cricket with balls

New podcast is up.

We talk about the state of New Texas (Queensland) comedy.

How really white whites can make you look fat.

Michael Clarke and Ricky Ponting’s changed personalities.

I mention platypus balls, again.

And we talk about a little hairy bastard.

Listen here.

Or, you can just read the whole thing here as transcribed by Swapnil who lives in Vancouver, not Salt Lake City, so he probably doesn’t wear magic underwear.

 

JK: Joining me again this week to talk non-sense about Australian Cricket is Gideon. How are you?

 

GH: Good Morning, Jarrod. How are you going?

 

JK: I’m very good. You’re back from Brisbane, you’re back in the sweet embrace of Melbourne’s bosom. What was it like up north?

 

GH: For one thing it was unseasonably mild. It was a little bit like the test match of 2010/11. It certainly wasn’t as tropically hot as we’re used to in Brisbane. Except, of course, for the Saturday when it rained cats and dogs and ruled out the entire day. It’s interesting that we still very nearly got a result in the game. Probably another half a day might have done it.

 

JK: Which is weird because the pitch just looked dead.

 

GH: Absolutely dead. But these days so often Test matches end in four days. Interesting that two teams who are Top 3 in World Test Championship still needed the rain’s assistance to achieve an honorable draw.

 

JK: There wasn’t much in it for bowlers. I suppose it was it was good to bat on but it was a bit slow. They said they had the right preparation, so I’m quite not sure how we ended up with that pitch. The Queensland government were protecting the Gabba from drop-in pitches, but that played as much like a drop-in pitch as anything at the MCG.

 

GH: Exactly what had crossed my mind. It seemed to me to be bearing some of the impact of football on the ground. The outfield was very slow as well. And certainly the rain didn’t help things. The Gabba usually quickens up on the second and third day. I think a day under the covers probably slowed the pitch’s maturation. I thought the Australians bowled as well as anyone in the course of the game, on the last day. It suggests to me that perhaps they need some overs in their legs in order to achieve optimum penetration.

 

JK: Everyone wants optimum penetration.

 

GH: Jeez. Pattinson was terrific on the last day. Hilfenhaus seemed to have fallen back into the mechanical ways of two years ago, the appearance that he gives of being on a treadmill where he is running in and almost running back to his mark.

 

JK: He does that semi-circle like he finishes his delivery and just goes straight back around.

 

GH: And then he doesn’t pause at the top of his mark at all. It’s almost like he just wants to get through and bowl a maiden and take his sweater. And Siddle improved over the course of the game and so did Lyon. There wasn’t much spin for Lyon but he took advantage of the match situation in the last innings to throw a few up and he looked a better bowler for it.

 

JK: It was quite interesting that Australia was in disarray after Day One. There was so much talk, even someone like Steve James said that I am glad to wake up to find out that Australia doesn’t have a bowling attack. But pretty much by the end of the test you can almost reverse that statement.

 

GH: Certainly when Morkel and Steyn were not bowling, I thought, South Africa looked terribly, terribly ordinary and actually embarrassingly abject when Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla were turning their arms over. What kind of No. 1 Test nation in the world has two bowlers like that who really would not get a game in the Top 3 XIs at the Yarras.

 

JK: They were a bit unlucky though because Duminy can bowl, maybe not brilliantly, but he can bowl better than that.

 

GH: Little bit unlucky, but I think you make your luck to some degree. I thought that was a poorly selected team too. I can’t really follow the rationale for choosing Rudolph. He’s an honest cricketer but at No. 6 he doesn’t really provide them with any kind of counter-punching power. He’s not a particularly outstanding fielder. I understand that he is quite good for the morale, but teams at No. 1 in the world should not be in need of morale.

 

JK: He’s the best Andy Bichel they could find. I want to talk about Kleinveldt. He’s an amazing selection. When his record came up, when he was bowling that first over, he had a first class bowling average of 27. And I thought okay he’s a guy that’s not too old. He’s obviously massively out of shape. He’s shaped pretty much like one of your teammates at the Yaara and much of the testmatchsofa crew. And he bowls with this amazingly whippy action where it doesn’t look like he can get much swing or seam movement. And he decided to try and bounce Eddie out for a day. And he couldn’t stop bowling no-balls. He just looks like a club cricketer who is just lost.

 

GH: Exactly. I don’t know whether you saw the South Africans wear this very brilliant white strip, it’s almost luminous. He looked like a refrigerator on casters. I think he bowled a couple of no-balls in his first over. He just looked like someone who was either (a) nervous or (b) a case of mistaken identity. Apparently he’s a teammate of Philander’s and to he was Philander’s mentor and, to a degree, Philander overtook him to take his opportunity. But he looks a mile off being a test-class bowler and I’d be very surprised if we saw him at Adelaide.

 

JK: Yeah, that first over, he went for ten, with two no-balls and twice Eddie hit him for four. But Eddie also picked out the fielder with two even worse balls that he should’ve smashed. It could’ve been an eighteen run first over. But it wasn’t so much that. You can understand first over nerves even though he is a very experienced player, as you said. It’s not like he’s a young talent coming in. But what was more amazing is it was hard to see how he’d ever averaged 27 in first class cricket. There didn’t seem to be any wicket-taking ability, really, other than the fact that for the first couple of balls you’d probably say to yourself – that’s a weird action. Or you might say to yourself – he’s a bit chunky. But other than that, he’s the sort of guy that, if I was playing first class cricket, I’d go okay against. It’s interesting that him and Philander are from the same area because neither of them looked fit and you have that white strip, it is so unforgiving. You know the whole Samit Patel thing, of looking worse in the white, that definitely happened to those two guys. What did you think about the whole sledging furor on the last afternoon?

 

GH: Just absolutely nothing to it, really. I was glad to see some intensity in the cricket on the last day because at times the match had drifted. South Africa, in particular in the field, they have so many poor fielders that they just don’t seem to be maintain pressure. You’re hiding three or four blokes in that team and when the batsmen are on top and it looks like the entire field is down ill, which is what Michael Clarke makes it look like at the moment, they really looked like a mid-table team. They’ve got a lot of work to do before they get to Adelaide.

 

JK: It’s interesting that, when I was watching England-South Africa, last summer, on four different occasions, when I had nothing to write, I started to write a piece about how un-athletic they were in field and how bad they were. Morne Morkel, it’s almost like he can’t see the ball. And Imran Tahir, it is brilliant. Then you’ve got someone like Vernon Philander who puts a lot of effort in but he is not particularly the best mover. They looked marginally better than India did the summer before but that’s not what you think of from South Africa. You think of these amazing athletes and they are not really like that anymore.

 

GH: You look back to the South African team of 1952-53 which probably invented the idea of fielding being an offensive weapon in international cricket, Jack Cheetham’s team. You’re not meant to talk about that in South Africa anymore, that period, of course, did not exist.

 

JK: I don’t think those players have numbers, Gideon. I’m not sure if they count.

 

GH: They’ve really missed de Villiers in the field. It’s almost bit of a club cricket situation where your most athletic guy in the field happens to be the only guy who can handle the gloves so you put him behind the wicket and, all of a sudden, your fielding looks absolutely hopeless. It’s happened to us often enough. They really needed some energy and some vitality in that in-field to just keep the batsmen on their mettle. Because for periods, the Australian batsmen, particularly when Hussey and Clarke were batting, were just coasting.

 

JK: The AB thing also accounts for the run-outs. Because he doesn’t think like a wicket-keeper, which is a problem when he is keeping. But the biggest problem is, I think Eddie should have been run-out. He hit the ball straight to mid-on, to be fair they might have even made a run in it but Clarke didn’t want it. I’ve counted about seven or eight times in the last summer, where it just took AB a second to work out that he had to go to the stumps. It’s funny because Matthew Wade who isn’t a keeper from Perth, even though he looks like he should have been a keeper from Perth, but when you watch him or Matt Prior, they take off straightway, whereas AB de Villers doesn’t take off. That’s almost like what South Africa look like at the moment, they’re that team that who is just not sure what they want to do, because their first innings was really confused for me.

 

GH: Yes it was. It looked to me, at the end of the first day, that they were building towards a massive total. I think they made 69 in the last 27 overs of the first day and both batsmen didn’t mind coming back the next day and dictating. Australia bowled quite well in the first half hour although not all that well after that. Throughout that period Australia were not good at building pressure either. But then there were a couple of wickets, both the establish batsmen got out. You had two new batsmen at the crease and they showed no particular initiative or game awareness. Perhaps because Duminy was out and that had thrown their plans awry, Rudolph has a question about his place in the team and Philander really is an over promoted tail-ender. And it was a very low intensity period of cricket which allowed Australia to re-establish themselves in the game.

 

JK: I watched the first session and to go to bed and then get up. I didn’t expect Australia to bowl them out but I also didn’t expect them to score that low in that period. The one thing I’ve noticed under Kirsten is they actually have been far more aggressive. I noticed that Ian Chappell and Ian Healy were making jokes about the fact that they are still the same old South Africa but everything I’ve seen of them in recent times hasn’t been like that. They’ve actually done fairly attacking declarations. I’m pretty sure I had a heart-attack at one of their declarations in the UK. I wasn’t sure if it was Graeme Smith or someone had taken over his body. And yet, it almost looked like they retracted to that old style team. When you’ve got Kallis and Amla, those guys can roll on forever and they don’t always kick on, but surely it’s up to the other guys to get going and AB and Rudolph didn’t look like they could.

 

GH: In hindsight, one of the inflection points in the game was when Kallis failed to advise Amla to review the LBW. I’m surprised that Amla needed help in that. If you’re hit above the knee-roll and the ball feels as though it’s decked back in, fair dinkum. If it’d happened to me and I would have been given out, I’d have been furious. It was que sera sera with Amla.

 

JK: It is a bit like his personality. My first call was that’s a bit high. No way it couldn’t look that way. That was quite interesting. Let’s talk about Clarke. Its hard to talk about him because he’s had so many different periods in his career. He’s probably, in the future, only gonna be remembered for his amazing start and this bit.

 

GH: I’ve actually written a column in the paper today about the perception battles that both Clarke and Cowan have undergone in their careers. They both played together in the U-19 world cup in 2000. That was the tour from which Clarke was recalled to play first class cricket for New South Wales. There was huge investment by the media and by fans in the idea that Clarke was a continuation of the glorious green and gold tradition. We fell in love with the idea that he wore his baggy green when he scored his maiden test century in Bangalore. We had Darren Lehmann offering to stand down for him because he was obviously so special. Then there was this period of bitter disillusionment about three years ago when he became associated with a high-profile, accident-prone girlfriend and boot was in the other foot for a change. The Daily Telegraph was describing him as the most over-rate cricketer in Australia and saying that personally he was a tosser. We’re very difficult to satisfy in Australia and no one changes that much in the course of their life. Clarke certainly has matured as a person over the last 18 months or so, he’s had to. It’s interesting, if you have memory longer than a goldfish, these are quite strange times in cricket to find that Michael Clarke is not only Australia’s captain and go to guy but he’s also a columnist in the Daily Telegraph.

 

JK: That was about the period that everything started changing. He changed management, he changed girlfriend, he, sort of, changed everything in his life. I suppose, he had to because he was massive under-achiever, purely on talent. You were talking about he was the continuation of the line. I heard the phrase ‘once in a generation’ about Michael Clarke so many times that it almost lost meaning. It was like people were punching me in the head with that phrase.

 

GH: They said the same thing about Mitchell Johnson, didn’t they?

 

JK: They did.

 

GH: So it was twice in a generation, wasn’t it?

 

JK: There’s a lot of ‘once in a generation’. It comes around more than you think. But it was quite weird and then for him to drop off. I thought he struggled not so much tactically but he struggled with handling players. It seems like everything is changed in his life and he’s just become a real boy. He wasn’t really a real boy at any time and now he is (unintelligible). The form, you can’t make up form like this, can you?

 

GH: That’s right. I think he was always a super dedicated cricketer and a terribly, terribly hard worker and an enormous talent. The one thing that has been immensely useful and under-rated in Clarke’s ascendancy is the role of Ricky Ponting in legitimizing his captaincy. Having an ex-captain in the ranks is not historically a formula for tranquility and congenuity.

 

JK: More importantly, it is un-Australian

 

GH: It is un-Australian. But Ponting has actually helped make it Australian. There’s no doubt that Ricky Ponting, of all the cricketers in my time, has said (lets draw) by public image and personal glory than any other. This last period of his career is, in some respect, his finest moment. He’s become a senior pro and first among equals as far as the Australian team is concerned and a bench-mark for other players in this team. If you train as hard as Ricky Ponting then you will as successful has Ricky Ponting.

 

JK: Ponting’s changed a lot too. He became very bitter and very angry when he was captain and things weren’t going his way and once he let go of the captaincy he looked at the world a little more and went it’s not the end of everything, it’s just me being a captain. I remember moment when he couldn’t accept the third umpire’s decision of Kevin Pietersen at the MCG and that was about the last time I can remember him being, what we used to call, the hairy-armed troll. It’s the last time I can really remember him being that angry little man. Since then he’s just become a normal human being. From everything I’ve heard around the team, you can’t go past the fact that players just talk him up at all times and wasn’t happening five years ago with Ponting. So he’s obviously had a lot of change and Clarke’s had a lot of change. I don’t think three years ago, had neither of them changed, this situation would wotk for either of them.

 

GH: That’s true. For Ponting the source of confusion and dissatisfaction was the fact that he, sort of, led Allan Border’s captaincy career in reverse. He started off with this great team and watched it disintegrate around him whereas Border started with a middling team and built it up into a team on the brink of being World Champion. And the first half of his captaincy career didn’t prepare him for the second half. Your bowlers couldn’t bowl to one side of the wicket. When you’ve gotten used to handling Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, it’s just baffling. What do you do then? I think part of the truculence that Ponting displayed in that period was a sense of disorientation. Why can’t bowlers do what they have been used to doing for years? Bowling used to look so easy.

 

JK: Yeah, definitely. Have you got any amazing insights for us for Adelaide? What are you expecting? Tahir has to play, doesn’t he?

 

GH: Definitely, Tahir has to play. Tahir worries me a little bit. l know you are a big fan. He does seem to bowl his overs in a terrible hurry. He does seem terribly, terribly excited as he’s bowling. With the short squares boundaries at Adelaide, he could go for a lot of runs. That’s one of the reasons why I would have liked to have seen him play at Brisbane. It is a more forgiving ground for a spinner.

 

JK: He can start very bad. He needs to find a rhythm. Sometimes, it can be hard for him to get into it. Once he gets into a rhythm, he doesn’t get scored off that much. Of all the bowlers I’ve seen in the world, he’s probably the most in love with his own bowling which is actually something I like.

 

GH: Yeah, but these days in international cricket, there is a tendency to want to attack every spinner as soon as they come on. I have no doubt that that’s the tactic that Australia will pursue if all things are equal. I think Smith has sent a message of ambivalence about Tahir by leaving him out in this Test match. If the current formation continues, there will be seven lefthanders in the Australian team for Tahir to bowl against. That’s not an easy challenge for a leg-spinner.

 

JK: It isn’t. But if any leg-spinner is gonna do it then it’s gonna be the one with a very hard to pick wrong’un. That definitely brings him back. If they pick anyone other than Tahir, they are almost saying that they’re gonna try and win this series by attrition and I’m not sure that’s the message they should be promoting. Having said that, Kallis didn’t bowl many overs. So perhaps Tahir not playing wasn’t as much to do with him as much to do with the fact that Kallis doesn’t look like he can get through anything more than five or so overs in a day.

 

GH: I think they were banking on not using Kallis too much because after a while it did look like a draw for the last day and a half. They weren’t gonna take too many risks on busting a bowler, they’d keep him back for when he’d have maximum impact. I actually think that he looked alright with the ball. He wasn’t taking a lot out of himself and I think that from what we saw of him in England he’s still potentially an impact bowler. He’d still bowl that 140-145 kph ball out of nowhere with that little bit of extra grunt. He’s not a bowler that you can afford to take a too many risks with. He’s just so sagacious.

 

JK: I think you’re right but the one thing that I found interesting is that we know that the Kookaburra ball doesn’t swing that long. And he was brought in well after it was going to swing. I just wondered whether they just didn’t want to give him too much to do. Whether that’s just that he’s not that fit. He never really looks fit. Does he? And he never really looks like he wants to bowl.

 

GH: None of the Kookaburras swung at all in Brisbane. To be fair, the climactic conditions didn’t really suit it. But it was amazing that when the odd ball did swing, it was completely out of the ordinary. There was a little bit of reverse swing but not very much.

 

JK: That’s because the Kookaburra ball is from the Southern part of Melbourne and the Platypus ball is from the Northern suburbs, it would have swung sideways.

 

GH: You’ve used a Platypus, obviously, rubbish balls. They used them in the BTCA.

 

JK: We should talk about how rubbish Platypus balls are every podcast. I wanted to talk about Greg Ritchie. It’s an amazing furor about a guy who since the early 90s has had a racist comedy act and it’s taken this long for it to upset anyone to the point where he’s not being invited to cricket grounds.

 

GH: It was interesting that Ritchie delivered that routine several times during the course of the Test match. Neil Manthorp, who was sitting next to me in the press-box, saw the first one the day before the game and he was extremely unimpressed. He didn’t do anything about it. When in Rome. I’ll just let it go. Telford Vice, from the Sunday Times who reported the story, only came upon it quite by chance. He walked past an open door and heard the sound of Ritchie’s voice and pours to listen in to some of the material and was shocked about what he heard. So he wasn’t actually attending the lunch, he was just overhearing it. So, it’s, kind of, a fluke story. I dare say that Ritchie’s being giving the same routine in Queensland for fifteen years and hence his consternation and confusion that anyone should begin to complain about it now.

JK: I don’t think it would be the same routine. He probably originally would’ve had it against Aboriginals or Asians and then he moved it on. Let’s not forget Mahatma Cote, who became an icon of a brown- faced comedian. He was the only dark face we had on Australian TV during the 90s, wasn’t he?

 

GH: Yeah, but don’t forget we had Hey Hey it’s Saturday.

 

JK: The difference Hey Hey it’s saturday was that it happened once and everyone seemed to not like it anymore. Whereas Greg Ritchie, when I grew up, he’d be on Sport 927 in the mornings, doing Mahatma Cote’s voice. Whether he put the make-up on to do the radio interview, I don’t know but that’s been going on a long time and it’s just a thoroughly unlikeable person. But the thing is that the report I read and you might know more talking to Telford, but the report I read was everyone just laughed at it.

 

GH: Yeah, at the lunch that Neil Manthorp attended, the laughter was somewhat embarrassed, somewhat uneasy. You might just have gotten away with it. Oh No, maybe you didn’t.

 

JK: At your book launch for the Shane Warne book where Eddie Cowan stumbled over some words, did you perform anything there in brown-face?

 

GH: No, I didn’t but there was a hysterical moment at my book launch. We now have a lift in the South Yarra pavilion, which is one storey. Apparently it’s for the throng of hand-kept cricketers that over the years have been turning away. The fact is we only use it for getting slabs upstairs. And just as Eddie finished his speech, the lift doors opened as if by magic and there was an intake of break. Was it Warnie turning up with Liz? When, in fact, it was one of our committee members and his wife turning up with a bowl of salad. He looked around the room at everyone looking at him and was wreathed in this imbecilic smile. Why is everyone looking at me?

 

JK: I suppose we better talk about Ed. He’s the one person we haven’t discussed at all, considering he’s probably going to be one of the seven listeners of this podcast. How was it being there? I missed out, I didn’t even stay up for the actual 100 because I was so angry he couldn’t do it before lunch.

 

GH: From a purely personal point of view, it’s a unique experience for me to see a friend of mine make a Test century. For the first half hour of the innings, I was extremely nervous. I was actually physically shaking in the press box. I had to cross my legs in order to stop that happening.

 

JK: I’m glad it’s not just me that it happens to.

 

GH: We live every ball with Ed. But after half an hour, he asserted himself early. He got to 20 very quickly and his wife always says that he’s the calmest, he’s nervous. And he certainly didn’t look it.

 

JK: Can I just say something about that? She says that a lot. I’ve got a lot of documentary footage of Eddie that I think completely takes that theory apart. Also, talking to George Bailey about him, I think you’d find he is quite often nervous.

 

GH: Well, nervous energy can help you perform. You wouldn’t want to be sleepy or indolent facing an attack including Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel. He looked very decisive. I saw him batting in the Victoria Shield game, he didn’t make many – he got 42 and 16, but I thought he looked in terrific form and seemed to me to be batting as well as he ever had. He just hadn’t been getting the results that he would have wished. Here we are the irrelevance of form in domestic cricket. Ricky Ponting’s average over 100 in domestic cricket and got our fifth ball and Ed’s averaged in 17 and looked to me in (barks).

 

JK: He was helped by South Africa. It reminded me about the Marcus North and Phil Hughes thing. When they bowl to batsmen they are not really used to, they quite often get it amazingly wrong for an entire innings. They, suppose, did in the session the following morning when they didn’t bowl him as many short balls. I didn’t think they put any pressure on him; they still let him score a bit easily.

 

GH: He’s very good at getting off strike. He’s got lots of options off the hip, to the left hand of cover. This was an innings of someone who had planned for every bowler, was thinking about the ways in which the bowler might try to get him out and had come up with means to counteract it. It was an innings that he had been thinking about for five or six months and it showed.

 

JK: It was very obvious the way he batted against Philander especially. He was so far down his crease. He was thinking about how he was gonna stop the late movement and all that sort of thing. More importantly and probably the most important thing we can finish a podcast with is that Ian Chappell was forced to say nice things about him over and over again.

 

GH: I didn’t hear that but I wish I had. It would’ve been a great moment. Ed was in England with Australia A over our winter and he watched the South Africans bowling to Strauss. So he had an idea of the way in which they would approach bowling to a left-hander. He had anticipated all the situations that he was gonna find himself in. This was not an innings that was won or lost on the day in question. It was one that his whole life had been leading up to. I know how much he’s longed for the opportunity to show what he can do. And so far in Test cricket, he’s been typecast as a limited player, as an old-fashioned grinder, an old-fashioned attrition cricketer. Well, there’s more to him than that and you began to see it. This was an innings that he’s hankered to play. It’ll be a defining one for him.

 

JK: I think when he retires from the big time, I think he’d do very well in one-day cricket for the Yarras but I don’t wanna put any pressure on you for having to select him at all.

 

GH: If I can play one-day cricket, then Ed can too.

 

JK: Thanks you very much, Gideon. We’ll talk to you next week.

 

GH: My pleasure, Cheers Jarrod.

Swapnil Shah transcribed this for me. You’ve got to appreciate the unnecessary effort in doing this. Sort of like writing up a dossier just so you can leak it. Although on his site it says Swapnil lives in Salt Lake, so what else is he going to do with his time.

If this transcript looks scary long and you need something to listen to while running from imaginary monsters on your treadmill, the podcast is available here.

Cricket Sadist Hour – A Transcript
Nov 7, 2012

Jarrod Kimber chats with Gideon Haigh on Rob Quiney, Graeme Smith’s future, cricket balls and what’s not-so-good about the Gabba

Digitally joining me is the man, the myth, the legend, that’s what everyone says about him but actually he’s a F-grade cricketer that basically is trying to hold on to Cricket any way he can. It’s Gideon Haigh.

JK: How are you?

GH: You flatter me, Jarrod.

JK: It was great the way that you got your, basically you were asked to do the Bradman speech and you spent about 25 minutes talking about yourself and how you play Cricket.

GH: Well, I talked about my sponsors, the sponsors pretty mad at me; I was on message to put on a gratuitous Lachlan Fisher reference (unintelligible). It hasn’t done me any good at club level – last three innings I’ve had two dodgy lbws and a dodgy caught-behind.

JK: But that’s what we love about Club Cricket, that you can say everything nice about it but at the end of the day, if you can’t play…

GH: it just turns around and bites you in the arse.

JK: Now, you’ve got a new book as well. I think, I could be wrong, but you are the first person to ever write a book about this young man, Shane Warne.

GH: Ya, first person to write a proper book, anyway. Even Shane wasn’t able to do that. He’s written two autobiographies and they’re really book-shaped objects rather than books. It was interesting to sort of study the existing literature on Warne. It’s vast but it’s not deep. There’s an awful lot of very pedestrian, very superficial, very, quite puerile stuff that’s been written about it. And, to my surprise, I found relatively little that was actually a physical description, of him bowling. I guess, because people saw him bowl, fifty thousand deliveries at international level, there’s a general assumption that people have seen it all before and if they are curious they can go to Youtube. But it was one of my paramount objectives to write a description of Warne bowling that kind of, explored exactly how wonderful it was and the sensations that you experienced while watching it. Because I suspect that in ten-twenty years time when we don’t have the physical specimen to study, people will have forgotten what a transcended experience it was.

JK: You talk about the physical specimen and the first thing I noticed when I got the book was he just doesn’t look anything like the person on the cover of the book anymore. I mean, it’s impossible not to notice that. It’s almost like, because we’ve seen him change, not slowly, but quite dramatically, quite quickly. But at the same time, we’ve all seen the pictures as it’s been happening. And then to actually, suddenly get that image in front of you of what he used to look like, it’s phenomenal how much he’s changed.

GH: Yes, I’ll never forget being in the press-box at Lords in 2009 and seeing out of the corner of my eye this orange streak pass through the back with this blue rictus. His teeth were so white, they are almost blue. And it is quite spell-binding; you almost can’t take your eyes off him. He actually reminds me, little-bit, these days of Bert Newton (not sure). I remember I once went on the Bert Newton show and the advice that I was given before I went on was, “Don’t start staring at his head. You just can’t take their eyes of his hair. Just try to look elsewhere”.

JK: Ya, that wouldn’t be hard with him. Talking of people with big heads, I want to go into Shane Watson a little bit. Brydon’s written a piece saying that if Shane Watson doesn’t bowl anymore, he may not get picked for Australia. I know, last summer, that was the big rumor – that Australia could do without him. And since then he performed superhero like in the World Twenty20. What do you think about Watson and do you think they will pick him if he can’t bowl and he clearly can’t bowl?

GH: Watson has created himself, over the last three or four years, a bit of a niche that suits him at international level. He likes opening the batting, because as he says in his autobiography, he likes the fact that when going in first, he doesn’t have to respond to a match situation, he can create a match situation for him. And he likes being able to bowl, because he thinks it takes pressure off his batting. Psychologically, he seems to be unable to step outside that and do anything else. He’s created a world that suits him or a role that suits him and I think any changed to that role, he finds, disproportionately difficult. So, if for physical reasons, he has to change his role, then that will stretch him psychologically.

JK: “Watson’s world” is a very scary concept. Basically, what we have got is, we’ve got a guy who doesn’t make enough hundreds in Test Cricket. He does get a lot of good starts but he is probably not batting like a top-order batsman if he’s not making big hundreds. We’ve got a guy who can bowl decently and take wickets and has taken five-wicket hauls in test matches and occasionally change the game but everytime you bring him on to bowl you’re afraid you want see him again for six to eighteen months. And you’ve got a guy who, for whatever reason, maybe doesn’t quite fit the new team, the new Australia way of working

GH: Yes, I think that it’s interesting that Australia was able to get by with four bowlers last year, they didn’t necessarily need a fifth bowler’s input, and his position in the field has closed up. He can’t field at first slip anymore. First and second slip are taken. Where do you put him in the field? He’s not quick in the midfield, he’s not a natural gully fielder, do you stick him at mid-on? He’s not gonna look a little bit obtrusive at mid-on. Somehow, the role that he performed has closed up and he hasn’t been able to re-invent himself.

JK: Ya, it’s quite odd and obviously with him out, we’ve gone straight to Rob Quiney. Have you seen much of him from Victoria?

GH: Yes, Little bit. I’ve always quite liked him as a classic, he’s a very Australian looking player. He’s one of those players who couldn’t come from any other country – lean, (ranging), hungry, aggressive, plays all three forms. A bit home-spun, even sometimes a little bit crude in his methods but looks as though he’s played a bit of cricket at lower levels, knows what it’s all about. You’ve seen a bit of him too, Jarrod. I enjoyed your piece about the night that made Rob Quiney.

JK: Well, I’ve seen a lot of him early on, I’ve not seem him that much recently except in IPL and they odd game in the Big Bash. I’ve always said, he gets a lot of abuse in the IPL because he plays spinners dreadfully. But I think he’s as good a fast bowling batsman there is in Australia and I think that’s essentially why he is being picked. I can’t think of too many other batsmen outside the main team at the moment who could play fast bowling anywhere near as good as him and he probably plays it better than some of the others. And I think that’s a massive advantage coming up against South Africa. He’s gonna face two of the fastest bowlers in the world and probably the smartest seam bowler in the world. I am worried though that they picked him, perhaps, too much because of this whole thing that Dale Steyn doesn’t like bowling to left-handers. I think Morne Morkel could bowl to a left-hander in his sleep and let’s be honest he usually plays in his sleep.

GH: You got Post hoc ergo propter hoc rationalization, isn’t it? The whole left-hander shtick.

JK: Ya, it’s interesting. What do you think about Doolan? He’s made 160 in that game. He’s usually a top-order batsman, usually a No. 3, and he is also four-five years younger than Quiney. It’s interesting that they went with Quiney, it’s not like his record or his form this year has demanded it. I wonder if they were just looking for someone who wouldn’t be fazed.

GH: Ya, I really liked Doolan. He’s essentially another classic, old-fashioned Australian player, who hasn’t come through the new-fangled path. He’s got a very traditional upbringing of club cricket. He’s a bit of an enigma, Doolan. I’ve seen him look absolutely terrible like he’s almost got no idea which end of the bat to hold. Infact, I saw him batting at Bankstown earlier this season and he looked in all sorts playing against Trent Copeland with Brad Haddin standing up. He seemed to lack any sort of fluency and any sort of shape. And then two weeks later, I saw him playing at the MCG and looking a million bucks. It’s almost as though he doesn’t quite understand how good he is. I’ve met him when he came to the South Yarra cricket club last season. He’s a very mild mannered, softly-spoken and dryly-humored young man. He doesn’t strike you a natural, gregarious, aggressive, out-going, international sportsman. He’s done it the way that Australian players used to it, by steadily accumulating experience at the first-class level. The fact that he has batted at No. 3 for such a long period suggests that he actually might have been a better bet than Quiney. There is a difference between opening the batting and No. 3. It’s actually asking quite a lot of Quiney to essentially bat out of position in his test debut.

JK: Ya, you’ve got, Doolan, Davis and Klinger who were the other three. And I just that wonder whether they are all too similar to Eddie Cowan and whether they were just thinking we know that Quiney’s not sort of guy that’s gonna get over-awed, we know that he’s gonna attack a little bit, we are willing to take a punt on him batting at No.3. We don’t want to get stuck in the mud with Davis or Klinger. Maybe they were worried about having too many defensive batsmen in the top order.

GH: Well, I tell you what. Watching Doolan in the Shield match here, he was smashing them, they were peeling off the middle of his bat. It looked as though he almost could not believe how well he was hitting the ball.

JK: That’s a good place to be. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that myself. Let’s talk about South Africa. Graeme Smith. This could probably be his last test tour to Australia, if not, his last test tour anywhere.

GH: Ya, this is a South African team that’s at its peak that perhaps over the next two to three years faces a fair but of man-power turn over. That creates its own kind of pressures for a side with the need to achieve, the need to make the most of this environment and the opportunity to win in Australia. He’s obviously closer to the end than the beginning.

JK: The signing with Surrey was quite interesting. I know for a fact that surrey were looking for someone who was going to be available a good period of the year but basically they were looking for someone who wanted to retire and become their captain. It sounded like he originally said No to the deal and then signed a three year deal. It almost sounds like, I want to beat Australia, go back home, finish on my own terms, and then maybe just head off to England.

GH: And I think probably dealing with the South African administration on a daily basis would probably wear you out. And Smith’s had his problems over the last eighteen months. I think every one of those circumstances has a limited life-span. And the turn-over at the top of Cricket South Africa means that everyone’s operating in a normally uncertain environment too.

JK: And I think his wife is Irish or Scottish. There might even be more, he might just think, I can play probably five to six days of County Cricket without too many problems. It’ll be interesting to see who they go with because AB de Villiers is obviously their golden child but he is very close to becoming Dan Vettori. It seems to be that almost every job you need they go “Well, AB will do it”.

GH: It’s got to be Amla, I think. Amla’s got the authority, he seems to have to personality, he’s got a bit of grounding in the job and I think he’s got universal respect and authority. He would be my selection.

JK: He’s the person I would have selected as well but I talked to Telford Vice in the UK Summer and Telford said that he doesn’t think that Amla wants to do it. He doesn’t want to take an extra job and that he’s quite happy being the guy in the background who smiles and makes the runs. So it could be an interesting one if Smith does go. How do you think they’ll go in this actual tour? Because they’re a good side but they also generally play their worst cricket after they’ve played their best cricket.

GH: That’s a little bit like the Yarras.

JK: I’m gonna have to start beeping out references to the Yarras.

GH: You look up and down that side and it is quite hard to discern weaknesses in it. One thing that stands in Australia’s favor is that I think both teams have explosive attacks that could break the back of an innings in an hour. That’s often all that it takes to win a Test Match. So I think that probably Australia is a better chance of taking a Test Match off South Africa than England was, England being a steady, consistent, rather humdrum, sometimes professional outfit. You never quite know what Pattinson is gonna do on a daily basis and he was very, very sharp against Western Australia. Having looked a little bit indifferent against Tasmania, he’s coming into some prime Test Match form at the perfect moment.

JK: Ya, him and Siddle. I hate to say something nice about Cricket Australia but the idea of putting the videos up online of Shield Cricket. I’ve seen a few spells, especially when I was in Sri Lanka and him and Siddle just looked amazingly primed to take down Test Cricket. They’re at that level where they are almost too good to get the edge in Shield Cricket right at the moment.

GH: Pattinson just seems to have gotten better spell by spell this Summer and he was scary in the late evening on Friday against WA. He looked like he was gonna take a wicket every ball.

JK: I wanna talk about both bowling attacks because when I was leaving Australia last summer, Bill Lawry, Craig McDermott and a bunch of drunk people were saying that Australia had the best bowling attack in the world. And South Africa arrived with the best bowling attack since the West Indies. What’s happening?

GH: I thought England had the best bowling attack in the world.

JK: That depends on who you talk to on what day. But that did seem to happen. I noticed the minute the South African team turned up, the Australian press couldn’t stop telling them how good they were.

GH: But that’s just the fifteen second gold-fish memory of the likes of most Australian cricket journalists. We’re infinitely suggestible and once we pick up a line, we like to repeat it to enjoy the sound of it.

JK: But what do you think? I’d say that there are weaknesses and strengths in both attacks. South Africa have got an extra bowler with Kallis which gives them a huge advantage and Tahir gives them something else completely. Vernon Philander is a very good bowler but I don’t think he can keep up this run. I think he will eventually have to slow down and this may be the series on flat Australian wickets. Morne Morkel is always one cheeseburger away from ending up in an asylum from what I can tell. They are an attack that could collapse and they weren’t always bowling that brilliantly against England. England gave them a lot of advantages with lot of stupid shots.

GH: Of course, in a three test match series, less can go wrong than in a five test match series. Perhaps both attacks are suited by the fact that it is a shorter series rather than a longer series. They can go harder over shorter periods without necessarily having to worry about seeing out a full-fledged five test match series. It’s interesting the venues that have been chosen for this series. Brisbane and Perth, Australia’s taken actually a bit of a risk in programming games involving South Africa at those two venues rather than on more benign surfaces. It could be quite explosive. Certainly, if you are in the top three of either side, you will have earned your runs for sure.

JK: The Perth one is probably more interesting. The Gabba generally gets the first test now I suppose but the WACA would be the one that you would throw to Sri Lanka so that you give yourself an easy win. They haven’t done that. I know you are not up in Brisbane yet, but do we know much about the pitch? There’s talk about Gabba green tops and then quite often they are shaved the last moment. Do we know much about the pitch?

GH: I’ve heard it’s pretty flat. I’ve heard it’s designed to last the full five days. Of course, what you can’t reckon is the climactic conditions. It’s both an innovating environment and a potentially enticing one for a bowler who moves the ball in the air. You’d suspect that if Philander is gonna bowl well anywhere in Australia, it’s gonna be at the Gabba.

JK: Ya, that’s a good point. Although I bet you that he might need to get used to going up the wind at the WACA. I think it was New Zealand, this time they toured or the last time, there was an early November pitch that moved around everywhere up there. It’d be interesting to see if they take that because it could be a series, if you win the toss on the first day you could almost book yourself a chance of not losing.

GH: The scores last time against New Zealand at Brisbane belie how good the pitches were. Batsmen were being beaten once an over, they just weren’t good enough to get an edge. I thought Clarke’s hundred at Brisbane was a first rate one. The season before, the preparations were compromised and they ended up with a pretty flat wicket and that it was very difficult to get the batsmen out on the last couple of days. But the scores have been middling at the Gabba this year which leads you to suspect that the groundsmen are trying to do something to make things a little bit interesting and none of batting top sixes have had an awful lot of recent form on the board. They’ll be doing their acclimatization to five-day cricket in a five-day game which has a lot of challenges.

JK: It’s interesting, actually, I forgot to mention it earlier that Quiney’s record at the Gabba is phenomenal. I’m not sure why he hasn’t moved to Brisbane. Maybe he’s afraid they play at the Allan Border Oval too much, but he seems to be the only batsman excited that that’s where the Test is being played.

GH: The other thing about the Gabba is those ridiculous seats that they have, it’s probably one of the worst seeing grounds in the world, those dabble seats, the multi-colored seats. You often see slip catches go down the first couple of days because the back drop to vision from slip is unlike any other ground in the world. So don’t be surprised if you see some crucial catches going down.

JK: The South African journalists haven’t been there in a long time so they might get lost. When I was there for The Ashes, I had no idea where I was going and I kept looking up and everything looks the same, there’s nothing to tell you where you are, you just keep walking around. I’m pretty sure I did three laps once just to try and find the nets.

GH: And you can’t get outside the ground. I went to the Gabba for the first time in the mid-1980s. It was like the Queenslander, that classic kind of indigenous architecture. It felt like a sub-tropical cricket ground. The architecture was quite varied; these bizarre crenellations like the place had been built on the run. Back in the 1950s, apparently the place was so covered with barbed wire to keep the hoi polloi out of the members stand; the visiting cricketers called it the Belsen, not a politically correct reference at all. But it had a certain home-spun charm; you couldn’t have been anywhere else in the world. Well, you could be in Melbourne; it feels like a Football Oval.

JK: But at least there’s the gladiatorial aspect at Melbourne. It feels like no matter where you are sitting, how far you are, you can still spit on a player, which is what I like about Melbourne. I want to talk about one other thing. There’s been a lot of talk in the India-England series about the fact that India won’t let England face any spinners in the warm-up. It was quite interesting that South Africa who haven’t really complained about this so much; Smith might have mentioned it at the first press conference but they arrived in Australia to prepare for a Test at the Gabba by going to the SCG, which is about the opposite.

GH: They tried to get it changed, didn’t they? But it was too little, too late. It was almost as though they hadn’t paid any attention to the itinerary until they looked at their plane tickets and then went oh what we can do about it. The system as you and I know used to be that you used to play a first class game at the arena that you were going to play the Test Match immediately before hand.

JK: And you play at Lilac Hill when you first arrived, quite often.

GH: The fact is that traditionally there has been such a great variety of conditions at the different Australian Test Match venues that playing a game at the venue on the eve of the Test Match was disproportionately valuable, perhaps more so then in England or in India. But now what dictates the itinerary is more player workload than actual preparation to play under particular conditions and particular times or particular venues.

JK: Ya, the England pre-tour, I am surprised at how many matches and how long they seem to be in India and preparing. I’m pretty sure they arrived in India before South Africa arrived in Australia.

GH: Ya, South Africa only arrived it seems like yesterday …

JK: When did the Champions League finish? Maybe that hasn’t finished, maybe it is still going, you never know. Pat Cummins is probably still bowling over there.

GH: World Cup 2007 is still going somewhere…

JK: I just got one final thing actually. It’s the thing that maybe will only be interesting to you and I. And it is not about LockLand Fisher Bats, for once. It’s about the fact that they are using different balls. They are thinking about using Dukes and then eventually phasing in SG balls and Kookaburra came out and said that if they don’t have Cricket Australia’s support then they might actually end up going broke. Is this not the same Kookaburra that took over balls and basically made the company Platypus go broke.

GH: It is the same company that’s had a monopoly on the Australian Cricket ball manufacturing since the Second World War and frankly, rightly so. They make the best ball. We used to use Platypuses in our local comp and they were rubbish. They never seemed to have a seam which is a bit of a problem when you are making a ball. Have you ever noticed that a Kookaburra sits nicer in your hand? It just seems like a better put together, more compact ball. It seems to retain its shine a bit longer. I certainly could never get used to bowling spin with a Platypus. I suspect that this is more maybe the authorities reminding Kookaburra that their monopoly isn’t a natural one, balls can be imported from overseas and that if they should decide to charge that extra 10% then Cricket Australia has ways and means of making sure that the internal market for balls is competitive.

JK: I wonder if it is not worth for first-class cricket, especially, using Duke balls in Hobart and Gabba, using SG balls in Sydney and Adelaide, and using Kookaburra balls in Melbourne and Perth.

GH: That is such an esoteric scheme, Jarrod, that only you could have dreamed it up.

JK: I spend a lot of time thinking about balls, Gideon.

GH: All rays on (unintelligible)

JK: It is. Thank you very much. You are gonna be popping in and out during the Summer and we will talk about things, generally, when there’s actually been Cricket rather then this non-sense that we have tried today.

GH: Well, there was Cricket, I played at the weekend.

JK: But you failed, ya?

GH: Yes, we lost by 1 run.

JK: I think every time I ever talk to you about Cricket, you’ve always lost by 9 wickets or 1 run.

GH: That’s the glorious game for you.

JK: Beautiful, Thank you very much for joining us.

GH: No worries, Jarrod, See ya.