Here’s a fact for you: most left-handed batsmen are right-handed.

Okay, we haven’t actually delved into the data to uncover that, so that may not technically be a fact. We’re pretty sure it’s true though. Batting is a thing you do with both hands. Just because cricket calls one stance ‘left-handed’ and the opposite one ‘right-handed’ doesn’t mean much at all really.

No left-hand batsman has scored more Test runs than Alastair Cook. However, if you’ve seen him bowl, you’ll know that Alastair Cook is actually right-handed. (Admittedly, it isn’t entirely clear-cut from watching him bowl, but you have to assume that if he were any better with his left hand, he’d use it.)

Next on the left-handed Test runs list is Kumar Sangakkara, who is right-handed; then Brian Lara, who is right-handed; then Shivnarine Chanderpaul, who is right-handed.

The most successful left-handed Test batsman who is actually left-handed is Allan Border.

The flipside of this is that there are of course left-handed people who have batted ‘right-handed’ in Test cricket and made runs.

The team below comprises only people who are actually left-handed, which is to say we’ve gauged their handedness by their bowling arm. This is a very good but not flawless way of deducing handedness, as you’ll see.

Most of the batsmen are considered ‘right-handers’ and we’re hoping that we get lots of angry comments about this. (That’s the main reason why we didn’t include Border, if we’re honest.)

Sanath Jayasuriya

A disappointing inclusion for two reasons. (1) It now seems like Sanath might be a bit of a wrong ‘un. (2) Unlike everyone else in the top order, he did actually adopt a left-handed stance.

In our defence, we’ve previously stated our fiercely held belief that Sanath the cricketer is an entirely different bloke from Sanath the bloke who failed or refused to co-operate with an anti-corruption investigation.

Also… that cut shot.

Wilfred Rhodes

We will include Wilfred Rhodes in an XI any chance we get. Any cricketer who was picked to bat at both 1 and 11 in a Test team would be worthy of inclusion, even if he didn’t have 58 first-class hundreds and 4,204 first-class wickets to his name.

Most importantly of all, Rhodes was absolutely dynamite when we picked him in Cricket Captain 2018’s All-Time Greats mode. You can’t argue with that. Well, you can, but you should probably find something more productive to do with your time.

Denis Compton

It’s Denis Compton, isn’t it? This is an easy pick.

Did you know that as well as all the runs, Compton also took 25 Test wickets bowling left-arm wrist spin? Four more wickets without conceding another run and we could have classed him as an all-rounder according to the old ‘averages less with the ball than the bat’ criterion (Wilfred Rhodes passes that, by the way).

Michael Clarke

Bit of an arsehole, but he was Lord Megachief of Gold for 2012 so it kind of feels like we have to include him.

Averaged less with the ball than with the bat. All-rounder.

Inzamam-ul-Haq

We made Inzy one of our ‘Kings of Cricket’ for All Out Cricket a few years ago. Rebrands and domain name changes mean those words are now sadly unlinktoable, but the crux of the piece was that we loved his souplesse.

Souplesse is a cycling term which refers to the perfect pedal stroke. It’s a fluid, effortless movement with no wasted motion whatsoever.

Inzamam-ul-Haq did everything required for a perfect shot and nothing more. There was no flourish, no muscularity. Afterwards, it was almost as if nothing had happened at all. Then he’d get run out.

Garry Sobers

Garry Sobers was left-handed, so, um, that’s that really. Garry’s in.

Sarah Taylor, Ian Healy, Matt Prior, Mushfiqur Rahim, Brad Haddin, Quinton De Kock or someone

We’ve stumbled here. In large part because of the nature of the job, we couldn’t find a decent wicketkeeper who bowled with their left hand.

There are people like Adam Gilchrist who batted left-handed and bowled right-handed, but left-handed bowlers who typically wore the gloves proved impossible to identify. Best we could manage was all the people listed in the subheading above who kept wicket but never actually stooped to revealing their preferred handedness by turning their arm over. Any of these players could be left-handed. We’ve no idea.

Wasim Akram

First name on the team sheet. When you think of left-armers, you think of Wasim. Correctly.

Wasim Akram took four hat tricks in international cricket. In March 1999, Sri Lanka were on the receiving end of two in a little over a week. Wasim Akram is a man who can talk about his international hat tricks and have a favourite.

Wasim was a bowling attack in his own right: a new ball bowler, a reverse swing master, a line and length seam bowler and a flat track innovator. He found angles no-one knew existed. He could basically do anything.

Mitchell Johnson or Darren Gough

We imagine you’ve some questions about this selection.

Most of you will be thinking that Johnson bowled with his left-arm and Gough bowled with his right, so why the hell is the Yorkshireman even mentioned? You are absolutely correct. Johnson did indeed bowl with his left arm. But here’s a video of him playing tennis right-handed.

If we’re defining handedness by bowling arm, let’s go with Johnson. However, if we’re going to consider him right-handed on the basis of tennis and autographs, that opens the door for Gough, who plays darts and signs autographs left-handed.

Gough would certainly bring something a little different to the attack.

Derek Underwood or Mitchell Starc

Derek Underwood is one of those cricketers who gets talked about far less than seems fair, given his record.

Deadly played 86 Tests and took 297 wickets at 25.83. That’s a broadly similar record to Bob Willis (90 Tests and 325 wickets at 25.20) in pretty much exactly the same era, yet you almost certainly know a great deal more about Willis than you do about Underwood.

Despite this, we’ve only got Underwood down as a second spinner, which would arguably be an unnecessary role in a side that also contains Rhodes and the multi-faceted Sobers – even if he was a very, very different brand of spinner.

If we were to opt for another pace bowler instead, we’re having Mitchell Starc because he bowls at the stumps as fast as he can and that’s an approach we just fundamentally like.

Rangana Herath

Herath Mudiyanselage Rangana Keerthi Bandara Herath (yes, his name is Herath Herath) seemingly spent 95 per cent of his career only a match or two away from retirement. This stopgap veteran status persisted long enough for him to snare 433 wickets, which is an insanely large number. It’s actually more than Wasim Akram, which is a fact we can’t really wrap our head around.

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< 1 minute read

Well, looks like we’ve got to the bottom of that whole ‘bowl to the left, bowl to the right’ thing. Turns out Mitchell Johnson is right-handed.

Here’s some expert coaching advice, Mitch: bowl with your other hand.

Better late than never with these kinds of tips.

You may already have been aware of Johnson’s ambidextrousness/confusion. We weren’t. Responding to yesterday’s post – in which we reminded people that when only one arm is tattooed, it should the ‘doing arm’ – Top shelf tweeted us to point out that Johnson signs autographs right-handed.

There we were mistakenly thinking that Johnson had the wrong arm tattooed. Turns out the correct one had been tattoed all along and he’d simply been using the other one to bowl by mistake.

< 1 minute readIt’s increasingly fashionable for captains and coaches to talk about building culture within their team – shared values and working together and all that crap.

Mitchell Johnson’s autobiography, Resilient, features a colourful anecdote from his time at the Cricket Academy in Adelaide which sheds light on every aspect of the culture that underpins Australia sides.

“Every night we’d pile into the common room and watch Neighbours before dinner. I was always a bit willing as every time there was an ad break there would be an all-in wrestle on the floor until the show started again.

“In one wrestle I was dragged through the door and into the bathroom by a heap of guys and somebody pushed my head into the toilet. I wasn’t impressed and the red mist descended. Somehow I managed to break free and I grabbed whoever it was by the front of the shirt as I got up and someone grabbed mine.

“I raised my right fist and he did the same. Then we looked at each other. It was Watto.”

Hopefully the red mist isn’t the product of a very severe urinary tract infection in this story.

Assuming it isn’t, what we’re left with is: watching Neighbours, wrestling like children who’ve spent too long cooped up indoors and faecal peril.

And afterwards all you’re left with is Shane Watson’s fat face staring back at you as he threatens to hurt you, but doesn’t.

2 minute readMitchell Johnson contributed some extremely interesting cricket and you can’t ask for much more than that from a player. Overall, his record is very good, but that long-term-very-goodness was created by opposing short-term extremes.

At his best, Johnson was as exciting to watch as pretty much any cricketer ever. If your team was playing against Australia, you may not have enjoyed the spectacle, but you can’t say it didn’t raise the heart-rate. It wasn’t so much the pace, as that sense that the entire match could be decided in short order.

Set against that, his worst was comically dire. This is of course just as entertaining and therefore, in our eyes, every bit as worthwhile. Friend or foe, Johnson will be missed.

Where’s the ball gone?

If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from the impact of Good Johnson, it’s that even in its purest form, fast bowling isn’t all about pace – it’s about reaction times. Ed Cowan helps us understand this with an account of what it was like to face him.

“He rocks back after the familiar rhythmical approach, and then it seems you wait an eternity for the ball to be launched towards you. An ever-so-brief moment of panic can sweep across you as you realise he has let it go but you have not picked it up until the ball is halfway down.

“There is certainly some luck involved in getting through those early exchanges – if one delivery is on the money, your day can be over before it really begins. So much of the advance information gained by batsmen about the length of a delivery vanishes when the bowler possesses such an action.”

You can get half an idea of what he means by watching this video comparing the actions of Mitchells Starc and Johnson.

At this point, Johnson’s bowling arm is already down and the ball is well on its way to being released…

… but yet the two bowlers release the ball at (almost) the same time. As Cowan says, there’s almost a pause when the ball’s behind Johnson in his delivery stride; a coiled-spring moment that gives the batsman a split second to ponder what’s to come and also denies him the rhythm he needs to react properly.

Starc is the archetypal thoroughbred fast bowler. Johnson was the Whangotron 9000. For all that a smooth, languid bowling action might be more aesthetically pleasing, in many ways the Johnson method presents more of a threat.

2 minute read

That sounds a little like a crude and edgy, deliberately controversial Off-Broadway show. But it isn’t. It’s a reference to the eldest Mitchell; the man who apparently compels English batsmen to dash their own brains out in fear.

Mitchell Johnson is currently the man with the fifth-best bowling average and strike-rate for Australia in this series. No-one likes facing him – that’s fairly obvious – but we do rather feel that his impact is prone to being overstated. He’s a very good bowler, he’s done great things in the past, but it does sometimes feel like his performances get talked up as being earth-shattering even when he’s taken 3-60.

Don’t get us wrong, 3-60’s good, but it’s ‘well bowled’ good, not ‘cower before me, mortals!’ good. Johnson may also take 5-15 at some point, so why not save all the cooing and fawning for then?

“We’re not going to cross the line, but we’re going to go right up to it and I think there are a few scars there which might open up,” said some fictional amalgam of the Australian team because we can’t be bothered finding an actual quote about mental scars with which to make our point.

It’s a peculiarly Australian obsession, mental scarring. Other nations rarely talk about it, but Johnson in particular seems to believe he’s liable to open up scars in England’s top order by dismissing Stuart Broad with a short ball. Maybe it’s that psychological phenomenon where you project onto others the flaws you possess yourself, because surely if anyone’s scarred by a northern hemisphere Ashes series, it’s Johnson.

Or maybe it’s just a fast bowler talking bollocks because the Ashes is a pantomime. Either way, it’s a really tired thing to say and we’re kind of sick of the self-aggrandising aspect of it.

Meanwhile, Mitchell Starc’s bowling more rapidly and producing a greater number of unplayable deliveries, while Josh Hazlewood’s plonking it on a length and getting more wickets than either of them.

< 1 minute readNot much is happening in the cricket at the minute, so we might as well busy ourselves tackling the difficult philosophical questions. If three Mitches play cricket for Australia, is it possible to have a favourite?

For us, this is the order in which we’d place them – best at the top.

1. Mitchell Starc
2. Mitchell Johnson
3. Mitchell Marsh

If we try and explain our reasoning, it seems our preference is largely based on cricketing reasons, which is something of a surprise. In short, we feel that Starc ‘deserves’ success, while Marsh doesn’t.

We remember in the early days of Jason Gillespie’s career, Steve Waugh (or possibly even Mark Taylor) tried to embiggen him before an Ashes series by saying he was the best bowler in the world. It was bollocks, obviously – he was only the third-best bowler in the team – but the captain did at least put forward a reasoned argument.

He said that Gillespie was the perfect fast bowler. He said he was tall, bowled 90-odd mph and swung it both ways, all of which was true at the time. We kind of feel the same about Mitchell Starc, only he’s also a left-armer. We figure if a player has all of those qualities, he should be successful otherwise much of what we believe about cricket is wrong.

As for Marsh, he’s a medium-pacer and an Aussie all-rounder. If they prove effective, it again calls into question much of what we believe about cricket.

On the plus side, there’s a Twitter account about Mitch Marsh that we find funny largely on the grounds that we don’t get it. Merchell Mersh communicates with weird neanderthal vowel sounds and that’s pretty much the joke.

We generally just try and avoid thinking about Mitchell Johnson.

< 1 minute readIt’s not just England then. South Africa have been forcefully Johnsonned and are probably already considering reverting to a more conservative team for the second Test. Five bowlers is great when you’re top of the world and full of confidence, but let’s just see what happens now that they’re rattled.

But bring in a batsman and it’s over. The problem for South Africa wasn’t the sixth wicket partnership, it was that they were 43-4. Even Australia aren’t happy with that kind of batting score – and they’ve been winning from that position.

Vehement letter-C denier, AB de Villiers, has been the only man to show resistance thus far. He may have averaged almost 80 in 2013, but for how much longer is he going to keep wicket? We can’t see it lasting. Not sure why. We just can’t.

< 1 minute read

The escape route outlined in yesterday’s article? England evaded it perfectly, opting instead to stand their ground, whereupon they were flattened by the giant, tufty-haired boulder which has been rumbling after them since they landed Down Under.

The most frustrating thing is that, for all the devastation, Mitchell Johnson only actually dismissed one of the specialist batsmen – Alastair Cook. Carberry was out to Watson, Root and Pietersen were out to idiocy and Bell was not out.

If Root or Pietersen could have avoided lending Australia a hand, Bell showed how together they could have countered Johnson and perhaps worn him down. Who knows? Maybe the lower order would have lasted more than a ball each then.

There’s still a second innings, but realistically the opportunity has gone now – you can’t turn blancmange back into brain.

< 1 minute read

As in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything. Although that would go some way towards explaining why he’s forever spearing balls down the leg side.

We find ourself conflicted about Johnson’s recall. He has looked like a proper fast bowler of late, which is a good thing. However, we don’t particularly want England to face a proper fast bowler. We’d far rather they faced the Johnson of old – a loping bag of meat hanging from a bad haircut with all the coordination of a puppet. That would mean denying the world a fast bowler though and there aren’t many of those knocking about these days.

George Bailey looks set to play in the first Test as well. His one-day form is magic. His first-class record is middling. It will be interesting to see whether there is some monumental flaw in his batting which might be exploited or whether his grown-up brain will get him through.

< 1 minute readMichael Clarke concluded early on in his tenure that his man management of Mitchell Johnson would involve unconditional love, no matter what the tufty-haired purveyor of left-arm ineptitude did with the ball.

Johnson hasn’t taken many wickets recently, but Clarke’s been steadfast in his support. Someone should tell him he can give it a rest now.

Johnson is expected to have surgery on his left big toe this week and is likely to be out of action for about five months.

Seemingly engaging ‘mindless support mode’, Clarke said:

“I think it could have a good impact on him. It will give him more time away from the game to clear his head and get himself fit and strong.”

For once, we’ve got some sympathy for Johnson, because the poor sod’s already at a low ebb and is now going to miss basically a whole season. However, the idea that sitting on his arse with his foot in the air for half a year will somehow improve him as a bowler isn’t all that convincing.