Posted by You may have guessed that we didn’t see much of this one. But that’s okay – we can read a scorecard with the best of them.
England won. It is 2-0. Here are some things that apparently happened…
Joe Root one-ups himself
Has Joe Root finally hit upon a way of not being mere context? True to type, his first innings hundred was essentially the backdrop to Gus Atkinson’s in terms of newsworthiness. But then he went and hit another one in the second innings.
If Atkinson was still player of the match after following up his ton by bothamming a five-for, there was no overshadowing Root in the second innings or in terms of batting across the match. England’s batting cards would have been very interesting looking things without him – Atkinson wouldn’t have reached three figures for a start.
Fortunately for England, he was there – skipping around, blithely making hundreds – and Atkinson did make a hundred too. It’s staggering to think Ian Botham hit a hundred and took a five-for in the same match on five occasions. People weren’t always impressed though.
Papal perplexity
Ollie Pope was a little less productive. Where are we with him at the minute? He seems to ping-pong between brilliance and ineffectiveness without ever spending too long in between.
His second innings dismissal was particularly fine, surveying the packed legside field and backing away so that he could perfectly pick out the one man on the off side boundary. Have people started saying he’s due yet? You know you’re in trouble then.
As for his captaincy, it’s hard to know what to think. Michael Vaughan has somewhat infamously labelled Pope “quite an insecure human being” and concluded from this that he should not be captain.
We don’t know about the insecurity – it’s a hard quality to pick from afar – but we do feel that he is one of those players who are billed as having ‘leadership potential’ on the basis of almost nothing that can be perceived by a fan.
This is not uncommon. Quite a few England players have attracted similar comments in the past. Alastair Cook was one and we feel similarly about Jos Buttler (another of those players who is often said to be in possession of ‘a good cricket brain’).
What is this mysterious unseen leadership quality, you find yourself wondering? “Oh, you should hear the kinds of things he says in the dressing room,” say the coaching staff by way of explanation, leaving you none the wiser.
Pope’s on-field efforts are a funny mix as well. A 100% failure rate with DRS doesn’t inspire confidence, but a 100% success rate in terms of victories is hard to take issue with.
Stand-in captains are extra hard to judge because they’re essentially riding someone else’s bike and it’s invariably slightly the wrong size for them. It may even be that Stokes and McCullum have Pope down as a specialist vice captain; a company man who can be trusted to provide holiday cover without faffing about with anything important.
Top Fernando Watch
Newfound candidate for our cult hero affections, Asitha Fernando, had another good game – 5-102 in the first innings and 3-52 in the second.
That first effort was perhaps a little showy. He seems to us to be more one of those bowlers who reliably takes 3-67. In short, the kind of bowling figures that initially seem a little disappointing until you do the relevant division and realise, oh wait, that’s actually pretty handy.
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I really don’t have an opinion on Pope but I don’t think there’s anyone who has managed to lose my respect over the years quite like Vaughan has. Just an utterly repellent person.
Indeed, Daneel.
Contrast with Stuart Broad, who could be an intimating ass at times as a player, but who has rapidly transformed himself into a thoughtful, balanced and informative pundit.
This is completely on target, regarding Vaughan. Vaughan is a creepy egoist who has plumbed new depths in his remarks on Pope’s personality (as perceived by Vaughan). Like the racist remarks that Vaughan didn’t make when playing for Yorkshire, the best that can be imagined is that this is code for something else that even Vaughan wouldn’t be prepared to say. But, contrary to Wittgenstein, you can dog-whistle it. As for Pope’s captaincy, he has been decently creative with his bowling changes and field placings, and these have come off. He did a very decent job, too, as Surrey’s captain in the Blast. He seems to have the respect and affection of players in both the teams he has skippered this season. Pity about the runs, and possibly approaching terminal on that front; his ability to deal with the length ball that moves away seems to have deserted him. That has led to all of us developing a mental picture of Pope with right hip facing up the wicket and the off stump cartwheeling. This is, however, not a personality issue.
“Quite an insecure human being” is such a weird piece of cricket punditry, code (for what?) or otherwise.
ECB accounts for the year ending January 2024 crossed my radar today – profits increased to £27.9m (from £21.1m the previous year). Interestingly the Ashes, while good for ticket sales and UK TV money, didn’t bring in as much non-UK TV money as the previous year (when England played Tests against India, South Africa and New Zealand, who bring more international eyeballs, maybe partly due to time zones and partly due to, y’know, India).
The ECB seem to have made payments of c£2m to each of The Hundred franchises, hard to tell from the ECB accounts if that’s a subsidy (they’ve paid more than £100m to the National County Clubs and County Cricket Boards in the same period), so I thought I’d have a look at the Manchester Originals accounts as well, they made a profit of around £50k for the year, about £29k after tax, on a turnover of c£2m (of which £1.9m seems to have come from the ECB, judging by the ECB’s accounts).
I’m not an accountant by any means, but I would have thought, given the level of hype around the investment opportunity for the Hundred franchises, that they’d be generating a bit more revenue than this. I’d welcome insight from anyone who knows about how the Hundred operates as a business.
Such insights are not for the likes of us, APW.
More worryingly, I’m not sure that anyone at the ECB has such insights either.
That’s a measly profit margin for Manchester Originals. KP must be going nuts, so to spake. Thank goodness for Test cricket subsidising then or where would the Hundred be, eh?