-slowest
for England in a home Test, Ben Stokes,
who scored the slowest of his ten Test
hundreds, and Shan Masood, who
spent eight hours over an innings of 156
in the first Pakistan Test.
Bowler-friendly conditions may be
the key factor but, whatever the reason,
there is nothing wrong with attritional
cricket. Many people may prefer the
sort of lower-scoring games we have
seen. The first four Tests all produced
positive results and this game may
maintain that sequence.Simon Wilde
Broad is the seventh English bowler
to take three wickets in seven
consecutive Test innings, according
to statistician Andy Zaltzman.
Graeme Swann in 2009 is the last7