Cricket365

More Self-Harm

Monday 5th May 2008

It's another lethal delivery from Steve Harmison... sadly, once again, it's in his newspaper column.

Britain's most exasperating sportsman told the Mail on Sunday that he will consider giving up cricket altogether if he doesn't get in the England team. And, as I speculated last week, it's hard to see an easy route back into the XI.

"This is no reflection on county cricket in general, but the fact is that the prospect of playing for England is what drives me and, if I felt that my chance of doing that was gone, the probability is that I'd retire from first-class cricket altogether," he says.

"This is not an ultimatum or me trying to impose conditions on anyone. But I'm 29 now, and if I felt my England career was over, I would be tempted to say I want to do something different with my life."

Steve has shot himself in the foot previously via the unlovely medium of the Mail on Sunday, when he played the man and not the ball in response to criticism from Geoffrey Boycott about his form and attitude.

Countering Boycott's comments by saying "he has no status" amongst the players, and "we cringe when he comes near" simply handed the argument on a plate to the Yorkshire curmudgeon.

The latest comments in the Mail on Sunday - "this is not an ultimatum" - just make him sound even more of a berk.

In a quieter passage of play at Lord's this Sunday - i.e. most of the game apart from the 84 balls when Surrey's birthday boy James Benning was smashing Middlesex around the place for a terrific 106 - I played a favourite parlour game/dilemma with a couple of friends. The game is simple: would you swap, say, 40 IQ points for the cricketing talent of, say, an Andrew Flintoff.

The rules of the game dictate that you wake up, 20-years old, brilliant at sport but really pretty thick. (I am not suggesting that Flintoff is dim; he clearly isn't.) You can bowl at 90 mph an hour, smash quality bowling all round the place and throw like a Howitzer. On the downside, you reckon Oasis are the greatest band ever, you're really interested in cars and you think Ally McCoist says some very clever and witty things on A Question of Sport.

For the purposes of the game, you don't know that you used to be reasonably smart; you've always been a big daft lad who's good at one thing and one thing only.

Yours is sporting glory, modest fame (but not the stalky kind that footballers or popstars might get), plenty of money (but see previous note about footballers), the joy of playing sport with your friends, being in great shape, and having sex with promotional girls.

On the downside, no life of the mind, no art, no books, not getting some of the cleverer jokes on My Family... And what do you do when you retire, some time in your mid-thirties? They only let the clever ones do the coaching and the punditry for any length of time.

So what for the dimbos? Hanging around the fringes of the game, dreaming of the glory days, managing a leisure centre, making a few quid by having a pop at the current players?

Steve Harmison, almost incredibly, seems to be saying that he wants to find out sooner rather than later.

Alan Tyers