Shane Watson’s run-out for 103 during the Perth Test of the 2013/14 Ashes was one of the all-time great comedy dismissals. This is why.

As an England fan, it’s easy to steer your gaze away from the 2013/14 Ashes. It wasn’t just a defeat, it was an annihilation. And it wasn’t just an annihilation, it was the last rites for what may well prove to be the best England Test team you’ll see in your lifetime.

But can we let you in on a secret? Just because something was almost entirely rubbish, it doesn’t mean that nothing funny happened in it.

Think of the Wicker Man remake. From start to finish, that film is fundamentally an abomination – but at the same time there are so many spectacularly funny moments that we can’t possibly list them all: the needless punches; Nicolas Cage repeatedly enquiring how a doll got burned; that bit where he keeps shouting “not the bees.”

If you look back on it now, the 2013/14 Ashes is a bit like that and Shane Watson’s run-out was a particular highlight.

What happened?

We don’t usually like to write about stuff we’ve covered in the Ridiculous Ashes podcast, but this is an incident we felt warranted closer attention.

The situation was this.

England were already 2-0 down in the series and about to lose the third Test and the Ashes.

Australia made 385 batting first, largely thanks to Steve Smith’s second Test hundred. Alastair Cook and Mike Carberry then started kind-of-okay in England’s reply before the tourists folded to 251 all out. Tim Bresnan’s 21 ended up the third-highest score.

Australia finished day three on 235-3, already 369 runs ahead, meaning England took to the field on day four about as buoyant as osmium.

What happened next was that Shane Watson made 74 runs off his next 41 balls. This included being caught for six by Bresnan on 90 when the burly seamer leaped like a crested salmon only to land the wrong side of the rope.

Three balls later, James Anderson bowled five wides. A ball after that, Watson tipped one down to fine leg for four to bring up his hundred.

By the end of the over, Australia were 331-4 and England’s wheels were not just off, but elsewhere, at a location unknown, almost certainly fractured into a great many pieces.

At this point, Watson top-edged an absolute steepler off Tim Bresnan.

Look at the image below. That incredibly blurry thing is the ball. It is going pretty much exactly straight up, which is quite the feat really from Watson.

Here’s another angle. Just look at his eyeline. Drink it in.

Impressively, Watson had also hit one precisely straight up in the first Test, so maybe this was a shot he’d been working on.

Anyway, the important point is that it was not a chance that was difficult to get to and it wasn’t an especially difficult chance to take either.

Ian Bell came in, dropped it and immediately turned his back to sulk off.

At this point, Tim Bresnan – completely and utterly furious – picked up the ball and threw down the stumps and in so doing ran out Watson.

What was especially great about this from a TV coverage point of view, is that the wicket took place entirely in the background.

Here’s Bresnan in the act of throwing and also just the very tip of Watson’s bat to indicate his location.

Now here’s the moment immediately after the ball struck the stumps. And let’s just take a minute here to appreciate everything that’s going on in this shot.

There are three brilliant things happening here.

Number 1: Shane Watson running off because he’s out

There’s Shane, bottom-right, just in front of the umpire raising his finger. He’s doing that great thing where you’re so obviously run out that you don’t bother stopping, you just keep on going to the pavilion.

Number 2: Tim Bresnan, absolutely furious

Look at the stump out of the ground and the umpire’s finger and look at absolutely nobody celebrating.

Tim Bresnan, in particular, has got a batsman out with a decent piece of fielding and he is just out-and-out livid about that.

Yes, he’s been denied a wicket in his bowling figures – but it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s a lesson in how illogical you are when you’re miserable. Bresnan has got a wicket, but all he can focus on is how he hadn’t got that wicket half a second earlier.

That’s all he’s really thinking about and you can see it most clearly when he throws the stumps down. It’s probably only 50% a genuine run-out attempt with the other 50% a petulant need to smash something immediately.

Number 3: Ian Bell, entirely oblivious to the dismissal of the batsman he has just failed to dismiss

That’s Bell on the far left, striding away from the scene of his crime, utterly ignorant of the fact his miss was almost instantly negated.

In summary

Bell not seeing and Bresnan not caring is what makes this run-out so great for us – and specifically the sheer nonsense of Bresnan being very visibly disappointed at not taking a wicket, even as he was taking that wicket.

It is like a little snapshot of how insensible a cricket team becomes when a Test match is careering away from them and everything is going wrong.

For England, things were so bad that the taking of the wicket didn’t negate the disappointment of failing to take that wicket.

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As Ian Bell retires from first-class cricket, let’s talk about a player whose Test record was plenty good enough but whose technique honestly left us kind of cold.

Ian Bell was player of the series in a 3-0 Ashes win. Can we just state that first before we get into anything else? It seems like for most players that would be a pretty significant thing, but with Bell what should really be a career-defining fact for some reason gets rather lost.

The two main themes of Bell retirement reportage have been (1) pretty good, but could have been even better and (2) ooh, that cover drive.

The first of those was his eternal curse; the notion that no matter how well he played, there was somehow another level he could attain. People largely thought this because of the second part.

As we’ve written before, “class” is for the most part a nebulous, meaningless thing that invisibly bolsters some batsmen’s first-class averages in the eyes of selectors and fans. It is not generally directly related to whether or not a player is actually any good at batting or not.

The story of Ian Bell’s career is of someone battling to overcome a widespread tendency to measure him against cruelly lofty expectations.

Ian Bell suffered from people forever thinking he *should* be better. Even after 22 Test hundreds and with an average of 42.69, people think it should have been 30 hundreds and an average of 50.

It’s largely forgotten now, but this shortfall between what he was actually doing and what people for some reason thought he could do led many people to actively hate him.

26 years old, averaging 40 in Test cricket, and a lot of England fans loathed him.

Others adored him – quite often because his batting was smoother than Tetley’s Smoothflow.

Much like Tetley’s Smoothlow, we always found him a bit nondescript. We don’t really see what’s of interest in ‘textbook’ batting. It’s the weird batsmen who’ve come up with their own method who tend to catch our eye.

For quite a long time this website was unique in being entirely non-committal about Bell. We even ran a campaign, the theme of which was to have no firm opinion about him one way or the other.

We invited people to try and feel more numb. “Imagine you’re arriving at work on a Tuesday morning and looking into the faces of your colleagues,” we suggested.

AP Webster even did us some propaganda.

Our firmly-held position couldn’t last.

In 2010, Bell defended England to an unlikely draw against South Africa and we called him “an actual hero” before somewhat bizarrely likening him to a wooden spoon.

In 2011, he played far, far too well and found himself named Lord Megachief of Gold.

Then things went REALLY tits up in 2013 when he sherminated Australia with England winning all three Tests in which he scored a hundred.

But this is not what people will remember. What people will remember first and foremost will surely be his eternal and irrepressible Ian Bell-ness.

A case in point: in his final summer of Test cricket, with no fewer than 199 Test innings to his name, people were still suggesting that a move up the order might be the making of him.

Ian Bell.

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They’ve only gone and dropped him. Dropped him as if he were a cricket ball and they were him standing in the slips at some point in the last 12 months.

There’s a hideous video on the ECB Twitter feed where selector James Whitaker mouths the usual platitudes about Bell taking a break and reassessing before coming back strongly.

But he isn’t going to come back, is he? If he comes back at all, it’ll be in tears and bearing petrol shortly before torching the ECB offices. It would take more than ‘hunger and desire’ to persuade selectors to recall a malfunctioning 33-year-old who publicly floated the idea of retirement earlier in the year. We only hope that they didn’t talk him out of calling it a day back then only to make the decision for him a few months later. That would be cruel.

Then again, it would also be apt. Raising hopes, giving every impression that things are going to be just wonderful before a sudden and unheralded demise – the archetypal Bell innings.

2 minute read

Turns out Ian Bell’s not retiring. You may have heard that he maybe possibly was. You may not. Either way, he isn’t.

The umming and ahhing does hint that his career is nearly at an end though. Soon enough, the bell will toll and watching Bell will no longer take its toll. We should probably embrace his pure, unadulterated Ian Bell-ness while we still have time.

Even earlier this summer, people were discussing whether a move to three might be the making of Ian Bell. That he is still widely considered unmade after 199 Test innings is quite something. There’s a certain art and majesty in continuing to maintain such a perception.

Always leave people wanting more, they say, and Ian Bell generally delivers in that regard. Quite how a 33-year-old veteran can still be thought of as having promise is one of the mysteries of the age. One day, many years from now, he’ll move his zimmer frame just so and onlookers will see it as an indication that he’s finally cracked this batting lark. At this point, Bell will drop dead. Always one step ahead of us, Bell; constantly finessing what might one day be revealed to be the greatest post-modern joke in the history of sport.

For now, all we can do is look on in wonder. Hopefully there will be at least one more dreamy, effortless innings cut short by an unexpected bout of seppuku. Rather than curse and wail at the moon in frustration like we usually do, maybe next time we can smile and say: “That Ian Bell – his ability to continue playing cricket like Ian Bell really is quite something.”

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We’re way past Ian Bell 2.0. Being as he’s 33 and batting at three, we’re going to call this incarnation Ian Bell 33.3. Hopefully that won’t prove to be its batting average.

Most of the previous Ian Bells have looked solid only to get out in infuriating fashion when you least expected it. This new version’s different. This one seems hell-bent on scoring at at least a run a ball and consequently its dismissal only ever feels a delivery away. But it’s fun while it lasts. It rattles along at a frightening rate, pinging drives through the covers and slicing back-cuts between the slip fielders like its risk-assessment circuits have malfunctioned.

It was also good to see England attack a victory target with gusto. You can sometimes inch to a win and leave the opposition feeling more uplifted than you are. This was more akin to getting a few bonus jabs in before the next round. ‘Remember last time you bowled to me and I flayed you for three boundaries every over?’ you seem to say as you walk to the middle in the next Test.

Ian Bell.

2 minute read

This isn’t really about Ian Bell. It’s about English cricket’s attitude to age and the impact of the international schedule as it is now.

When an England player has a spell of poor form, it is generally described in one of two ways. Young players are ‘found out’ while older players are seen as being in terminal decline.

In recent years, the latter message has been reinforced by the fact that very few England players have played on long past their 33rd birthdays. If you’re dropped at that age, it’s increasingly accepted that you’ll never come back. This then perhaps makes selectors reluctant to pick any player over 30 on the grounds that they don’t have much of a future.

Your mid-thirties run-scorer

But 33 isn’t really so old for a batsman. Sachin Tendulkar, Graham Gooch, Rahul Dravid and Alec Stewart all made over 5,000 runs after their 33rd birthdays. In recent years, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Kumar Sangakkara and Younus Khan have all scored at least 3,000 runs and averaged over 60 beyond that age. Mike Hussey, Misbah-ul-Haq, Jacques Kallis, VVS Laxman – all of these batsmen and plenty more held their own in this period of their careers.

For England? Andrew Strauss can boast relative longevity, having made 1,601 runs after 33; Paul Collingwood made 944; and Kevin Pietersen made 682; but other than them, no-one. We have to go back to Graham Thorpe (1,635 runs) and Nasser Hussain (2,479 runs) to find anyone who’s made over a thousand in recent times and they retired in 2005 and 2004 respectively.

Why so few? There’s surely a tale to be told in the countless broken bodies and minds. But is it also something cultural? A growing impatient lust for the new?

Old man Bell

Bell’s currently the old guy and almost because of this, there’s a feeling that he’s on borrowed time. It’s a battle to suppress the urge to bin him and rush onto the next thing. Who knows whether Bell feels this as well and whether it has an impact on his game. Perhaps that sense that it’s almost time becomes self-fulfilling.

Bell is in poor form, no doubt, but it’s also true that the future will arrive one day and you don’t need to break into a jog to meet it early.

Australia have spent the last couple of years proving that the present matters, unafraid to cling onto 49-year-old Chris Rogers or select 35-year-old Adam Voges for a Test debut. They’ve wrung plenty out of these players – and others – long after England would surely have discarded them.

Neither team has an embarrassment of riches at its disposal, so it’s certainly possible to gain an advantage through making the most of what you have.

< 1 minute readIan Bell made 187 off 145 balls against the Prime Minister’s XI in England’s latest warm-up match. Okay, so it’s not exactly the biggest match ever – Chris Rogers bowled two overs – but what’s more reassuring, making 187 off 145 balls or making 26 off 38?

This constitutes further evidence that Ian Bell is not Alastair Cook. The match also provided evidence that Glenn Maxwell remains Glenn Maxwell. You’ve got to love a man who can score 136 off 91 balls one day and be clean bowled charging down the pitch to leave the ball in a Twenty20 match another day.

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There are a lot of optimists in the world and the problem with positive people is that they assume that positivity itself is some sort of positive.

It’s all well and good swanning about thinking everything will work out, but really you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. The truth is things don’t always work out.

Positivity can be good. It can be necessary. But it can also lead you to do stupid things.

Let’s have some examples

At one extreme, imagine you’ve just bought a bag of beef-flavoured Space Raiders. It requires minimal positivity to look on the bright side and assume that the things inside the bag are baked corn snacks and therefore edible. Result. You get to eat some food.

An extreme pessimist, however, might perceive the same items as being made from some sort of radioactive compacted dust laced with strychnine. Boo. No food for you.

Now imagine you’re standing on a high bridge across a canyon. You close your eyes and consider stepping off the side. Most people would assume that they would fall to their death were they to do that. An extreme optimist might think that a giant bird would just happen to fly underneath their foot at the exact moment they stepped out and hover there, providing support. Then another bird for their next step and another and another until they reach safety.

Now these are two extremes, but positivity does slowly morph into delusion the further you move towards each end of the continuum. Somewhere between them there’s a grey area. For example, a recurring scenario in cricket is when a team has to choose between a familiar older player and a less familiar younger player.

Shades of grey

The point about shades is that you’re talking about gradation, which is why we’ve just resisted the obvious temptation to include a number with that subheading. We’ll go with ‘infinite’ if it makes you any happier.

No two cricketing selection decisions are the same, but with really close calls it always boils down to how much of an optimist you are – how you perceive the absent data. You know what’s happened, but what will happen next?

Let’s get specific. Ian Bell will open the batting for England tonight. Alex Hales will not. Is that the right decision or the wrong decision?

Bell v Hales

Bell is familiar. Perhaps over-familiar would be a better way of putting it. For better or worse, we don’t feel like there’s anything left to learn about him.

Alex Hales is newer. He had a strong domestic season and has a really good record in Twenty20 internationals, but as a 50-over opener, he’s more of an unknown quantity.

We can compare stats and technique and approach, but a large part of the argument seems to hinge on what Hales might do. If you’re inherently positive, you’ll say Hales might win England matches with aggressive hundreds. If you’re of a more negative mindset, you’ll say he might rack up a great string of single-figure scores.

So Ian Bell is not Alastair Cook then?

Correct. Chances are, on some level you’re aware of this fact, but we thought we’d provide a reminder. People talked so much about how bad it was to have Bell and Cook in the same top three that the two batsmen have almost become interchangeable when we talk about one-day cricket.

Hales, in contrast, was fortunate enough to be kept out of the side by Cook and has therefore become symbolic of the brave new Cook-less world in which everyone hits sixes from ball one.

But Ian Bell is not Alastair Cook and Alex Hales is not the anti-Alastair Cook. (Nor is Cook the purest form of one-day failure imaginable, for that matter – but that’s something it’s not worth getting into right now.)

Ian Bell is Ian Bell

If we’re looking at their technical suitability for one-day cricket, Alastair Cook has three shots and Ian Bell has about 42.

If we’re looking at the stats, Cook clearly ground to a halt, but Bell has been surprisingly effective for a while now. In 2012 – the year that England became the top-ranked one-day international nation – he averaged 54.90 and scored at a strike-rate of 82.68. In 2013, he averaged 43.00 and scored at 76.87. In 2014, he averaged 34.21 and scored at 90.89.

You can look at those figures two ways. You can say he simply doesn’t score quickly enough for the modern day and age, or you can say that it’s unrealistic to expect everyone in your batting line-up to perform like David Warner.

Warner, for the record, averages 31.40 in one-dayers with a strike-rate of 83.50.

But Hales *might* win matches for England

It’s true. He might. It really is hard to argue against that, because it’s absolutely true. We’ve even said that Alex Hales and Moeen Ali would make a great one-day opening partnership ourself.

We’re not trying to make a case here. It’s a grey area and that’s really our point. If we have some sort of message, it’s that the ‘better the devil you know’ argument is rarely a crowd-pleaser, but that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong.

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Well that was – actually, what was that? It’s probably a bit early to be committing to specific words, so let’s not. England have won the Ashes. That’s a functional way of saying it. You can add your own emotions internally. England won every Test in which Ian Bell scored a hundred. Shermination complete.

It was seat of pants airborne travel for the editor working on the Channel 5 highlights show with the fourth day of the fourth Test pushing on past 7pm. Chapeau to them and chapeau to Stuart Broad and Tim Bresnan – the latter taking second billing thanks to a couple of key wickets and some might fine lower-order whoppery in the morning session.

We’re not sure how confident England were that Australia’s middle order would showcase how Simon it is, but that’s kind of what happened after Bresnan’s stemwinder of a delivery dismissed David Warner. The resilience seemed to just drain away as if it had been floating in the toilet bowl waiting for someone to flush.

It’s not all bad news for Australia though. In Rogers, Clarke and Harris, they’ve unearthed some talented young cricketers for the future.

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When did Ian Bell turn into a big, relentless steamroller? He always used to be a two-seater sports car. He was sleek and flash, but entirely impractical when you came to do the big shop.

These days he’s not just practical, he’s reliable as well. His big engine chunters away as he flattens mile upon mile of tarmac for the benefit of his team-mates. If they later run out of fuel, he goes back and gives them a tow.

In the last Ashes series, Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott scored incredibly heavily. But that was different. That was about ensuring they made as many runs as possible. The 2013 Ashes has been more about whether a batsman can make any runs at all and for the most part it hasn’t happened – unless The Steamroller’s been at the crease.

We’ll tell you what: Ian Bell was not due a big score today.