3 minute read
A modern international cricketer like Ben Duckett has a lot of tricky career decisions to make. Sometimes you don’t know whether you’ve made the right choice until you have or haven’t aged into dust.
“This certainly is the cup of The King of Kings,” says grail-hunting, Nazi-collaborating Walter Donovan, shortly before drinking from it in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.
After he rapidly ages and turns to dust, the ghostly Grail Knight delivers one of the finest examples – perhaps even the definitive example – of stating the bleeding obvious.
“He chose… poorly,” he intones, entirely unnecessarily.
Choices, then.
It’s easy to ridicule the Kevin Pietersen argument that young cricketers can learn so much simply by being at the IPL; that their mere presence at franchises as unused squad players somehow provides an education they couldn’t get anywhere else. But it’s not without truth. At worst, it’s a pretty good opportunity to watch how a handful of the very best players from around the world go about their business for a few weeks. It can’t be hard to pick up a few useful ideas or habits from that, can it? It’s going to give you more fresh information than watching the same old team mates you’ve grown up with, who aren’t so incredible, whose games have been shaped by roughly the same coaching you’ve had yourself.
But Alastair Cook has a point too. At some point you do need to play a bit of cricket. A load of net practice and the occasional short innings or four-over spell only really buys you Ringo Starr level rhythm. No one (other than, inexplicably, the other Beatles) is happy with that.
County cricket can be a good place to find rhythm, but there are, of course, no guarantees. That makes the IPL v County Championship decision a pretty easy one for the lucky few faced with such a choice, because the upsides of the former are so much easier to come by.
Top tips, Ringo rhythm and a few hundred grand versus getting nicked off for 14 in your first innings followed by a groundswell of anxiety that you’ve made a dumb move that isn’t going to work out?
“Um, Top Tips please. When will the payment go into my account?”
Unusually, Ben Duckett weighed that head-to-head after a winter of scratching around, below his best, and concluded that longer hours for less money would be the right option for him this season.
This could have resulted in crawleying around the country, racking up single figure scores and in so doing inadvertently making a compelling case for omission from England’s Test team. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, he knocked out a series of handy half centuries before cruising to 203 not out against Surrey. The Walter Donovan-esque lifelessness of the Trent Bridge pitch is irrelevant really. Duckett was seeking runs and rhythm and he has successfully completed his quest.
The joy of The Grail Knight’s pronouncements lies in how gloriously redundant they are given what everyone around has just seen with their own eyes. (You ain’t ever gonna get one scintilla of wisdom, insight or awareness of the wider world from a crusader.)
Sometimes things have so obviously gone well that you don’t really need a 600-word article on an independent cricket website to tell you so.
After Indy drinks from “the cup of a carpenter” and fails to rapidly age into dust, The Grail Knight unnecessarily announces, “You have chosen… wisely.”
