We’ve often joked about Moeen Ali’s willingness to take on any pretty much any job for England. Any format, any role, bat or ball, Moeen would give it a go. This means there’s quite a lot of ‘what might have been’ in response to his retirement from Test cricket. But it’s worth setting that idea in context before then making an effort to instead celebrate ‘what was’.

As we put it in the article linked above, England really valued Moeen’s ability to uncomplainingly turn his hand to literally bloody anything. This both helped and hindered him.

He batted in every position from one to nine and this week told the Guardian and Cricinfo that he wishes he could have had more of a run in one position.

But then he also concedes that he wasn’t able to work on his batting so much during the times when his bowling was seen as the more useful string to his bow. And with regards to his record as Bowling Ali, he says: “Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I would get nearly 200 Test wickets.”

So while he says he felt he could have been more ‘on it’ with the bat, he clearly feels something akin to the reverse about his bowling.

And that’s the nature of being an all-rounder really.

Moeen got to do a lot more Test bowling than he otherwise would have done because he could bat. And he also played a great many more Test innings because he could bowl. There’s much to be gained from buying twice as many tickets.

Maybe he could have specialised more and become a better batter. Maybe he could have gone the other way and become a better bowler. But who’s to say that either approach would have made for a more fulfilling and satisfactory career? Is there not something to be said for the breadth and excitement of the taster menu?

With a batting average of 28 and a bowling average lurching towards 37, Moeen Ali’s Test record is ostensibly unremarkable. But these figures really mask the highs.

Moeen’s first Test hundred was just about as good as you get and he hit four others. He also took five five-fors and a pissing hat-trick. That’s a fair whack of good days. When we contrived The Hundreds and Five-Fors Rating in 2017, we argued that he was actually England’s best player. His fielding’s worth a mention too being as he’s the proud owner of one of the safer pairs of hands around.

That’s a really good career to have to your name, isn’t it? Rather than looking back and seeing an endless morass of forgettable fifties, Moeen can say: “Remember that time I blew Virat Kohli’s mind by bowling him through the gate first ball?” Or: “Remember that time I inexplicably left a Nathan Lyon straight ball and it knocked back my off stump?”

These are great and memorable moments. Moeen Ali didn’t tie up an end; he bowled to take wickets. He didn’t wring out all the runs he might have done, but he took a massive great backswing and used his willowy spaghetti arms to scythe fours and sixes with more liquid style than any other England batter of his era.

If you stop to think what you hope to get out of the game as a fan, it’s hard to argue that Moeen Ali didn’t do his bit.

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Calling someone a trier is usually seen as damning them with faint praise, so we’re going to have to expand on that headline a little bit to ensure the praise is significantly less faint.

The early days

Dale Steyn’s just retired from cricket. We remember his Test debut. For his first wicket, he arced a yorker into Marcus Trescothick‘s middle stump. It was a good start.

Despite that, he only very rarely brushed up against the 90mph mark in that match and we sort of put him to the back of our mind in a mental draw marked ‘South African fast-medium,’ which is not a drawer we often feel like opening. As the series progressed, this seemed increasingly wise as he failed to pick up more than two wickets in any of the six innings in which he bowled.

Some time in 2007, we took Dale out of that boring drawer at the back and moved him to the top drawer – the ‘fast bowlers who are good’ drawer.

He’s been there ever since.

The peak

The two big years from a King Cricket perspective were 2010 and 2013 because both times we named him Lord Megachief of Gold – which, as you all know, is the highest honour in cricket.

In 2010, he took 60 wickets at 21.41. Like a hot knife adrift in a sea of butter, he went through England at Johannesburg; India at Nagpur; West Indies at Port of Spain; Pakistan at Abu Dhabi; and through India again at Durban.

In Nagpur, South Africa made 558-6 and the world concluded it was one of those Indian pitches that we often seemed to get back then. Steyn took 7-51 on it.

In 2013, he took 51 Test wickets at 17.66. He took 6-8 against Pakistan and he took 5-17 against New Zealand on the same pitch his own team had just made 525-8 on, but he saved his purest Dale Steyn performance for India.

More than skill

Throughout Steyn’s career, there was always this stupid thing about how James Anderson was a more skilful bowler. It was entirely true, but it didn’t mean Steyn didn’t swing the ball.

At any given moment there were also a few bowlers who were more accurate, but again Steyn was plenty accurate enough. There were often bowlers who were quicker, but not many, and even fewer who were quicker after eight overs – never mind after 20.

Steyn was up there with the best no matter what fast bowling quality you looked at. He was athletic, he had great cardiovascular fitness, he was aggressive, he bowled swing and seam and he had a mean bouncer. He had a fair idea how to size up a pitch and he could identify batsmen’s weaknesses. His bad days weren’t too bad and his good days were exceptional.

But there was even more to him than that.

The unique ability

With the new ball Dale Steyn would whistle in, looking more or less completely deranged, and whip the ball past the batsman with a bit of away swing. That was pretty much it and that was a good way to use the new ball and plenty of bowlers have built an international career on that and that alone.

What separated Steyn from everyone else was what happened later, when the ball stopped swinging, when it got soft and didn’t bounce and didn’t move, and the fall of a wicket became nothing but a theoretical possibility or a memory.

What happened then was that Dale Steyn would really charge in.

“We have seen teams lose three wickets for nothing and 4-20 against us, more than once, so we know it will happen again,” he once told Wisden. “But not if you stop believing and start bowling slower.”

Dale Steyn was simply unremitting.

Against India in 2013, he got a pasting. In the first Test, he took 1-61 and 0-104. In the second Test, India reached 198-1, at which point he’d conceded 62 runs without taking a wicket.

What happens next? What happens next when you’ve taken 1-227 in the series, the ball’s 66 overs old and nothing’s doing?

Dale Steyn’s next 10 deliveries saw the departure of Cheteshwar Pujara for 70, Murali Vijay for 97 and Rohit Sharma first ball. He came back later to dismiss MS Dhoni, Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma in the space of eight deliveries.

The match and series sharply changed direction. He finished with 6-100.

This is the point

Dale Steyn always tried to take wickets – always – and in so doing he made every second of every Test match he played in utterly captivating. Even when it didn’t seem possible, he tried.

It’s the most obvious ingredient for success, but so often the hardest quality to muster.

Dale Steyn was a trier.

First posted in August 2019 when Steyn retired from Test cricket.

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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.

2 minute read

Some way into the evening session of day four at Galle, Rangana Herath clumsily reverse swept England’s Adil Rashid directly behind the wicketkeeper. He took a run and then, with the impetuousness of youth, ill-advisedly tried to take a second run.

Blessed with in-built padding, Herath was happy to bring out the dive. He then dusted himself down as he waited to hear that he hadn’t made his ground and that his career had therefore ended in a 211-run defeat.

Rangana Herath played a whole career in the shadow of arguably the greatest spin bowler of all time. Then, having played that career, rather than calling it a day like anyone else would, he played a whole extra massively successful career in which he took 433 Test wickets.

Where his predecessor was the most eye-catching spin bowler imaginable, Herath was pretty much the opposite. He built his success not on the one that ripped but on the one that unexpectedly didn’t. The relationship between the threat he appeared to present and the threat that he actually did present was such that we called him the homicidal capybara.

Herath has been excellent and now he is retiring. You might think that an undignified bellyflop into the dirt in a huge defeat is no way for a man of his stature to bow out. We disagree. The best way to leave something behind is to focus not on your achievements, but on all the bad times and how you’re glad you’re finally shot of them.

Rangana Herath.

< 1 minute read

AB de Villiers spent rather a long time desperately trying to engineer a cake monopoly. He wanted to retain and eat The Cake of International Cricket; he wanted to retain and eat The Lucrative Cake of T20 Franchise Cricket; and he also wanted to retain and eat The Cake of Having a Little Bit of Time Off.

Sometimes a man’s desires are impractical and AB finally seems to have accepted that the world isn’t organised how he wants it to be. He’s therefore taken the decision to forego The Cake of International Cricket.

It seems odd timing with a World Cup not so far away. Maybe David Warner and Nathan Lyon broke his spirit.

2 minute read

Each to his own and all that, but the “new chapter” in Zafar Ansari’s life sounds dull as shit to us. He’s retired from cricket at the age of 25 to pursue another career, “potentially in law”.

We’ve been here before. We’ve been here several times. There was James Bruce, who retired at 28 in favour of a career ‘in the City’ and there was Alex Loudon shortly before him.

We wrote about these bizarre decisions for The Wisden Cricketer in 2007 and looking back on that piece, it seems Loudon left cricket in favour of “a corporate advisory firm”. We’ve still no concrete grasp on what that might mean, but we do know that the words alone make us feel hollow and slightly tearful about the fundamental meaninglessness of existence.

To try and gain some insight into WHY IN HELL a man might make such a decision, we spoke to Paul Downton (yes, that one) who carved out a successful career in finance after he retired from cricket (in his thirties) and was at the time working as a director at a firm called Cazenove.

We can’t find our notes from that interview, but we remember him telling us that it would be tough for these players to turn down the opportunity to embark on what would surely prove to be highly lucrative careers. He had to tell us this several times because each time he said it, we responded with some uncomprehending version of “but… they were cricketers?”

Perhaps we’re a bit of a simpleton, but our view has always been that you only get one crappy body and it’s slowly dying from the moment you’re born. Using that body to play sport – and play it well – during the relatively short window when that’s an option has always seemed to us to be one of the absolute finest uses of one’s time.

But as we said at the top, each to his own. Loudon saw things differently. He admitted to us that he’d miss cricket at times, but added: “Mostly I’ll have my head firmly in front of a computer screen and thinking of exciting things in my future career.”

< 1 minute readIf we weren’t actually first off the mark in lauding Tom Smith, we were there or thereabouts. He elicited that laudery by taking 3-29 on the first day of the 2006 season. Fortunately for us, Smith actually made his debut a year before, so we’re still not yet at the point where this website has spanned a player’s entire career. Give it time.

Smith becomes the second Lancastrian 2014 county player to watch to be forced into premature retirement by chronic back knack after Kyle Hogg failed to even see out that season.

It is sad. Smith had an extremely good 2014 and people finally started to notice a man whose name had never really helped his cause. He played for England Lions. He did well. The following season: back knack – and he never really recovered.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s the wafer thin possibility that Glen Chapple might be forced into a 2017 cameo as a result of an unexpected injury crisis. Glen managed to evade injury to such an extent that he managed to take 985 first-class wickets – about half of which came on the same rock hard Old Trafford pitch which shuddered Hogg and Smith’s bodies to a standstill.

Do it, Glen. Just nip in for one match and take a cheeky 15-for. Round it up.

This article was first published on Cricinfo in April 2016, but they seem to have deleted it so we’re republishing it.

For a fair few years, from the early Nineties onwards, there was a phenomenon in British newspapers where Australian opinions of England cricketers were given greater weight. Seasoned cricket journalists would cite instances where an Aussie ‘rated’ an English batsman or bowler as proof of that player’s quality.

The subtext was that Australians knew the secret of cricket, whereas we Brits didn’t. Going by results on the pitch, it seemed a fair assumption.

In 2002 Steve Waugh said of Rob Key: “He doesn’t give a shit about much and is real relaxed. I like that in a bloke; it stops him getting overawed.”

That Waugh had seen a certain something in Key after employing his special Australian ‘good cricketer’ sense was a fillip for the player himself, but there was even more to his assessment for me.

I was, at that time, working in a warehouse and could very much identify with Key’s apparent disinclination to give shits about certain things. A similar age, but with my cricket playing days already behind me (I’m not big on team sports), I perhaps saw him as a slightly larger, southern me vying for the England spot I’d dreamed of as a boy.

In an interview for this website, Key was once asked what advice he would give his younger self, given the chance. “Don’t eat biscuits,” he answered. And what would he be if he weren’t a pro cricketer? “Trade in the derivatives market.” The latter was an obvious lie, but specific enough to be funny where something more commonplace wouldn’t be. In a similar questionnaire for All Out Cricket, he suggested that Here Comes The Hotstepper by Ini Kamoze would be the perfect music to accompany his walk to the crease.

Dry and self-deprecating, Key has never seemed to take himself or his cricket too seriously. Waugh’s assessment hinted that these characteristics could be attributes, rather than flaws. To me, that idea seemed worthy of support, so I supported Key.

He could play too.

Key surfaced as a Test cricketer against India in 2002 via a couple of fill-in appearances following an injury to Marcus Trescothick. This would become a theme of his short Test career. Key was always a stand-in or next in line; never quite the first-choice pick. On that winter’s Ashes tour, an injury to John Crawley saw him return to the side for the second Test.

It was a bleak tour. The first Test started with Nasser Hussain’s infamous decision to invite Australia to bat, continued with the severe injury to Simon Jones and finished with the tourists being bowled out in 28.2 overs. The second Test was an innings defeat and so was the third, in Perth.

In that match, Hussain, Vaughan and Stewart were all caught behind on the first morning failing to cope with what Wisden termed “exceptional bounce and pace.” Key made 47 – “a stout, mostly passive knock.”

This was the innings that impressed Waugh. England fans too remember when someone top scores in such situations. Resolve when fans are most desperate to see it buys a player affection in a way more obviously dominant performances do not.

Depending on your perspective, his dismissal was either frustrating or hilarious. At the time, it was almost certainly the former, but looking back, perhaps the latter. Against an attack comprising McGrath, Gillespie, Lee and Warne, Key was bowled by Damien Martyn.

Further soft dismissals followed against Zimbabwe the following summer. Our man was dropped, never really found form all year and ended up making barely 500 runs in the County Championship.

Fortunately, things were rather different in 2004. Kent finished second in the first division with Key making 1,274 runs at 79.62. He reached 1,000 first-class runs on June 2 and was named one of Wisden’s five cricketers of the year.

There was also that knock against the Windies.

I’ll spare you the detail, but it’s worth emphasising the impact that innings had on me. I’d been desperate for him to make a fifty, yearning for him to make a hundred and this ruddy-faced, somewhat chubby manifestation of my laidback approach to life went and made 221.

He reached the double hundred at about lunchtime on a Friday and when you’re working in a warehouse in the middle of July, that’s when a summer weekend is just looming into view. The endorphins were simmering anyway. The double hundred brought them to a boil.

Yet that wasn’t even his best innings. Two games later, chasing 231 on an Old Trafford pitch on which the West Indies had just collapsed from 88-1 to 165 all out, he made 93 not out as England won.

But he was still essentially a stand-in. Injury to Mark Butcher had given him an opening and it was only another injury to Butcher which saw him return to the Test team in South Africa that winter.

He wasn’t back for long.

To misquote Kevin Keegan, batsmen aren’t born today until they’re in their late twenties or thirties. Key’s Test career was over at the age of 26. He made 83 in his penultimate Test in an England win and never got another chance.

Just as players new to Test cricket are sometimes wrongly perceived to be young, the reverse often seemed to apply to Key in subsequent years. He’d been around for a while and a lot of people thought he was past it.

England went with the unsullied Ian Bell at the start of the 2005 summer. Bell made 65 not out and 162 not out against Bangladesh and England moved on. Key lurked, but always just out of reach.

In 2006, he took on the Kent captaincy. He thought the increased responsibility would help him get back into the England side. At the time, I couldn’t really see the logic in this. It didn’t seem to me that he really needed to do anything different. After his bumper 2004 season, 2005 had seen him score 1,556 Championship runs at 59.84. He just needed to carry on and then take his chance when it inevitably arose.

Unusually, I was proven correct. Key’s batting went downhill. At the end of the season, Graham Johnson, Kent’s chairman of cricket, said: “His commitment to the team has probably impacted on his own form.”

But the commitment was real. Key remained Kent’s captain until 2013 and then took the job on again in 2014. Through prolonged financial troubles and relegation, Key remained. It was not easy and only he knows how much it wore away at his batting.

There were occasional highs. He averaged 70.50 when Kent won the Twenty20 Cup in 2007, despite the necessary pace of captaincy in T20 cricket being “a pain in the arse.” There was also promotion in 2009 – albeit followed by relegation in 2010.

But the overall impression has often been of one man doing his level best to carry almost an entire cricket club. You can only do this if you give a shit, but at the same time it would crush a man in that position if he gave a shit about every last little thing. Rob Key has always been realistic and proportional in his shit-giving.

Primarily, he gives a shit about cricket. If you’ve seen him in what has up until now been his parallel career as a broadcaster, his enthusiasm for the sport is palpable. Laid back, witty and in love with cricket without taking it too seriously, Key seems an ideal fit for what seems likely to be his new career. This means that while he may never again deliver a moment quite so perfect as that Friday lunchtime in 2004, he will surely be given more TV opportunities than Test ones.

2 minute read

Rob Key has retired. It is a sad day. We’re going to don a black cardigan instead of a beige one by way of mourning. We will wear it for 221 minutes in tribute to the number of runs Rob once made in a single Test innings.

Adam Gilchrist’s highest Test score was 204.

You lose again, Adam Gilchrist.

But the truth is, today we all lose. Adam Gilchrist loses the most, but we all lose a little bit. The sky is greyer; the sun is colder; our wrinkles are deeper; and luxury goods are slightly more expensive. Everything is worse. Even this cup of tea is worse. It has slightly too much milk in it. That never would have happened yesterday.

Yesterday Rob Key was still plying his trade as the greatest cricketer in the history of the planet. Today he is playing golf. That isn’t even a joke. We saw it on Twitter. This might just be the most depressing paragraph ever written.

Speaking of Twitter, every now and again we happen across SimonC’s marvellous Rob Key creation which first appeared on this website back in 2009. People often republish it. Quite often they send it to Rob Key himself. If we were on Facebook, we daresay we’d see it there too.

As magnficient as the work is, it makes us sad that no-one ever gives it a proper build-up any more.

For the full effect, this is how it works…

You read this.

Then this.

Then this.

Then this.

Now you’ve earned it.

That’s how you publish a funny picture.

Even worse, the people thoughtlessly bandying the image about on social media don’t even know that Rob’s astride a capybara because he’s part of the Hindu pantheon and the capybara is his vehicle.

WHAT KIND OF AN IDIOT DOESN’T KNOW THAT?

We’re putting this post in the ‘England’ category because Rob did play for England and would have done so again if he could have been bothered. Which he couldn’t.

You may well be tempted to wade into the Rob Key archives of this website in a forlorn bid to soften the pain of this dank event. If you do, this is the hub. Don’t neglect the posts on the old site. We used to write songs about him back then. If you can hold back the tears, we could all have a singalong (separately, without making any actual contact with one another).

Rob Key.

2 minute readIf James Taylor’s public pronouncements betray an admirable desire to retain a sense of humour about things, his retirement from cricket at the age of just 26 due to arrhythmogenic right ventricular arrhythmia is anything but funny.

It’s easy to point to his having had a job as a professional cricketer as a means of highlighting how others may have it tougher, but at heart we’re all selfish bastards. We only truly know the life we lead and Taylor’s life has just turned down a very unexpected dead end.

You make plans, you work towards things and that’s what keeps you sane. It’s not the goals themselves that matter, but finding purpose in striving for them. With his destination obliterated, a man could quite easily find himself derailed. Throw in a serious heart condition and pessimism could become a default emotion.

A high-achieving cricketer’s sense of self is greatly bound up with the game. You are a cricketer. You are a batsman. You score runs. It’s not just what you do, it’s who you are. James Taylor is no longer that and when your occupation has been so all-consuming, how much room was there for anything else? It may be just a game, but a game can be everything and people feel the impact when everything is snatched from them in an instant.

Taylor will eventually be able to redirect his energy and pursue different things, coaxing his mind back to normal in the process – we’re sure of that. As for the heart condition, he is set to undergo an operation. His retirement from the game makes it clear that this will not be a cure in the fullest sense, but it will, presumably, improve his physical health.

James Taylor retires from cricket with the fourth-highest one-day batting average of all time. Decent player and, by all accounts, a decent bloke. The latter is something he can continue to be, no matter what he does next.