Plus, Hillary-Norgay’s previously undocumented Everest cricketing duel
Andy Zaltzman17-Sep-2014The Confectionery Stall will be taking a sabbatical until December, whilst I am touring with my stand-up show (details at satiristforhire.com). England will also enjoy a couple of months off the cricketing treadmill. It is very rare these days that England play no cricket at all during a two-month stretch. The last time it happened was from November 2013 to January 2014, a period that unfortunately coincided with the Ashes.England’s hiatus will be followed by a bumper 2015 (and early 2016) which will feature 17 Tests in 10 months, bookended by a 50-over World Cup and a World T20. Amongst all this, there is a liberal sprinkling of assorted unforgettable ODIs and T20Is, plus a week-long team-bonding marathon playing the 1980s computer game on an old Commodore 64, a Broadway run of the new cricket musical , starring all centrally contracted players as themselves, a stint on the UN Security Council, and a series of 24 one-off triangular cricket-baseball-tennis hybrid matches against the New York Yankees and the women’s world No. 5 and former Wimbledon runner-up Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland, which will be played entirely via Skype.There are also plans for England to play a simultaneous Test match and five-game ODI series on adjoining pitches, against themselves, whilst the ECB is rumoured to be on the verge of announcing the installation of a new month – provisionally entitled Cooktember – to take place between January and February 2016, which will be used for rest, practice, promotional activities, welding Stuart Broad back together, reinstalling and re-sacking Kevin Pietersen in what will become a formal biennial ritual, and a supplementary bonus Ashes.No doubt, every single game in that period will be equally as special and memorable as the next, to both players and spectators alike, and no doubt the executives may well be giggling into their balance sheets. The golden goose, however, must be looking at its schedule, muttering to itself: “You want me to lay eggs? Ouch. Well, you’re the boss. Could you fetch me some Vaseline, please. I think I will need it.”Perhaps in time, 2014 will be seen to have laid the foundations for a new era of success after the seismic upheavals of the winter. It was a curious international summer, with two classic Test matches, at Headingley and Lord’s, both of which resulted in English defeats, one dull Test with a thrilling finale (the first against Sri Lanka), one dull Test without a thrilling finale (the first against India), and three absolute humiliations of MS Dhoni’s sappingly inept team, whose theoretically brilliant batting line-up explored every possible avenue of incompetence in a depressing masterclass of underachievement.From an English perspective, it began with fascinating failures and ended with rather uninteresting successes. All in all, it was a strangely unsatisfying summer, but one that held out promise of a genuine English resurgence. If Anderson and Broad stay fit. And Australia pick Pankaj Singh.
By the time Alastair Cook and Alex Salmond toss the coin at the Hagley Oval in five months’ time, Hadrian’s Wall may well have been completely rebuilt, and the Queen could be floating over the British Isles in a hot air balloon, desperately appealing for calm through the royal megaphone
England remained largely flaccid in ODIs, but given that they have not played a 50-over game with both Anderson and Broad in the team since the Champions Trophy final in June 2013, and only belatedly realised that it might be useful to have a few more players who can hit boundaries, their World Cup prospects cannot be completely written off. The World Cup, in its current format, is essentially a three-game shoot-out. In any shoot-out, of course, it helps to have arms and ammunition. England have generally focused too much on the bulletproof jackets. But if they take some reasonable selectorial risks, and hit form in the right week at the end of March, they have a chance. As indeed do the other seven regular quarter-finalists. Who mostly have more of a chance.I bid you farewell, then, at least until England’s ODI tour of Sri Lanka, scheduled to help them prepare for the dustbowl conditions they will no doubt encounter in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 23 February, when they will be involved in what may be one of the most politically incendiary World Cup fixtures ever played. Depending on the result of Thursday’s Independence Referendum in Scotland. By the time Alastair Cook and Alex Salmond toss the coin at the Hagley Oval in five months’ time, Hadrian’s Wall may well have been completely rebuilt, and the Queen could be floating over the British Isles in a hot air balloon, desperately appealing for calm through the royal megaphone.A Scottish victory in that game is about the only concession that David Cameron has not offered the Scots in his desperate attempts to stop the UK falling to pieces. Whatever else happens to England in their insanely overfull 2015, they simply must win that match. We must remain Great Britain’s undisputed No. 1 cricketing nation, or we will truly have nothing left.* With all due respect to the Champions Trophy, the most significant match taking place in the next few weeks is, without question, the charity game atop Mount Kilimanjaro, the celebrity 5895-metre-high Tanzanian retired volcano. The altitudinous showdown was organised by David Harper, who is raising money for cancer research, Tusk, and the Rwanda Cricket Stadium Foundation, and features, amongst others, Makhaya Ntini, Heather Knight, Ashley Giles and Clare Connor. It is set to claim the record for the highest-ever game of competitive cricket.Whilst I applaud the charitable fund-raising efforts and the mountaineering valour of those involved – full details and a link to the donations page are here – I have my doubts that this will, in fact, be the highest altitude at which competitive cricket has been played. It simply beggars belief that Edmund Hillary – a New Zealander, after all – did not challenge Tenzing Norgay to a game of cricket when they became the first people ever to teach Mount Everest who was boss, back in 1953.Recent expeditions would almost certainly have discovered a bowler’s marker near the summit, had they bothered to look for it, whilst satellite imagery could probably reveal what look like three stump holes right on the peak of the world’s tallest mountain, if you look at it from the right angle. Furthermore, there is incontrovertible photographic evidence of the tea interval.Admittedly, it is unlikely that the game lasted very long, or offered much in the way of entertainment for the neutral. Norgay would have struggled with his run-up when charging up the slope from the South Col End, and Hillary would probably have been surprised by the pace of the ball through the thin air at 8848 metres above sea level, come down late on it, and edged it through the understandably vacant slip cordon.As the ball scuttled away across Everest’s notoriously slopey outfield, which makes Lord’s look like a paragon of flatness, the two men would probably have decided to call it an honourable draw, before heading back to base camp in their sponsored caps for the post-match press conference.Good luck to David and the teams. My prediction: a negative draw. No one is going to want to traipse all the way to the top of Africa’s highest mountain and lose. You can follow their progress on the website, and via Twitter at @kilimadness.