Cricket

Telegraph : Sport

Revived England shut out by B & B

By Paul Hayward
(Filed: 27/09/2004)

The heavy percussion of balls pounding wickets has given way at last to the softer thud of conkers on the lawn. All that's left is to decide how much to read into England's undoing by a couple of late-order batsmen who sounded more Winchester than West Indies. When it really mattered, the country's one-day cricketers had no answer to Bradshaw and Browne.

Scene: The Oval, shortly after 6pm on Saturday. The event: the ICC Champions Trophy – a chance for England to break their duck in limited-over competitions. The predicament: two West Indian also-there's have hauled the calypso archipelago from 147 for eight to within sight of England's total of 217 all out. Conditions: dark, damp and deadly. Reality: like the bird of summer, the game has flown.

Just as we were about to slam shut English sport's compendium of near misses (you are excused, Olympic rowers, sailors and cyclists, as well as Kelly Holmes), Michael Vaughan's one-day XI made heroes of a couple of background boys whose highest pre-tournament scores had been 12 (Ian Bradshaw) and 26 (Courtney Browne). Like gladiators, at close of play, this pair of crease-squatters fell under a mound of exultant West Indian bodies, having hit 34 and 35 respectively in a courageous ninth-wicket stand.

To feel a glow of empathy for those Caribbean islands ransacked by hurricanes was the first and most important response. It was also heartening to see two journeymen step into the breach vacated by more illustrious colleagues. There is a special pleasure attached to the spectacle of sportsmen or women surpassing themselves under such stress. You see them open the door they have been pushing all their lives.

If Bradshaw and Browne were provincial solicitors, they would get my business every time. They stood up to 90mph-plus deliveries from Steve `Grievous Bodily' Harmison and dealt cleverly with the second wave bowling attack of Paul Collingwood and Alex Wharf. More cruelly, they gave Darren Gough a hefty shove towards the wilderness. Statistically, at least, Gough bowled like a beer barrel. The 58 runs he conceded in his 10 overs were gravestone numbers.

B & B, as we shall call them, even defied autumn itself. They braved the darkness, the rain, and the disquieting sense that someone was about to get his head knocked off as a consequence of both sides desperately wanting Sunday off. All it needed at the end was for the players' mums to call them in for tea.

Here's the hard part. Did B & B confound only England's startling revival in one-day cricket, which featured an authoritative victory over the Australians in last week's semi-finals? Or will the damage turn out to be deeper? capable of seizing the Ashes when summer returns to these greying shores.

No postcards, please, pointing out the difference between one-day and Test cricket. What's under the microscope is not the format of the competition so much as the mindset of the protagonists. Ascending teams reveal their character in stages. The final and most brutal test is whether they can convert chances into trophies. In English football, the fish has been getting away since the 1990 World Cup semi-final. Off he swam again at the Oval on Saturday.

Intuition says that after a long stay in oblivion, England's competitive instincts are still hardening. Now they have another few months to bake before the baggy green caps bounce down the steps of Edgbaston and Lord's.

The immobilising shock that stole across Vaughan's face when the West Indies broke out of the headlock told only part of the tale. Granted, England's captain was rendered mute and incapable of even the smallest muscular twitch. But by the time he called the post-match huddle together he was already entitled to remind his men that the five-day brigade had won seven consecutive Tests and 10 of their last 11. The series whitewashes against New Zealand and the West Indies were too valuable to be tossed on the pyre of sudden agony.

A few autumns ago many of us were starting to suspect that cricket was dying in our culture. The shortened attention span, the sale of school playing fields and the ubiquity of football all seemed to be conspiring against our most complex and civilising game. Cricket was a sport with a blanket across its lap. Its keynote was nostalgia. The football monster was munching the back pages and battering the nation's brain with its endless capacity for hype.

Cricket's most extreme critics thought it was joining The Kinks in the Village Green Preservation Society (`God save strawberry jam, and all the different varieties'). England seemed to be losing the yeoman obduracy of Botham, Gatting and Gooch and acquiring a neurotic, milky countenance.

As with rugby union, surely, the renaissance started when the club or county game became subservient to the needs of the national team. The whole point was to create a successful England team – and from that all manner of secondary benefits would flow.

Saturday's salutary defeat aside, it's more than a cricket team that has been revived this summer. The glint of promise in Test cricket reopens a whole dimension in English life. The football-besotted young have yet to fully embrace Vaughan, Marcus Trescothick, Harmison and Freddie Flintoff as fonts of inspiration. But they will, if English cricket takes advantage of top billing in next year's summer of sport and wins the Ashes for the first time since 1987.

In fact, it's hard to recall a time when the game was so well placed to reclaim its place in our affections. The same opportunity presented itself to English rugby this time last year, and Sir Clive Woodward's lot grabbed it.

Before the denouement in Kennington, a rival newspaper called Vaughan's mob "sport's forgotten heroes". Duncan Fletcher, the England coach, observed: "I find it incredibly hard to work out how important cricket is to the English public." The answer is: more than he thinks. The love of cricket here is latent, though generally still dormant. There are enough big personalities now and a sufficiently clear team identity for a full renewal of the vows.

"Look at the bigger picture and the way we've played over the last few weeks in one-day cricket," Vaughan asked. "The players can also be proud of what they've achieved over the whole season." While south London's Caribbean community rejoiced, there could be no serious challenge to the captain's end-of-term report, even if there was that familiar sense of a chance going to waste (Euro 2004, the 2002 World Cup, France '98 and so on and so on).

The pity was that Bradshaw and Browne chose this day to step out of the long shadow that has fallen across cricket in their islands, not to mention their own relative anonymity. For England, though, summer takes its bat home at the end of an encouraging year.

26 September 2004: Browne and Bradshaw leave England in dark

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