This backs up our thoughts about Australian domestic cricket versus English domestic cricket. Newly capped Australian cricketers are more capable of coping with big matches. They’re brought up playing more competitive cricket, but more importantly, when they arrive in international cricket they’re more likely to play close to their best.

Consider one of England’s newcomers. Ravi Bopara’s easily one of the best batsmen in England. He’s not a third or fourth choice who’s forced to play when there’s a bout of injuries, he’s right up there.

Bopara’s actually played 50 one-day internationals already, but he’s only hit four fifties. He’ll be a good international cricketer – maybe even a great one – but England will have had to ease him through 60 or 70 one-day internationals to get him to that point. By the time Bopara can be relied upon, someone else will need to acclimatise to internationals. The Aussies always have 11 men who are good to go.

Ravi Bopara is an example. The same applies, more or less, to all of England’s young players. They’re rarely ready for international cricket and it’s not the fault of the selectors.

Batting

Weirdly, batting’s actually better than bowling. In previous cricket games, batting has largely been about getting frustrated and smashing the joypad because your idiot batsman set off for a run when the ball was in the keeper’s gloves or because you finally missed a yorker after facing six overs of them. In Ashes Cricket 2009, there’s none of this. More importantly, it actually feels like real batting.

The biggest compliment we can pay this game is that it really helps if you know a bit about cricket. For any given delivery, you have three decisions to make:

1. Front foot or back foot
2. Defensive shot, attacking shot, lofted shot or ‘using your feet’
3. Direction of shot

Your margin for error varies according to how sensible a shot you’re playing. Aim a drive at a wide outswinger or play against the spin and you’d better get your timing bang on. Play a straight half-volley back past the bowler and it’ll be much easier to time. The upshot is, you look at the field and weigh up the percentages. It’s like actually playing cricket, only you’re not unfit and uncoordinated. Not until you get to the tail anyway.

Equally important is that the game doesn’t automatically punish you if you play a crap shot. Edges might not carry, mishits sometimes evade fielders. It all adds to the sense of realism.

Bowling

To be honest, bowling is where this game falls down, which is a shame, because it promises a lot. There are loads deliveries on offer and it depends on the bowler and the playing conditions whether you can use them or not.

The bowling mechanism is good as well and at first you feel it’s just as good as the batting. It feels like you’re working the batsman over, trying to set him up. You’re bowling to your field and all’s going well. Then suddenly, it all goes mental.

I don’t know what it is, but after about eight overs, the opposition batsmen engage the long handle and switch off their brains. The ball flies to all parts, there’s a run-out every three overs and there’s NOTHING you can do about either of those things. At that point, it’s impossible to suspend disbelief and that’s no good.

Fielding

We’re shite at it. For catches, the ball approaches a fielder in slow motion and all you have to do is press a key at the right moment, as indicated by a red, amber or green colour around the ball. We favour the red immediately after the optimum green.

Is it worth buying?

We’d say so, yes. Twenty20 matches are largely immune to the demented slogging when you’re in the field, so that’s not so bad. Plus, you then get to gauge a run-chase, which is where this game’s at its best, because you’re constantly balancing risk and reward; picking your times to go over the top and making sure you score off every ball.

You can get Ashes Cricket 2009 from Amazon for not a huge amount of money.

It’s sometimes difficult to appreciate Sachin Tendulkar properly. It’s like thinking about the vast emptiness of space or the vast emptiness of the modern urban lifestyle. It’s all too much to comprehend.

What has Sachin actually achieved?

Sachin Tendulkar scored his 17,000th run today. That’s a stupid number that’s seemingly of no consequence at all. But then think to yourself that scoring just a thousand one-day international runs is actually quite an achievement. Ricky Ponting’s only just passed 12,000 and he’s the third-highest one-day run-scorer of all time. Sanath Jayasuriya’s second on about 13,000. These guys are a long, long way behind.

Two whole decades of being pretty damn exceptional

Tendulkar’s not some fly-by-night like Mike Hussey; he’s not some short-lived overachiever like Ricky Ponting or Brian Lara. Tendulkar’s in it for the long haul. As impressive as all the runs and all the hundreds are, the most jaw-dropping achievement of all is that Sachin Tendulkar has managed to be good enough to play for his country for 20 years.

Bet he’s ace at frisbee

He’s not a Nepali Ultimate Frisbee player either – he’s an Indian cricketer. And not just any kind of Indian cricketer – an Indian batsman. This is a country where if you wander down to the Oval Maidan in Mumbai of an afternoon and grab the six nearest people, you’ll probably have a Test standard batting line-up. Sachin Tendulkar has been pretty much the best batsman in this country for 20 years. That’s astonishing.

A tree falling in the woods may or may not make a sound

But a Sachin Tendulkar hundred in a packed stadium makes a kind of searing white noise that sets the hairs on the back of your neck on end even when you’re sat in England watching it on Sky Plus when you already know the result.

Towards the end of this match, Suresh Raina hit a cracking six and got all pumped-up and pleased with himself. He went for another big swing and spazzed it. Sachin Tendulkar hit two sixes in a row at one point. We can’t remember what he did with the next delivery, but he didn’t get out. He passed 17,000 runs and didn’t get out next ball. He got his hundred and still ploughed on.

But get it wrong and the white noise becomes blue murder. There’s that too.

And what have you got?

You get batsmen who are exceptional when they’re 16. You get batsmen with adamantium wrists. You get batsmen who choose their shots well.

You get cricketers who are fit and dedicated to their sport. You get cricketers who can cope with the downs and who come back stronger. You get get cricketers who can last for 20 years.

You never get all of this.

On the slide

There were people four years ago saying that Sachin Tendulkar was ‘past it’. They said his reflexes had gone. People often say this about batsmen once they get past 30. It’s such utter, utter bullshit.

Oh and by the way, Australia won.

Already without Nathan Bracken, Brett Lee, Peter Siddle and James Hopes, Australia’s bowling attack now has to cope without Moises Henriques because he too is injured. This is on top of the absences of Michael Clarke, Brad Haddin, Callum Ferguson and Tim Paine.

Different people, different injuries, but is there any chance that any were brought about as a direct or indirect consequence of Australia basically being on tour since February? It’s a surprise they don’t schedule in-flight matches to be played down the aisle.

This is why everyone in the frigging world is saying cricketers should play less. We don’t want to watch Moises Henriques’ replacement. How is that international cricket if he’s barely good enough to play for his state?

Pakistan’s cricket team are generally portrayed as equal parts genius and slapstick and with a capacity for self-destruction unrivalled even by Slash. (”I was pissed off at myself for having died. It really ate into my day off.”)

Yesterday was what we would consider a fairly typical Pakistan one-day performance. They lost two of their top three for ducks and were later 75-4. Pakistan have always had a freewheeling sort of lower order though. Shahid Afridi promptly lofted three deliveries into the farther reaches of the Milky Way on his way to 70 off 50 balls; Kamran Akmal hit 67 off 43; and Abdul Razzaq hit 26 off 20. Pakistan then bowled out New Zealand for 149.

The beauty of Pakistan is that you don’t know that they’re going to do this. Although it seems fairly typical, there’s also a good chance they could crumple like a paper cagoule.

Pakistan can actually make even formulaic, overplayed one-day cricket exciting. For once you actually have to watch the match to know what’s going to happen.

Mike Norrish, writing on the Telegraph’s site, says:

“I guess the whole thing boils down to representation and whether or not we want England’s cricketers to represent ‘us’.”

Does Jonathan Trott represent you? Does he represent your country?

Over the years, we’ve met a number of people who were born in South Africa who are working and making new lives for themselves in the UK. Conversely, we’ve met very few people like Alastair Cook, for example.

Jonathan Trott represents our version of England pretty well.

“It was tucked between two of my rolls of flab.”

Gameplay

It’s a player v player action game, as opposed to a management sort of affair. Batting is largely as you’d imagine: you aim in your chosen direction and then execute either a normal or a lofted shot. Timing is key.

There’s a quite a neat system for the bowling. You aim where to pitch the delivery using a cursor and then you stop a pointer on a meter to decide what kind of ball you’ll deliver. The ingenious part is that the meter is divided into three sections for three different deliveries, but within each of those sections, there’s a range for pace – so you can deliver a slow, straight ball or a fast away-swinger by pressing the key at different times.

It’s five overs per innings. We got battered in our test game, but we were playing one of the guys who’s made the game, so we don’t feel too bad. We hit a couple of sixes and got a few wickets.

Customisation and longevity

So far, so short-lived. The big selling point in our eyes is the fact that you’ll have your own team. You can change all the players’ names and change the kit that they wear, but you can also develop them. When you play well in a match, you’ll earn experience points and you can then allocate this to your players as you see fit. As players level-up, bowlers will get quicker and swing or spin the ball more and batsmen will time shots better and hit the ball harder. Fielders will become less spazzy.

Yorker spammers

Anyone who’s played a cricket game will know what this means. If you need convincing about this game, you’ll be reassured to know that measures are being taken to counteract this tactic, which should ensure a good, rounded cricket game that you’ll be playing for some time.

Clint McKay has been selected for Australia because he really, really wants to play cricket for his country. Lots of cricketers say that they want to play cricket for their country, but they imagine that it’ll just happen because someone once told them that they had ‘natural talent‘.

Clint McKay had a Victoria contract several years ago, but lost it. Rather than spend his time simultaneously crying and eating meat and potato pies, he trained like a bastard with an Aussie rules team and lost a ruck of weight. Then he took a load of wickets for his club and earned another state contract, whereupon he took further wickets for Victoria and got picked for Australia.

Elite development the independent way.

India are three wickets down in no time on a pitch that’s nastier than Satan when his haemorrhoids are playing up.
Dhoni: “Yeaaaaah. I’ll probably just stick around for 30 overs or so before basically just mincing the ball wherever I please when we get within touching distance of our target.”

Mahendra Dhoni is set upon by two thugs wielding knives.
Dhoni: “Yeaaaaah. I’m just going to take these knives off you, if that’s okay. Now off you go. Bye.”

Mahendra Dhoni’s trousers are aflame.
Dhoni: “Yeaaaaah. I’m probably just going to put these out now.”

This is what you can achieve when you’ve harnessed the power of the mind.