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Ask any of the good folk of Moddershall CC in Staffordshire who the better spinner was – Imran Tahir, club professional in 2004, 2005 and 2008, or Rangana Herath, his successor in 2009.It is almost certain that they would say the much-loved Pakistani South African leggie, an opinion that would be heavily supported by their statistics in the North Staffs and South Cheshire League, sample-size notwithstanding. However, anyone watching last week’s Boxing Day Test match at Durban – Imran’s new home city – might not have been quite so readily convinced: 48–4–165–3. Playing a man of the match winning 50.3–14–128–9, Herath was not only more economical, but carrying a greater wicket threat in that slightly surreal spectacle of two ex-teammates of ours battling it out as key protagonists in an international fixture…
Anyway, as well as being affable spinners (albeit one excitable, the other reserved) from Asia who have pro’d for Moddershall and Hampshire CCC, the two men are bound by a shared history of waiting. Vladimir and Estragon.
Having debuted in 1999 aged 21, Rangana has been waiting over a decade for the all-time leading Test wicket-taker to tire of whirling away in the long form of the game – which he did finally in July 2010, signing off with his eight-hundredth scalp – and then had to establish himself as the first-choice option in front of Ajantha Mendis, having previously tussled with leggies Upul Chandana and Malinga Bandara. Imran, meanwhile, had been waiting for the first half of the noughties to get a break for Pakistan, with the considerable talents of Mushtaq Ahmed and Danish Kaneria in front of him (indeed, Moddershall’s top-of-the-table clash with Longton – who had the hostile Alfonso Thomas pro’ing for them – in 2005 was, somewhat surreally, watched by an international cricket coach, the late Bob Woolmer, who had travelled up from his Birmingham home to check on Immy’s worthiness to attend a training camp). Once having wed his future to Sumayya and South Africa, he then had to wait another four long years from the date of his last Pakistan ‘A’ appearance to officially become a Protea – and then another 18 months for confusion and red tape – before finally getting the opportunity to play the highest level of the game, a dream I’ve written about elsewhere.
Both, at times, must have wondered what sort of career they would ever have at the pinnacle. Both must now cement their places in their respective sides.
Regardless of the comparative merits of the two bowlers, Rangana’s place is notionally a good deal more secure, largely because of the weakness of the Sri Lankan attack in the wake of the retirements of both Murali and Chaminda Vaas, as well as Lasith Malinga’s decision to play only limited overs cricket. Imran, meanwhile, has gone from an itinerant club pro three-and-a-half years ago to someone who made one of the most eagerly anticipated international bows since Graeme Hick, precisely a function of his new country’s long hankering after a match-winning spinner. Will this instinctively conservative team (and perhaps people) understand how to treat the exotic new creature in their midst? Will each Graeme Smith‘s six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other field turn up Imran’s tension dial, perhaps bringing about another nervy full toss that arouses those safe yearnings for the steady undercutters of Harris? Will they simply expect too much from him?
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| Earning confidence |
Clearly, Imran’s major weapon is a well-disguised (certainly, for me!) and sharply spun googly. By the very highest and orthodox standards, his stock leg-spinner doesn’t regularly spin sharply, nor drift à la Warne, although it is accurate. Furthermore, he bowls a decent flipper that can be lethal against lower order batsman, either as a catch-them-cold first-up ball or something to use once having dragged their front foot across the crease with a few well flighted leg-breaks. Anyway, for Imran to become or remain (as the case may be) an attacking bowler at this level, it is absolutely crucial that he earns the right to have at least a short-leg as well as the slip. In other words, it is essential that his variation carries the threat of taking a wicket, not just of inducing a false stroke and gleaning a moral victory. For that to happen, he needs to have the confidence and trust of Smith (which is a dynamic, fluctuating aspect of their relationship), and for that he needs not to hemorrhage runs. A 6-3 offside field might be a good option if either the pitch isn’t taking a great deal of spin or he isn’t quite on his game, yet he must bowl his quota of overs to allow the seamers to rest, but is ultimately defensive in the context of his general modus operandi and he should be encouraged to have either his short extra-cover or cover sweeper as a fourth man on the leg side. (I would also recommend he occasionally bowl his leg-break from wider of the crease, so that it threatens the stumps/front pad, rather than spinning across the batter’s eyes, but that’s another story…)
This modus operandi was far too good for most – not quite all – batsmen in the North Staffs League, and certainly allowed yours truly to set fields in a largely headache-free manner. (And yes, I set a 6-3 offside field, but then I’d often forsake mid-wicket for a silly point.) In 2004, after a sketchy start as joint-favourites for the title (Imran had helped his previous club, Norton-in-Hales, to the title by breaking Garry Sobers’ league-record haul of 104 wickets), our captain walked out four games into the season, beating a mutiny by hours, and I took over; our league results were OK (only one defeat in the remaining 18 matches but far too many draws to challenge for the title) but it was in the cup that we excelled, losing the Talbot Cup final (the intra-league competition) and winning the Staffordshire Cup for the only time in our history. In 2005 we pushed hard for the title, leading until the third-last game as Imran bagged 86 wickets at 12.6, but ultimately came up short behind a very strong Longton side that contained six or seven Minor Counties players alongside Alfonso. Finally, in 2008, the title was won, Imran taking 80 wickets at 11.14 this time, and at a better strike and economy-rate, with no less than 12 five-wicket hauls in the process. And all this having been picked up by Hampshire in mid-July, taking 44 wickets in 7 games for them to help them avert relegation. In short, he was a legend.
The wee Herath Mudiyanselage Rangana Keerthi Bandara Herath (as I greeted him – and told everyone they must call him – when he arrived three games into the season) certainly had a tough act to follow. All ten or twelve of the Moddershall ultras unhelpfully wrote him off before he had even started (incidentally, with a game in near-Balticconditions on our exposed, hilltop ground). However, I had chosen him with a great deal of care and thought (Immy had recommended his Titans team mate Roelofvan der Merwe, who he said “liked a beer,” but who was a shade expensive). My reasoning for picking Ranga was as follows:
(1) Firstly, a lengthy perusal of scorecards on Cricket Archive informed me that he’d made 88 not out for Sri Lanka ‘A’ in a 50-over game in Bloemfontein against South Africa ‘A’ that winter, coming in at 94 for 6 and seeing them past the victory target, a further 200 runs ahead. Impressive. Immy might look like an out-and-out start-the-roller merchant, and it’s true that there was little point in asking him to bat sensibly, but he biffed his way to 431 runs in our championship season and we couldn’t afford a rabbit.
(2) Second, according to his Cricinfo profile [don’t ever say my research isn’t thorough], he had a caromball: i.e. a quasi-doosra flicked off the middle finger that spun away from the leftie. Naturally, I absolutely reveled in divulging this tidbit to the local press for their pre-season preview, aiming to create a little trepidation among the league’s many red-ink mongers, my way of saying: “yes, Immy’s gone, but you’re still going to have to come and make tough runs against an international-class spinner on a beach! Good luck with that.” I also collated a list of Herath’s high-profile victims, purring as I incorporated it into an artfully composed sentence-cum-press release used as a further means to make our opponents fret: “Anyone who’s got Trescothick, Chanderpaul,Ponting, Kallis, Inzamam and Steve Waugh out has to be able to bowl a bit. So, all in all, the club is delighted with the signing and are hopeful he’ll be one of the three or four best pro’s in the Prem next year, particularly if the long-range forecasts for a hot, dry summer are accurate.” Mind games, innit.
(3) Thirdly, although he’d played a Test against Bangladesh as recently as December, he’d only taken 1/115, while his 14 games had been spread over nine years (36 wickets at a shade under 40) and Murali still didn’t seem like retiring; ergo he wasn’t likely to get called away, as had Imran for Hampshire…
Here’s how all that panned out:
(1) I now know that Bloemfontein is a road, an utter feather bed, sponsored by Slumberland, and irrespective of the fact that the attack contained Wayne Parnell, it was, for a bottom-handed biffer with three shots in his repertoire (pull, sweep, slog and hybrid forms of those shots), infinitely less taxing than facing clubby dobbers on soft green seamers. Fair to say, the posh side was only really used only for leading edges. All this thrust and thrape saw him average a slightly disappointing 22.25: i.e. only about 6 runs better than his current Test average!
(2) With the exception of the Bunsen on which we played Kim Barnett’s Knypersley (always Barnett!), when Ranga returned underwhelming and unflattering figures of 21.2–10–31–1 en route to smashing the world record for beating the outside edge (apart from in his first over, when he did induce an edge from the former Gloucestershire, Derbyshire, Checkley and Leek stalwart, only for yours truly to drop the sort of ultra-simple chance that has direct marketing companies pushing laser surgery leaflets through your door), the wickets were just too green, greasy and skiddy and/or slow and tacky when they took turn – rendering his carom ball the proverbial ashtray on a motorbike.
(3) I mentioned above that Ranga was a quiet guy who didn’t show a great deal of passion on the field – certainly not in comparison to Immy, whose kid-jumping-off-the-school-coach celebrations are not an affectation developed for TV cameras – but he was just starting to settle and come out of his shell a little when – guess what? – he was called up for Sri Lanka to replace Murali, who had a shoulder problem. Bollocks! OK, his stats of 112–27–333–14 in his 8 games are nothing to get frisky over, but he was improving…
So it was that, with us left to hire a succession of overpriced sub pro’s (one of whom – at the time in the first-class game, though not now – was among the most despicably exploitative and self-regarding bandits it has been my misfortune to meet), off went Ranga to Galle, where, hours after stepping off the plane, he went on to snare his first Man of the Match award (the one in Durban being his second), adding a decisive second innings spell of 11.3–5–15–4 to a couple of useful cameos with the bat as the Lankans beat Pakistan by just 50. In the next game, another victory, he bagged a maiden Test 5-fer as Pakistan lost 9 wickets for 35, a feat he promptly repeated in the third game. He then sat out the First Test against New Zealand – Murali returning and then-hot Mendis preferred– before picking up another 5-wicket haul as Sri Lanka won the Second Test by 96. So much for our two-wickets per game pro!
It was a veritable head-scratcher, alright. Perplexing. Bewildering.
Perhaps, ultimately, it was a warm weather thing. Y’know: needing to have feeling in his fingers–neshness like that. For no sooner had he bagged his Kiwi five that he was back in UK for a three-game stint as an overseas pro with Surrey, picking up dismal aggregate figures of 8 for 431 from 108.2 overs of toil in three Division 2 run fests (being outbowled at Wantage Road by Nicky Boje, incidentally). He wouldn’t fare much better for Hamsphire the following spring, either, nor for his country last summer, aside from a decent spell at Lord’s. But the key drawback he faced at Moddershall was that, where everyone knew Immy could rip out a side’s heart in half-a-dozen overs or so, he could not. Had it been Lancashire, ’appen t’members’d’ve broke ’is fingers ’n’ put ’im on next boat ’ome…
But I could see a good cricketer – a good club pro – in that shuffling approach and snappy, narrow pivot; in the chest-on delivery that imparted all the revs (and the curve, the drop) from the shoulder; in the clever use of the crease – something Imran, less guileful, more artillery, didn’t do – and in the round-arm variation that either undercut or would spin sharply; in the lesser-spotted carom ball; and in the cultic slogging. It’s a shame, I guess, that he saved his best performances for the Test arena…
While Ranga was bagging wickets in the tropics, Moddershall… Christ, where to begin? With a thrice deferred PhD thesis to finish and my motivation at what I thought was an all-time low (it wasn’t: the following season was worse), we were slipping inexorably toward relegation, a fate I thought all but inevitable when, four games from the end, our never-before-seen hired help arrived at Little Stoke looking like Dev from Coronation Street’s rotund elder sibling, and proceeded to bowl (half-decent off-breaks) in silver Nike trainers while sporting a generic baseball cap, backwards, doubtless to conceal his bald patch. Oh Lordy.
Incredibly, we won the game… I say incredibly – actually it was because of a utterly ludicrous decision by our opponents to play on a badly worn pitch (they cannot have thought that ‘Dev’ was a seamer, surely!), the sort of deck on which either Ranga or Immy would have taken 7/30, at least. Anyway, this performance (3-fer and 30) bought him two more matches before he was mercilessly axed for the final game, when, unable to persuade (Joe Sayers to persuade) Ajmal Shahzad that £700 was preferable to a weekend in London, we went back to our right-armed bandit whose 9/39 on a rug kept the club safely in the Premier League in what was the most unsatisfactory, sour-tasting last-ditch escape imaginable.
I had discovered that nothing is quite so tiring as talking to cricket agents all week, trying to get value-for-money in what was always a seller’s market but became even more so in the light of the UKBA’s tightening of its immigration policy and the ECB’s more stringent rules for qualification of overseas cricketers. Add to this the fact that our league administrators deemed that any player who had subbed for any club in any of the four divisions could play for no other club in the league that year (a change brought about by Shahid Afridi playing for and against the same team in consecutive weeks in 2003). So, for the 2010 season, I simply had to select a pro who would absolutely never get called up for representative honours, be that county or national.
After much searching, we dropped on a seamer who, in October 2009, had played just the two first-class matches (for Khan Research laboratories), about whom the reports were good, and whose height would be a useful tool on damp English pitches. And boy, was he tall – so tall, in fact, that he didn’t exactly slip under the radar; so tall that he actually appeared on the radar of the national coaches, who invited him to a training camp and then picked him for the tour of England. This bowler was the 6’10” (or 7’2”) Mohammad Irfan. And so it was that I spent another 12 weeks on the phone that season, slowly cracking up. Thus it was that, barely 20 months after Imran finished with us – 20 months after the pinnacle of my cricket-playing days – my desire to play cricket was finally extinguished.
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