Past Achievement vs. Future Promise

It's been a mixed couple of days for England's cricketers.

Graeme Swann's fortunes appeared to have continued on a downward spiral, post-Catgate, as his name was left off the ICC longlist for cricketer of the year. This snub -- and any resulting effects -- lasted barely 24 hours, though, as he was added to the list, and promptly picked up his 98th, 99th, 100th, and 101st Test wickets.

At the other end of the scale, Alastair Cook continued his rather ignominious battle with Salman Butt (batting totals in last five innings: 1, 8, 7, 0, 17) for the title of 'least in form left-handed opener of the series' by adding a meagre 6 runs to his aggregate of 41 in 4 previous innings.

I'm more than prepared to eat a whole dish of humble pie this evening, following a gritty 120 from Cookie that forms the backbone of an eventually-match-winning 200+ lead. The trouble is, I don't think he's going to deliver. Yes, Cook may be the second-youngest batsman in the world, after a certain ST, to reach 4000 Test runs. But past achievement, even when compared with the current greatness of a batsman such as Tendulkar, is not necessarily an indicator of future success.

Graeme Swann's achievements provide an interesting point of comparison. The third of Swann's four wickets yesterday placed him on an intriguing list of players to take 100 wickets in 23 Tests. The names Mankad, Underwood, Warne, McGrath, Mushtaq, and Kaneria will no doubt catch the eye, but it is another English name that is of note, here: nestled between the two great Pakistani spinners is one Stephen James Harmison.

In his prime, Harmison was undeniably a good -- even, on a certain March morning at Sabina Park in 2004, a great -- bowler. But he will never be lauded along with the Indian, English, Australian, and Pakistani names that he and Swann both join at 23 on the 100 list.

Swann's performances over the next years -- not his achievements over the past 23 matches -- will determine whether he goes the way, in English bowling terms, of Underwood or Harmison. Cook's fortunes, similarly, hang in the balance; though a decision on his future may come sooner rather than later.

[POSTSCRIPT, 3pm: Cook falls, 10 runs short of the fairly arbitrary total I set him. Mmmm, tasty.]

On the Kelvin Scale

Graeme Swann's drink-driving charges this week might have been seen as a distraction from the task in hand, as the no. 3 in the World Test bowling rankings was forced to miss training a mere 48 hours before the third Test against Pakistan. What caught the eye in the Cricinfo report on Swann's absence on Monday, however, was the input from the no. 3 in the England T20 batting lineup, one 'Kelvin' Pietersen.

The form of Kaypee, former captain and once the first name on [insert England coach here]'s team-sheet, has been a worry of late. Stephen Brenkley has written about the dipping Test average that will soon plumb depths from which even a Man of the Series Twenty20 performance won't be able to drag him. What this story about Swann shows, however, to the English media and -- equally importantly -- the Australian dressing-room alike, is that here is a cricketer who remains at the heart of (*yuk*) 'Team England': it is KP's twitted comments on Swannee's predicament that make the headlines, ahead of the more professional summary of the team captain.

And it reveals something about Swann, too: even within the England team there are grumblings about the South-African-born contingent. I wonder how Andrew Strauss feels about that?

Why Cricket Doesn't Matter

Umar Gul and Yasir Hameed are two players who have not been at the centre of the Pakistani cricket uproar in recent weeks, but they are significant for two reasons. Firstly, they have provided the Pakistani team with some rare high points in a lacklustre all-round performance in the little-more-than-five days of Test cricket in the series so far: Gul's 65* from no. 9 was not only the team's highest score of the first innings of the first Test, it came at a S/R comfortably higher than those around him, a stat that he reproduced in the second innings; his stats as a bowler have been pretty good, too, with 4 wickets at a respectable 31.5. Hameed's single contribution had less of an impact, but his ability to do what very few of his team-mates had done -- actually hold onto a catch -- makes his role in the side a noteworthy one.

Secondly, however, there is the question of the provenance of these two men. Whilst most of the squad are Punjabi by birth -- nearly half were born in Lahore, in the east of the country -- these two hail from Peshawar, in North-Western Frontier Province. For those of you who've been living under a rock, Gul and Hameed could be forgiven for having things other than the thwack of leather on willow on their mind at present: with current statistics for the flooding in Pakistan touching 12 million affected out of a population of 166 million, it doesn't take a vast imaginative leap to consider that these two -- if not a greater number of the tourists -- might have been directly affected in some way.

It seems to be the done thing at the moment, after successive batting collapses of monumentally inept proportions, to lambast the Pakistani cricket team. Well, after five years that have seen a major earthquake in the vicinity, a terrorist attack on a fellow international cricket team in Lahore, and now this month's floods -- not to mention, within the sport, match-fixing allegations, international bans and the rest -- is it any wonder that they're a bit . . . ermm . . . out of sorts?

A couple of days after my recent post about Murali's status as an all-time great, I read a newspaper piece that suggested Warne's career achievements were the greater as he got a lower percentage of his wickets against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. I think if the recent travails of the Pakistanis show us anything, they serve as a reminder that the fortunes of all international cricket teams rise and fall -- West Indies after 2003 would be a good example, but England teams of the 90s and early 00s were fairly shocking, too -- and for reasons that don't always have everything to do with the sport. This is the beauty of international cricket: that it is at one and the same time a serious business for millions of people, and something that -- when faced with the natural and political disasters of certain regions of the world -- matters not a jot.