ESPNcricinfo staff20-May-2016…and Bairstow was quickly into his stride, overtaking Hales in the first hour•Getty ImagesHales got to within 14 runs of a maiden Test hundred before losing patience and holing out off Rangana Herath•Getty ImagesDushmantha Chameera then picked up two wickets in an over, leaving England 233 for 8•Getty ImagesBairstow progressed to his second Test hundred, and first on home soil•AFPSteven Finn played a few shots as he and Bairstow added 56 for the ninth wicket•Getty ImagesBairstow took his score on to 140 as England made 298•Getty ImagesThey were quickly among the wickets as Sri Lanka started their reply, Stuart Broad making the breakthrough…•Getty Images…followed by James Anderson, who drew level with Kapil Dev on 434 Test wickets…•Getty Images…and Broad again, his second in three balls, to leave Sri Lanka 12 for 3•AFPBen Stokes had some pain in his knee but carried on bowling•Getty ImagesBairstow bagged five catches to follow his hundred•AFPBroad picked up two more as Sri Lanka crumbled•PA PhotosAnderson finished with his first five-wicket haul at Headingley and Alastair Cook enforced the follow-on•Getty Images

A costly missed stumping off a rampaging Andre Russell turned KL Rahul’s third consecutive half-century into a distant memory and hastened another defeat for Royal Challengers

Deivarayan Muthu in Bangalore02-May-2016KL Rahul was beaming after his third successive half-century lifted Royal Challengers Bangalore from their worst Powerplay score this season – 40 for 1 – to 185 for 7. About two hours later, he was disappointed as Royal Challengers lurched to their fifth defeat in seven matches, in part because of one big error Rahul made behind the stumps. The wicketkeeper-batsman’s night summed up the cruel nature of T20 cricket.Legspinner Yuzvendra Chahal had Andre Russell five feet down the pitch and beat him with lack of turn in the 14th over of the Kolkata Knight Riders chase. But Rahul was also beaten and the ball snuck away for four byes. He sank to his knees and put his hands on his head. Two balls later, Rahul failed to gather a flat fizzer down the leg side and the ball hurried away for five wides. Russell, whose reprieve came on 13, slapped 39 off 24 balls and went on to claim the Man-of-the-Match award in Knight Riders’ five-wicket victory.The win, which was achieved with five balls to spare, was later termed an “easy” one by Yusuf Pathan, who added 45 in a rapid 96-run partnership for the fifth wicket with Russell. Rahul’s lapses had decisively scuppered his team’s defence.”Nothing much to say,” Royal Challengers captain Virat Kohli said after the game. “I think we needed to take our chances. Getting to 100 for 4 and then getting it to go away. Couple of chances came our way and guys like Russell will make you pay.”The M Chinnaswamy Stadium surface had offered extra zip and bounce to the seamers. This meant that Rahul was tested with the keeping gloves as well. He leapt and collected bouncers from S Aravind and Varun Aaron before fumbling against the spinners.Rahul is only a part-time keeper. He has kept wicket in only 14 of 118 domestic games. Kedar Jadhav was Royal Challengers’ first-choice keeper at the start of the season but Rahul has been given the responsibility to improve the team’s balance. He is still finding his feet.Rahul, in fact, is still finding his footing as a batsman in T20s. Prior to this season, he had only 653 runs in 39 matches. He began IPL 2016 with slogs and ramps and was even hit on the helmet by Mitchell McClenaghan after losing his shape at the Wankhede. In his second match, against Rising Pune Supergiants, Rahul attempted a wild slog and skewed the ball to third man. He may appear flashy with his man bun, but his batting is geeky, and that is his strength.He relies on technique, balance, and timing. Chris Gayle, who returned to the Royal Challengers XI, was bounced out for 7 in the second over. Russell and Morne Morkel ran in hard and hit the deck harder. Even Kohli was pinned down. Rahul, who was promoted to the top following fifties against Gujarat Lions and Sunrisers Hyderabad, was under more pressure.He sussed out the spongy bounce provided by the pitch early and rose on top of it to blunt the fast bowlers. He then used the pace of Russell and Morkel, guiding the ball in the V behind the wicket. Having moved to 11 off 11 balls, Rahul attacked Sunil Narine. The offspinner had lost his bite, having reworked his action. Narine, with a more pronounced side-arm action, looped an overpitched ball outside off, and Rahul eased forward to cream a drive through the covers. The next ball was also too full and Rahul nailed a sweep through backward square leg.Rahul accelerated by hitting Narine for two more boundaries, in the 11th over, but holed out to sweeper cover in the next over, from Piyush Chawla. Unfortunately for him, he undid his sparkling knock by fluffing the stumping chance against Russell.Rahul is no stranger to bounce backs, though. He returned from a horror debut in the Boxing Day Test of 2014, in which he managed four runs. He dropped a sitter early in the next Test in Sydney, before scoring a resilient 110 in that match.How quickly Rahul rebounds from this latest setback could be crucial to Royal Challengers’ chances of reviving their campaign.

Early inroads, a dropped catch (or sometimes more than one) and then the opposition middle order leading a recovery. It’s a familiar script for Sri Lanka

Andrew Fidel Fernando at Lord's09-Jun-2016From a pitch expected to be lifeless, Sri Lanka’s working-class attack squeezed three first-session wickets out. On a first day some suspected might be fruitless, six batsmen were wangled back to the pavilion, and Sri Lanka were occasionally strutting about.But then, at some point in the day, their outlook changed. An easy catch was spilt. Chances were missed. Balls scooted into fielders’ hands, then accelerated out, as if having got a second wind. And an opposition batsman in the lower middle order made a smart hundred. He strung hefty partnerships together along the way.Hang on, hasn’t this happened already? Three weeks ago, Sri Lanka had had England 83 for 5 before the hosts surged to 298, Jonny Bairstow helping himself. Oh wait, but that was in a colder crosswind, and in front of a sparser crowd, at Headingley.Although, 12 days ago, didn’t Sri Lanka have their opposition five down again, before England eventually went on to more than double their score – a No. 7 romping to triple figures? Oh, but that was in the even colder crosswind, and in front of the even sparser crowd, at Chester-le-Street.In Bairstow’s 107 not out at Lord’s, the ghosts of many lower middle-order tormentors of Sri Lanka were invoked. When he cracked Nuwan Pradeep to the square-leg boundary in the 32nd over, he was Sarfraz Ahmed, who leapt around the crease to cut and pull, rescuing Pakistan from a big first-innings deficit and delivering them instead a lead, first at the SSC in 2014, then in Galle less than a year ago.When the catch off Bairstow dribbled onto the turf in the 36th over, he was Kane Williamson being shelled at fine leg in 2015, en route to a match-upending double ton. Or Moeen Ali being let off at gully at Chester-le-Street, en route to 155 not out. Or Bairstow being put down by the bowler at Headingley, on his way to 140.And when Moeen and Chris Woakes played good supporting hands, in partnerships worth 63 and 52 unbroken respectively, they were Zulfiqur Babar hitting a half-century from No. 10, or Morne Morkel scratching out an important partnership alongside JP Duminy.To say Sri Lanka have opponents by the shirt collar then let them go is, by now, an understatement. They’ve let go of the collar, apologetically smoothed out any crinkles they may have caused, then asked any more shirts that needed ironing. They’ve taken the foot off the pedal, sprinted out to the front of the slowing car, and then got themselves run over.At the end of the day, they sent the same player they had sat in front of the media inside the first two days of the first two Tests. He answered in the same old way, the same old tired questions the same old boring journalists asked of him.”We dropped crucial chances in Durham and here as well,” Rangana Herath said when asked about Sri Lanka’s difficulties with the lower middle order. “Throughout the series the catching has cost us big time. Catching is one discipline that we need to improve a lot. But then it’s part of the game. The important thing is tomorrow morning we need to come back and do well. The first hour tomorrow is going to be very crucial. We need to bowl them out as soon as possible.”In some ways, Sri Lanka are like the has-been band, still touring around the world, playing the same set-list. Only, they have been on the road so long, they’ve forgotten they have played this same concert at this venue before. In their most recent Lord’s Test in 2014, they had had England at 120 for 4 on the first day. England wound up eventually declaring on 575 for 9.The problems for this young team are many, but among the most familiar is this propensity to leak runs. Since the start of 2015, they have surrendered 30.12 runs to the last five partnerships in an opposition innings, on average. No team has been worse.A scoreline of 279 for 6 on an unhelpful surface, after losing the toss, represents good returns when taken in isolation. In the greater scheme, it is another revolution on a merry-go-round of middling days that could have been outstanding ones.

Confronted by problems no amount of money seems to be able to solve, Australia’s cricketers have no alternative but to hold their nerve after defeat at Pallekele

Daniel Brettig31-Jul-20165:52

Chappell: Australia must learn to play spin when young

“Perhaps this is the most scary part: that you can assemble all the best people in one place, give everybody all the resources they need, and yet whatever you do will still always be a leap in the dark. Nobody can truly be sure of anything.”Jonathan Liew used these words in The Telegraph this week to describe the sense of uncertainty around English football’s huge, and hugely resourced, development hub St George’s Park. The FA could not have thrown any more money at the facility and its staff, yet it is now 50 years since the country’s last major tournament victory.Australian cricket has it own performance and development greenhouse, the National Cricket Centre in Brisbane. It also has a similarly limitless amount of funds to throw around, bolstered by multi-million dollar television deals and strong participation numbers among juniors that make it Australia’s favourite sport.But the certainty thought to be provided by this infrastructure lasts only as long as Australia’s cricketers play at home. Their record of success in Asia is about as good as England’s in World Cups, and this week’s defeat to a transitional Sri Lanka in Pallekele felt something like the Three Lions’ demise at the hands of Iceland – if Sri Lanka were that organised.Certainly there was an air of bewilderment about the selection chairman Rod Marsh as he tried to make sense of the result, which puts Australia’s No. 1 ranking at considerable risk. Ostensibly speaking about the ODI team to play after the Tests, his mind remained fixed on what he’d just witnessed over the previous five days. In response to a query about the full limited-overs squad being used, Marsh replied: “It depends how we’re going. If we play like we played in this Test match there’ll be a heck of a lot of players playing.”I don’t think we can pick a better team. We’ve got all the people who deserve to be here on numbers. People talk about the way we play spin bowling, well there’s no doubt about the fact we don’t play it as well as the way we play pace bowling in Australia. But that’s something that’s a work in progress. Everyone’s had the preparation for this tour, we couldn’t have done anymore, and we had an opportunity after bowling them out for 117, we only make 200 – unbelievable.”To some degree, Australia were beaten in Pallekele by a combination of circumstances and surprises. Steve O’Keefe was injured at an awkward moment; David Warner was short of match practice after a broken finger; the skills of Kusal Mendis and Lakshan Sandakan were not widely known to the tourists before their arrival, and in the case of the latter footage was scarce. But they were also undone by problems glimpsed often before: porous techniques allowing too many balls to hit pads or stumps; mental errors with the bat that would not take place in Australia; indifferent bowling to the tail. Marsh cannot see how any of this related to preparation or resources.”What else can we do really?” he said. “We send them off to India, we send them to other parts of the world where the ball turns, we played Australia A series in India last year and they batted well against good spin bowling. But it gets to a Test match and whether it’s the extra pressure of it being a Test match, whether it’s the fact that we historically haven’t done well on turning pitches on the subcontinent. Whether that plays on their minds I’m not sure. But it’s a work in progress.A glimpse of better things for Australia came from Mitchell Marsh, who got starts in both innings before small errors led to his dismissal•AFP”There were some positive signs as well. I thought Joe Burns played really well in that second innings after perhaps not looking too sound in the first innings. He went to plan B and he looked really good until he didn’t hit one…”Another glimpse of better things was offered by Mitchell Marsh who got into both of his innings nicely before small errors led to his dismissal. Marsh has been the subject of much scrutiny over his place, as a project player not yet pulling his weight as a batsman in particular. But the selectors are determined to persevere with him for reasons of balance, and talent. They hope the investment leads to greater returns in Galle.”To look at the way he batted in this game, in the context of the game where, apart from a bloke who got 176, he was one of the best batsmen in the game,” Rod Marsh said. “But he got 31 and 25 and that’s the sad part. He started beautifully on both occasions, but that can happen on pitches like this, you get on with your name on it.”He missed one in the first innings, which he wouldn’t like, at least he’s got his pad in front of this one, but he is in good nick. His bowling’s probably kept him in the side to a degree, but his bowling’s going to be less important here than his batting. He’s got a big reach as well, and I think that helps often on turning pitches.”Pallekele and Galle are about as far from the manufactured spin wickets of the NCC as it is possible to get. The certainties of Australia fade away, replaced by Asian mystery and surprise. In a situation where Australia are 1-0 down to a team they should be beating, the visitors must try to hold their nerve and believe they have done the work to be successful. In the middle of a series there is really no alternative.”It’s about each individual having a game plan that can work,” the captain Steven Smith said. “For some it might be being a little bit more aggressive. For others it might be sitting on the crease and using their bat out in front. We just have to find a way.”

Suddenly Yorkshire are confident in white-ball cricket but it was not always that way. The change over the past few weeks has been dramatic

Paul Edwards19-Aug-2016Suddenly Yorkshire are the masters of white-ball cricket. Alex Lees and his players will arrive at Edgbaston for Finals Day in the NatWest Blast expecting to do well and, to add to their pleasure, there is also a 50-over semi-final against Surrey in prospect.But it was not always this way. Just two months ago Yorkshire’s best chance of getting points in the NatWest T20 Blast seemed to be an abandonment. So how has the team that was regularly beaten turned into the team to beat? What has changed?Having won five of 14 games and finished next to bottom of the North Group in 2015, Yorkshire had won none of their first five matches this year (although two were abandoned) and seemed to have little chance of qualifying for the quarter-finals.Then they played Derbyshire at Headingley on June 19 and, when rain swept across the ground, their nine-over score gave them a grimy one-run Duckworth-Lewis victory. That was the first of seven wins Yorkshire were to record in this year’s Blast and, following last Thursday’s demolition of Glamorgan at Cardiff, they will arriving at Edgbaston on Saturday in confident mood.”I think most people were writing us off but we had that self-belief that if we got one win, we would get on a roll and do well,” said the T20 skipper, Lees. “As a team we’ve bought into the ideology of backing yourself and backing your team-mate. The key is to do the same thing when things are not going so well.”We sat down and had a couple of chats and said that we knew we were better than the way we had performed. We’ve been poor since 2012. We’ve done it as a team, as a collective, and that’s our blue print.”All of which is fine, of course, but rather similar things might have been said by any skipper whose county was playing pretty dismal short-form cricket. And yes, T20 is a game of frustratingly daft narrow margins. The key is to ensure that, far more often than not, you end up on the right side of them. The reasons go deeper than that.Let’s go back to that game against Derbyshire because it was important for more than just the result. The game saw the return to Yorkshire’s T20 team of Adam Lyth, whose confidence had received a fillip when he had hit successive 50-over hundreds against Northamptonshire and Lancashire a few days previously. Lyth blasted 30 off 16 balls, hitting three fours and a couple of sixes. Muck or nettles, he has carried on blasting ever since.But the match against Derbyshire also saw the return to Yorkshire’s T20 side of Azeem Rafiq, who had been released a couple of years earlier, yet whose form has been such since his re-engagement that he has been awarded his first-team cap. Rafiq is currently bowling his short-form overs at 6.9 runs apiece and he has taken 13 wickets, making him second only to Adil Rashid and Tim Bresnan in Yorkshire’s list of successful T20 bowlers this season.

“There’s never just one voice in our dressing room. There are 11 players who voice their opinion and that’s the Yorkshire way”Yorkshire’s T20 captain, Alex Lees

“Azeem was a revelation for us, particularly in those middle overs with Adil,” Lees said. “He gives you consistency. His bowling has made my job a lot easier. I was assured he’d be back at some point in the next few years but I didn’t know in what capacity and now he’s been rewarded with his first-team cap.”And the biggest thing for Adam is that he’s been backed. There is a carefree attitude that we’re going to go out and have a good time. The same thing can be said of David Willey, who didn’t get the runs he would have liked early in the season.”There is a sense in all this that Yorkshire’s cricketers have taken the brakes off in T20 cricket. Those brakes may not have been applied at all times in all games but they do not need to be. You only need to have four bad overs in the short-form stuff and it’s Goodnight, Vienna.Perhaps something of this approach was communicated to Lyth and his players by Kane Williamson, the New Zealand leader to whose team talks Rafiq has paid particular tribute.”There’s never just one voice in our dressing room,” said Lees. “There are 11 players who voice their opinion and that’s the Yorkshire way in all our cricket. Kane came in at the right time, he was a great character to have around the dressing room and he gave us a bit of direction as to the way we should go, particularly when we were unsure.”Kane give us that calmness as well as his own view. We got on a roll when no one believed we should be at a Finals Day and here we are.”The results of any change of attitude have been different with each player but they have been particularly evident with two cricketers at very different stages of their career. Jack Leaning has found that hitting sixes is something he can do on a regular basis while Bresnan is suddenly mixing up his deliveries like a drunken postman.”Jack’s gone from nudging and nurdling it around to whacking it out of the park,” said Lees. “He’s found his method in white-ball cricket and that can only come from confidence and he’s now very confident in that format.”Tim is experienced and he probably looked at how he went last year and just adapted things a little bit. May be he has mixed it up a little bit. This year it seems he’s bowling tight and he was exceptional in the game at Cardiff but in his own words his first ball was ‘a pie’ and he got a wicket with it. Last year, it would have gone out of the ground.”Liam Plunkett has been some rapid spells, proof that simple, searing pace has a home in Twenty20 and Lees himself, in his first season as a youthful captain, has worked on his own game well enough to enter Finals Day as Yorkshire’s leading run-scorer.Some would argue that Yorkshire are the form horses at this year’s Finals Day and they will be boosted by the availability of Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow et al. Whatever else, they will play without fear and with a brio that was absent in the grim days of May and early June. It has been some transformation but at Edgbaston it will receive its most searching test.

A teenager bats against county and Test pros and lives to tell the tale

Luke Alfred02-Oct-2016In my final year at school I was chosen to open the batting for the Transvaal Under-19 side with a big-hearted kid called Craig Norris from a neighbouring school. We had one mid-week warm-up game against a Transvaal Invitation XI at Morningside before flying down to Stellenbosch for the 1982 Nuffield Week, a tournament for South African high schools.I can’t remember exactly what we thought but I’m sure we assumed that the Invitation XI would be made up of ringers and sundry club unemployables of good standard. We’d negotiate past the fixture with the minimum of fuss and be on that plane down to the Cape in a jiffy.In those days, club cricket in Johannesburg was properly competitive. Several Premier League clubs employed English professionals like Richard Lumb or Ashley Harvey-Walker, sometimes called Ashley Harvey-Wallbanger by the wits of the local scene. Every so often you would encounter a Transvaal player on a soft club weekend, or a Transvaal B player trying to play their way back into form or fitness.Schoolboy cricket was hard-fought but genteel. You played on good wickets in front of gently appreciative fathers and mothers sitting in deck chairs; you wore your blazer to tea, didn’t argue with the umpire, and didn’t appeal unless you had a good chance of getting it right. Mostly they were heavenly days.

When Dilley and Radford came off, Page replaced them. He was slippery, darting it off the seam, thudding a couple into Craig’s midriff and hurting him on the juicy inner part of the thigh. Alvin Kallicharran watched it good-naturedly from the slips

As a younger boy, clutching my precious 12th-birthday bat and standing timidly knock-kneed in my recently scrubbed , I remember listening to Lumb and Harvey-Walker in a daze of wonder. If you were lucky enough, your headmaster might select you to attend one of their precious net sessions on Friday afternoons at Balfour Park. I didn’t learn many cricket lessons at these sessions, spending the afternoons in a funk of thwarted desire. Lumb, I noticed, was kitted out with St Peter equipment, down to batting mitts that shaped over his hands like boxing gloves. Only boys with rich parents could afford St Peter gear. The rest of us had to be content with sanding the edges out of our Gray-Nicolls bat (“sand the grain,” urged my dad), lovingly applying linseed oil in the long months before summer with a (rag) from the kitchen.Sometimes Lumb spoke about Geoff Boycott – or “Geoffrey” – his Yorkshire opening partner. It was usually in tones of mild derision, but he always managed to find space in his tales for a sort of reluctant admiration. Then he laughed and shook his big head of hair and went back to the far less perplexing business of leading the fielding drills.Harvey-Walker was a different proposition. He was clipped, speaking in a language I identified as English but only partially understood. We must have seemed retarded because we never quite understood what he was saying but didn’t have the courage to ask him to repeat himself. Sessions were conducted in a busy miasma of mutual incomprehension as he clucked at us in his Derbyshire accent, and we did the best we could to act on what we thought he’d said. Net sessions didn’t run particularly smoothly.It was only when Hugh Page came into the schoolboys’ dressing room as Craig and I were padding up after we “lost” the toss against the Invitation XI that we began to realise what we were in for. “You might want to wear this,” Page said to me kindly as he passed me his helmet, an outsized maroon number with a protruding visor that stretched all the way to the Zimbabwe border. I had never worn a helmet before. Mostly we just wore our caps. If you came upon anyone really quick in schoolboy cricket, you reeled in your shot-making and waited for him to blow himself out. This helmet was large and ungainly, with fiddly straps. It was like batting inside a hollowed-out watermelon.Richard Lumb bats against Essex at Lord’s, 1980•PA PhotosCraig, who was better than me and had played more regularly at a higher level – he was playing in the Transvaal “Mean Machine” side a year or two later – probably took first ball, but before long I was facing Graham Dilley, then opening the bowling for England.Dilley hammered his front foot down like some storybook Gulliver but also had a back-foot drag, so the two sounds arrived fractionally before his deliveries cannoned into the splice of my much-used old County bat. I hopped about the crease like a scalded rabbit, and didn’t score anything in front of square for the first hour as I flicked and glided and nudged.Neal Radford opened the bowling with Dilley, and when he realised he couldn’t get me to nick off, proceeded to cheerfully bounce me. The forward short leg probably got in on the action but I was too busy trying to survive to listen very carefully. When Dilley and Radford came off, Page replaced them. He was slippery, darting it off the seam, thudding a couple into Craig’s midriff and hurting him on the juicy inner part of the thigh. Alvin Kallicharran watched it good-naturedly from the slips. The wickets would come, his indulgent smile seemed to be saying, it was just a matter of time.After a while their pity hardened. Radford bounced us some more. A Warwickshire professional whose name I’ve forgotten started to get lippy. We couldn’t have been far from a hundred partnership – Alfred 40-odd – when I spooned an inelegant mistimed drive to mid-off. The Warwickshire pro went off, swearing like a sewer.As I walked back to the pavilion, struggling with my helmet, our coach caught my eye. “That wasn’t so bad,” he said breezily, and I could see the relief in his eyes.

A decade and a half ago, the country embarked on steps to increase the representation of black players in cricket – raising questions of the sort that South Africa are struggling with now

Tristan Holme12-Sep-2016Zimbabweans waking up on a crisp Monday in July 2001, the day after Hamilton Masakadza had become the first black batsman to score a hundred for the country, might have expected their joy to be reflected in the morning’s papers. Instead they were affronted by a headline that bristled with pent-up anger: “Masakadza proves racists wrong”.The headline was a precursor of things to come in Zimbabwe cricket. But it also represented an outpouring of frustration from a segment of the black community who felt that, for all of Zimbabwe Cricket Union’s efforts to transform from its white base to a majority sport, players of colour were still being kept at arm’s length.Fifteen years on, this feeling has been rising on the other side of the Limpopo River, in South Africa. Last November, a group of black cricketers sent a letter to Cricket South Africa (CSA) saying that they were “sick and tired” of being included in national squads without being picked to play. Their frustrations have been echoed by Zimbabwe’s interim coach Makhaya Ntini – who claims he was shut out of the coaching realm in South Africa because of race – and in newspaper columns that have questioned the appointment of Mark Boucher as Titans coach despite his absence of coaching experience.For all of these issues, there are counterclaims. Those in favour of picking sides purely on merit might suggest that black players have not been quite good enough, even if they deserved their place in squads. Others might point to Ntini’s lack of coaching qualifications, or the fact that he only expressed an interest in coaching in the Eastern Cape, a largely dysfunctional province. Some might say that personality is important – not every former international cricketer will make a good coach – and that this is the difference between Boucher walking into a franchise appointment ahead of Ntini or any of the other coaches in the domestic system.

“You’ve got to actually tell people if there’s a quota system in place. Because the young white guys are going to worry about whether they’re doing the right thing by staying”Heath Streak

But what is clear is a growing divide, an increasing polarisation in views where both sides only become more entrenched in their position with each passing incident. It is surely no coincidence that South Africa are experiencing this at a very similar time in their history to Zimbabwe – 20 years after attaining black majority rule. It would appear that this is the point where patience begins to run out, and where promises start to ring hollow.The administration in Zimbabwe at least had better excuses to fall back on. The country spent its first decade building the game up on a completely amateur base and only became a Test nation in 1992. Thereafter there were visible attempts to spread the game, with the ZCU spending its own limited resources to install facilities in lower income black schools.By contrast, South Africa has had the benefit of two decades of ICC Full Membership and far greater financial resources. Admittedly, CSA is operating in a much larger country, making it more reliant on the government to do the groundwork, but concerted and sustained attempts at establishing cricket in the townships or in black rural areas have largely been lacking. Even when private entities have got the ball rolling, they have received scant support from the federations. Now, with too few black cricketers developing into top-level players and time running out, CSA has been compelled to implement a “top-down” approach and install “targets” at national level.While any racial selection policy is inherently unfair and regrettable, at least South Africa’s players now have clarity. The absence of such a policy in Zimbabwe created even greater distrust among the white players, and ultimately led to the rebel walkout in 2004. “I said that you’ve got to actually tell people if there’s a quota system in place,” Heath Streak, who led the walkout, has said. “Because the young white guys are going to worry about whether they’re doing the right thing by staying. At least if you do have a quota system and you say that we have to have three or four players of colour, then they know that they’re fighting for seven positions or whatever it is.”On the face of it, the ZCU had done many things right in its bid to avert a full-blown crisis. In March 2001 they set up the Integration Task Force as part of “an aggressive campaign to eliminate racial discrimination within cricket at all levels”. This was a response to several incidents, two of which affected Trevor Madondo, who had preceded Masakadza as Zimbabwe’s first black specialist batsman.Makhaya Ntini, now Zimbabwe’s interim coach, claims he was denied coaching opportunities in South Africa because of race•International Cricket CouncilIn December 1999, during a one-day series against Sri Lanka, Madondo had arrived half- an-hour late for practice. His punishment was to be omitted from the squad for the remaining three matches, a hefty sanction that drew accusations of racism. The two judges tasked by the ZCU with investigating the matter ruled that “on the evidence … heard it is not possible to conclude with conviction that Trevor Madondo was treated as he was, because of his race”. Yet they had a word of caution, advising that “in the multiracial and multicultural diverse society that we live in, there is need for sensitivity in one’s approach when dealing with issues which cross the cultural or racial divide”. In short, they did not feel that Madondo benefited from an “even-handed approach”.A year later, in a rain-hit Test match in Wellington, Streak declared Zimbabwe’s first innings with Madondo unbeaten on 74 – his highest Test score. The game was going nowhere – Zimbabwe declared on the final morning, still 147 runs in arrears. The decision not to give Madondo a crack at a hundred is still spoken of in some quarters as a slight on black cricket.There were other signs of trouble. In a Test in Bulawayo a few months earlier, Guy Whittall withdrew from the side in protest after David Mutendera, a young fast bowler, became a late replacement for Craig Wishart, a batsman, due to perceived political interference. And in 2001, after a white batsman had made a century, Streak walked around a corner in the dressing room to find one of the selectors on the phone, lamenting the fact that they would now have to keep picking the white centurion.The Task Force charged with addressing the growing divide had a wide range of cricket people from across the racial spectrum, and was facilitated by Dr Zackrison, an American consultant. The presence of an outsider with no prior knowledge of the situation or even the game of cricket raised the ire of the experienced white players, who also had little time for the process as a whole. One player refused to fill in a survey on racial attitudes in the game, but claims to have been lambasted for his opinions nonetheless when the community met to discuss the Task Force’s findings. These included aggressive targets for everything from the number of black players in the national team to the racial make-up of the crowd, although they were genuinely targets whereas CSA’s recommendations are quotas under another name.

How do you promote one community without completely alienating another? If the South Africans are to maintain their competitive edge then they must retain enough white players, coaches and administrators with talent and experience

Alistair Campbell, who believes the hard work done in the 1990s was about to bear fruit without political interference, says he walked out along with several other senior white players when the findings were presented. “More blacks need to play the game with the least possible reduction in personal and team performance,” was the statement he remembers. “We sort of questioned that,” he says. “You’re saying that by bringing people into an organisation you’re going downhill, but you just want damage limitation. That’s what that statement says. I’ve had this out with some people, and said, ‘Guys, I think you were advised poorly.'”Because of the historic imbalance, there were barely any senior black players to present their side of the argument and the emerging generation was still too young to deal with such complex issues. Tatenda Taibu, who had become part of the Zimbabwe squad when still a teenager, barely recalls anything about the Task Force process. But he does remember a club match in Harare where an on-field racial slur by one of his team-mates led to an off-field “brawl” in the changing rooms after the game. He says he just walked out, along with his good friend and team-mate Stuart Matsikenyeri. “We had decided we weren’t going to be distracted by things that wouldn’t allow us to achieve what we wanted to achieve,” he says. “Hamilton [Masakadza] saw that and started to do the same. So it was not something we put any mind to.”Unfortunately, their silence left the door open for others to speak for them. These were chaotic times in Zimbabwe as it spiralled into political and economic meltdown, and the racial tension in cricket allowed people with political connections and questionable intentions to infiltrate themselves into the game.The Task Force’s biggest challenge was coming up with a process and a pathway that all of these disparate parties could buy into. “My view on it is that it was necessary, that it should have happened earlier – not in a political sense but to try and change with the times and to embrace where the country was going,” says Andy Pycroft, who spent many hours working on the Task Force. “But there was a certain element in the white community that didn’t want it to happen, and there was a certain element in the black community that was prepared to ride over everything regardless, a sort of ‘we don’t care’ attitude. And it was trying to marry the two and seek a common middle ground. It was very difficult.”This is the challenge facing South African cricket over the coming years. How do you promote one community without completely alienating another? If the South Africans are to maintain their competitive edge then they must retain enough white players, coaches and administrators with talent and experience that the game’s value will not be eroded overnight. A glance across the border does not offer a blueprint on how this can be done, but there are some lessons that can be heeded. Above all, it is a reminder of the cost of failing to attain even a tenuous unity in such a delicate process.

ESPNcricinfo staff24-Oct-2016Asad Shafiq and Younis Khan got together for an unbeaten third-wicket stand of 63•AFPShafiq, who had resumed on 5, compiled an unbeaten 58, before Pakistan declared on 227 for 2 at the stroke of lunch•AFPSet a target of 456, West Indies lost Leon Johnson in the eighth over, when he gloved an attempted sweep off Yasir Shah onto his stumps•AFPRahat Ali was gifted a wicket when Darren Bravo chased a wide delivery and slashed it straight to backward point•Getty ImagesYasir sent back Marlon Samuels for 23 after accepting a simple return catch•AFPKraigg Brathwaite struck his first half-century in the fourth innings of a Test, before falling lbw to Mohammad Nawaz•Getty ImagesJermaine Blackwood moved on to a brisk, unbeaten 41 to take West Indies to 171 for 4 at stumps – still 285 away from a win•AFP

A move from the ‘spin to win’ approach to empowering their young fast bowlers, under the mentorship of former captain and veteran L Balaji, has added a new dimension to Tamil Nadu’s bowling attack this season

Deivarayan Muthu in Visakhapatnam22-Dec-2016When Tamil Nadu made the Ranji Trophy final in 2011-12, T Natarajan was a tennis ball star for his local team in Chinnappampatti, a hamlet near Salem. It was a team led by his neighbour. Amidst a battery of right-arm bowlers, a left-arm action seemed odd, perhaps why he stood out despite not having even a remote idea about bowling with a leather ball.It’s from this hamlet that Natarajan came through the ranks to eventually move to Chennai and play for Vijay CC and Jolly Rovers, two of the more prominent clubs in Tamil Nadu Cricket Association’s robust first-division league. Two years in league cricket was enough for the state selectors to thrust him into the first-class structure. He made his debut against Bengal in the 2015-16 Ranji Trophy. But even before he could let the dream sink in, he was crushed.Natarajan was reported for a suspect action, leaving him with the unenviable task of remodeling it, undergoing tests and trying to find his way back. It was a long haul, or so one thought. But here he is, fit and firing, much more confident in his abilities after modifying his action under the guidance of former Tamil Nadu left-arm spinner Sunil Subramaniam.An impressive stint for Dindigul Dragons in the Tamil Nadu Premier League and trials with Mumbai Indians later, he is at the forefront of the side’s bowling resurgence this season, one that has been brought about because of a conscious decision to move from the ‘spin to win’ approach to empowering their young fast bowlers, under the mentorship of former captain and veteran L Balaji.To say Tamil Nadu’s bowling has been a one-man army won’t do justice to the other two pacers K Vignesh and Aswin Crist. Like Natarajan, Vignesh too is a rookie, but has quickly worked his way up to be a certainty in the starting XI. The bowling revival is all the more heartening because the trio had a combined experience of 14 first-class games between them prior to the season.”Bowling with a cricket ball initially was a new thing. I did not know anything about gripping the cricket ball and struggled for control initially, but later got used to it,” Natarajan, who has 17 wickets in six games, tells ESPNcricinfo. “The TNPL was the big break. After getting my action right, I made sure not to keep the previous action in mind; that confidence was important. The TNPL also gave me a name and now I have trialled with Mumbai Indians.”Mumbai Indians picked T Natarajan for trials after he impressed in the inaugural season of the TNPL•TNPLThe newly-launched T20 league has also helped give Vignesh’s career a push. The swing bowler has 32 wickets in seven matches so far, including two five-wicket hauls at 20.28. One List-A game in 2014 later, he was in the wilderness for two years before returning. His long spells in the humidity of Chennai and training at the MRF Pace Foundation set him back on track.”In 2014 when Vignesh made his List-A debut he used to often drop the ball short and did not have control like what he has now,” R Prasanna, the former Tamil Nadu captain who coached him at Kovai Kings, recollects. “He’s learnt to handle pressure. Now there is a belief that whenever Vignesh has the ball, he will get wickets.”Vignesh made his debut against Mumbai in Lahli and claimed match haul of nine-wickets to become the first TN bowler to grab a five-for on debut in the last decade. His state bowling coach L Balaji, who had narrowly missed a five-for on his first-class debut, against Colombo District Cricket Association in 2001-02, couldn’t be happier.”You can’t get many wickets by pushing the batsman back on Indian tracks. There is not much carry and bounce from Indian pitches. It is about beating the batsman on the front foot in the air or off the wicket or with speed in four-day cricket, and opening up three dismissals – bowled, caught behind, and lbw,” Balaji explains. “Vignesh especially has been doing that [bowling full] game after game. His strike rate [45.9] is really good.”Vignesh acknowledges Balaji’s contribution in building the attack and emphasises the seamers now have the confidence to pick 20 wickets. “Bala has been a great influence, and he gives examples of how he bowled on various wicket,” he says. “We now know we can pick 20 wickets and set the game up. Sometimes, the wickets don’t come your way. During those times we are prepared to be patient and look to build pressure.” Crist, the pace spearhead who has 27 wickets in eight matches at 29.33 adds: “It is about working together. Sometimes I pick wickets, KV and Natarajan contain. Sometimes it is the other way around. When the young bowlers lose their way, I know I am the experienced bowler and I say ‘ read the situation and bowl accordingly.’ I will ask them to be clear about their fields and will communicate with the captain.”The result of this partnership has been astounding. This season, the fast bowlers have picked up a total of 83 wickets as opposed to 35 last season, one were the side sometimes featured four left-arm spinners on tailor-made tracks at home. There was a need to switch from their template and reinvigorate their pace stocks on the face of BCCI’s neutral venues ruling, which they’ve managed to so far.The trio is confident of repeating their magic against Karnataka. What better way there is than to make a name for yourself by performing against a quality side having in their ranks the likes of KL Rahul, Karun Nair and Manish Pandey. The stakes are high. It’s a storied rivalry, and three young men, who have had different paths to the state team, look every bit a part.

Poor shots, hilarious run-outs, making decent bowling look terrifying, and losing all ten for less than hundred: a look at the team’s meltdowns this year

Ahmer Naqvi03-Dec-2016Visit a Pakistani’s home and he will offer you tea; give a Pakistani a melody and she will make a beautiful song out of it; ask some Pakistanis to bat and they’ll eventually collapse.The collapse is the great tragicomedy of cricket, and in recent years has become quite a recurring event, even for once-mighty sides. But like Michael Jackson with pop, Pakistan have the ability to transcend the collapse beyond its genre, producing works that are instantly unique and yet timeless.The simplified narrative about Misbah-ul-Haq’s team and the discipline it espouses leads one to believe that this side is immune to collapses, but that is not at all the case. Each year of Misbah’s six as leader has seen some ridiculous implosions, though what distinguishes his side is their ability to fight back afterwards. However, even for this Pakistan team, which held the No. 1 position in Tests for a while, 2016 has been a remarkable year for collapses.At least part of the problem resides in the origin story of #TeamMisbah. In its first couple of years, the team distinguished themselves by their grit, holding their own in tough rearguard situations.Defeat in Galle in 2014, courtesy another collapse, suggested that the once-successful strategy of batting slowly to take time out of the game was becoming a problem. The following year, Pakistan embarked on a golden run in which they batted heavily and more quickly on their way to a number of wins.The early years of Misbah-ul-Haq’s captaincy were defined by a more defensive approach to batting•AFPBy 2016, the change was quite apparent. Of the four wins this year, only in the second innings at Lord’s did Pakistan score below 3.18 runs per over. In the five losses, they didn’t cross 3.31 per over; in six of those innings in matches lost, they scored under three an over. In Christchurch, Hamilton, Sharjah, Edgbaston and Old Trafford, these efforts came in the midst of stunning collapses.The only exception was Dubai, where Pakistan collapsed while scoring faster than they have in any innings this year. But what Dubai had in common with the collapses in Christchurch and Sharjah, in particular, was a peculiarly Pakistani tradition – the abject surrender to an otherwise limited bowler. The successes of Devendra Bishoo, Jason Holder and Colin de Grandhomme were not surprising, given that over the years, Pakistani batsmen have made heroes out of the likes of Murphy Su’a, Paul Harris, Imran Tahir, Marcus North, Nick Cook and Neil Mallender among others.The collapses of 2016 also show some more general trends that are not specific to Pakistan per se. For example, the team repeatedly displayed the modern trait of largely batting in one gear in Test cricket. Unlike most teams, though, Pakistan’s preferred gear is neutral. In Hamilton and Dubai, they struggled to impose themselves when the situation demanded it and collapsed when aggression was required. More worryingly, at Edgbaston and in Sharjah, Pakistan struggled in closing out the game – a skill that used to be this team’s forte.Like in every collapse, there were many poor shots in Pakistan’s various failures, but once again it was a case of almost always only poor shots, with few good deliveries to be seen. Forty-five wickets fell in the six collapses discussed below, and even applying the most lax of standards, at least 35 fell to totally avoidable and largely brainless shots.Sarfraz Ahmed edges one to second slip, Edgbaston•Getty ImagesEdgbaston, 8 for 72
The key to any good collapse is panic, and there can be no panic greater than knowing you are about to lose a match in which you held a 100-run lead. On this site, Jarrod Kimber described the collapse as “going the full Hafeez”. The hapless opener had indeed got out to (yet another) loose shot, but he wasn’t part of the eventual collapse. Pakistan stabilised before throwing it all away. Both Misbah and Younis Khan fell to good balls on the fifth stump that drew a shot, and Yasir Shah received a very good lifter. The other seven batsmen fell to more ordinary deliveries, almost always playing shots they didn’t need to.Younis Khan gives a leg-side catch to Jonny Bairstow, Old Trafford•Getty ImagesOld Trafford, 5 for 33
This collapse en route to a crushing defeat wasn’t quite as wondrous as the others, but did include a charmingly Pakistani brain fade. Seeking to bat out the day in reply to a mammoth first-innings total by England, both Azhar Ali and Younis fell to needless shots. At this point Pakistan decided to send easily the worst batsman of their fragile tail as nightwatchman. Rahat Ali was soon bounced out, and the next morning Shan Masood offered a simple catch to slip. Asad Shafiq then rounded off the slide by playing a truly terrible drive straight to backward point.Mohammad Amir is bowled by a big Devendra Bishoo legbreak, Dubai•AFPDubai, 8 for 46
This innings unfolded a bit like a shy adult being asked to mind a bratty child. It appears to be a simple task and yet the adult finds himself unable to deal with the brat kicking his shins and calling him names. Pakistan were extremely uncomfortable walking out to score quickly in a match they had dominated until then. Bishoo played the role of the impish prodigy, taking a remarkable eight wickets. No Pakistan batsman was a victim of a good ball: they slogged, dragged on and played against the turn to almost throw away the match.Azhar Ali helps Devendra Bishoo improve his bowling figures with a simple catch to first slip, Sharjah•Getty ImagesSharjah, 4 for 11
The annals of cricket history are filled with the romantic exploits of Caribbean fast bowlers bouncing out terrified batsmen, but none of them can quite compare to Holder’s heist in Sharjah. Bowling a little quicker than gentle, he managed to bounce out Pakistan’s top order, who used leaden feet and wild swishes to help him to his career-best first-class figures (5 for 30). The tail put up more of a fight, but it was undone by a truly marvellous run-out. Mohammad Amir had spent several minutes admiring a shot he thought was going to be a six, and had started to walk towards the non-striker, Wahab Riaz, when he suddenly realised that the ball was live and was being thrown back in. He ran back without his bat in a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to make his ground.Younis Khan gloves a short ball from Neil Wagner to the keeper in the second innings, Christchurch•Getty ImagesChristchurch, 10 for 102
Most teams would struggle if sent in to bat on a rain-affected pitch greener than jade. Pakistan’s situation was made worse by the fact that their tour games had been washed out, leaving this their first bat of the trip. But like Radiohead after , Pakistani batsmen were unwilling to do what was expected of them. After seeing off the dangerous opening pair of Tim Southee and Trent Boult, they proceeded to collapse to the dibbly-dobbly charms of de Grandhomme, who went on to set a record for the best figures by a New Zealand bowler on debut. Almost none of his deliveries were truly lethal. Sticking to a fourth-to-fifth-stump line, he picked up Babar Azam, Younis and Shafiq thanks to some terrible shots.The police line-up: Pakistan’s players ponder defeat in Hamilton•Getty ImagesHamilton, 10 for 99
The final release in an awe-inspiring collection, Hamilton was the Ozymandias moment of Pakistani collapses – “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” How many sides can imagine batting out two whole sessions in serenity before losing nine wickets in the last session of the match? As always, Pakistan took it a step further by making this the third time in their history that they lost ten wickets for less than 100 runs after putting together a century-plus opening stand. Indeed, such opening stands seem to be the kiss of death for Pakistan, who were once 101 for 0 before losing all ten wickets to Anil Kumble. The shot selection in Hamilton was ludicrous as only Amir and Wahab fell to decent deliveries. More than the context, it was the concept itself that merited admiration here. Any magician knows that every great trick requires a great distraction, and by batting out 59.5 overs for no wicket, Pakistan unveiled their most magical collapse of the year.