You can never underestimate the skill required in regularly going out in your 30s and 40s.
There is a poetic nature to it.
And while some ill informed cricket fans think this makes you a shit batsman, the opposite is true.
Ian Bell is like the John Grisham of the 30/40 odd.
They are all roughly the same, a few cover drives, tight footwork, hitting the ball to the fielder at will, and then out.
We all know them, even if we don’t all care for them.
You might say he is repetitive, but each of these 30/40 odds has a different setting, different baddies, and sometimes even different costumes.
Sure Bell and Grisham are pushing the one trick as far as they can, but it is their specialty, any wavering from the script would result in mass panic from their fans.
Bell has experimented more than Grisham, even producing an existential manuscript of 199 against South Africa.
It left the fans in a quandary, they had grown to love/despise him for his trademark innings, and this brazen attempt to cross genre left them feeling empty inside.
Today there is a twist, having tried to go out for 20 odd (sometimes you have to rush one out for the masses) he now finds a twist coming.
Should he embrace it and write an epic, or should he go back to what he does best.
This has all the hallmarks on an epic, the come back, the luck, playing at his home ground, and the Ashes, but the pull of the familiar cannot be underestimated.
The man is an artist, but sometimes you have to please your fans.
I know how Bell feels, even as I type this I realise that some of you are saying, “Jrod, this is fine, but where is the gratuitous sex and casual swearing.”
Sometime you have to please yourself (not a masturbation joke) and Bell could just do that today like Grisham did with playing for pizza.
If he does, I will miss his 30/40 odds.
That was excellent.
Could Dan Brown be worked in somewhere?
I suspect you could have just sledged him into a big ton
Ask not for whom the Bell tolls, it tolls for Umpire Rudi Koertzen, he of the inexplicable, lightning fast ‘not out’ to an appeal for LBW against Bell, who was trapped plumb in front with bat nowhere near ball. Even Koertzen’s mother, if she were alive and watching, would find it hard to defend this latest Rudi howler to follow up his several at Lord’s. Anything Bell does now in this innings must be regarded as really his second dig.
Even North Sea oilworkers on their rigs shouted ‘that’s out’ on first viewing and they weren’t even watching.
Rudi has taken against Mitch. It was Strauss in 06/07, now it’s Mitch. Dear oh dear.