Testing times
FRANK KEATING
Blossom by blossom, the season changes. So should the headlines. Fat chance. Weird times: roll up, roll up for a Lord’s cricket Test even before the mudlarks of winter have picked the teams for their end-of-term deciders. The hanging-baskets and bunting (and the boaters and blazers) might be in colourful place for the opening overs at Lord’s on Thursday morning, but both soccer and rugby still have an awesome amount of unfinished business. There has not been an earlier Lord’s Test in my lifetime. More than likely, alas, all will be grey and monochrome as an ‘unsettled’ weather system lumpenly sits over Marylebone to make the poor, palely shivering Sri Lankan cricketers unidentifiable under their four-sweater swaths of cream cable-stitch.
Even in a heatwave cricket would not be topping the bill. Not till all the football’s done and that, in 2006, will be on 9 July when the World Cup concludes its business in Berlin. As well as the potential loss of Rooney, the selection of England’s new soccer coach has been a drawn-out mess. I was surprised the FA did not bust the bank to persuade Arsenal’s Wenger to have a go especially if the mighty ambitious fellow accomplishes the ultimate with his club in Paris on Wednesday week. Unexpected, too, was that Ulsterman O’Neill gave the Brazilian Scolari no sort of run for his money on the shortlist. The three Englishmen so many backed, in truth, never cut the Colman’s at all: each excellent bricks-without-straw blokes in their ways, but with direly parochial CVs; like marathon running these days, Curbishley, Allardyce and McClaren are comparative plodders, back in the rump of the field among the perspiring hoofers and charity jokers; while the seriously fast knot of elite operators daintily stride on ahead without a blister: same distance but a totally different race.
Cricket, meanwhile, at least offers a refreshing springtime diversion. There will be none of the tumult, of course, with which cricket left us in the golden autumn half a year ago. How could there be? The Sri Lankans have lost their bright zing of a few years back, but they field some lumi nous favourites nevertheless — at the crease, thoroughbred captain Jayawardene and the dashing Dilshan and, with the ball of course, the mesmerising one-off Muralitharan with the ‘helicopter wrist’. England’s early summer pitches will do Murali’s guiles no favours but, as Mike Atherton wrote in his appealingly unmissable Sunday Telegraph page the other day, it will be the last time we shall see batsmen bamboozled by the ‘bobbing run-up, the goggle-eyes, the whirring wrist, the fizzing ball ... appreciate him while you can; his like will not come again’.
We should be thankful, because in an era of declining bowling standards Muralitharan has formed one part of a triumvirate of spinners — Shane Warne and Anil Kumble are the other two — who would be able to look bowlers from any other era in the eye without embarrassment. Statistics should be the last resort in assessing a cricketer’s qualities, but in Muralitharan’s case they stand out: 1,025 international wickets at under 23 apiece place him at the apex of the bowling pyramid. And even if you think that he bends his arm and the laws, think of the skill it takes to do it so consistently and so well.
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