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This post is by way of being a supporting argument for what I said in the previous one. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a worthwhile exercise in its own right. Well, I enjoyed the exercise anyway.

Start with the very first series of Test matches between England and Australia, in 1876-77, and set up a cumulative counter with three entries: Tests won by England; Tests won by Australia; drawn games. Ignore the fact that in a relatively few Anglo-Australian Tests the Ashes weren’t at stake; use the counter for all Tests between the two countries regardless. This is how it will go. After one series, England 1, Australia 1, Draws 0. After two series, England 1, Australia 2, Draws 0. After three series, England 2, Australia 2, Draws 0. After four series, England 2, Australia 4, Draws 2… And so on.

Australia take an early lead but the lead soon changes hands and from 1886 to the eve of the First World War England stay ahead. After the series of 1912, the score in Test matches between the two countries is: England 40, Australia 35, Draws 19.

Then, immediately after the war, in the series of 1920-21 and 1921 (in which Australia won 8 Tests and England none), Australia take over the lead again, and from that point until today England never regain it. They do draw level, but just once: after the bodyline series of 1932-33 the tally is 51 Tests each. From then onwards Australia move steadily ahead. By the end of the 1950s it’s 62 England, 74 Australia. By the turn of the century, at the end of 1999, it’s 93 England, 117 Australia. Just before the present series started it was 102 England, 133 Australia.

So Australia had a ‘surplus’ of Test victories of 31. I know that this is not a direct measure of Ashes achievement. What counts is holding the Ashes right now and, I suppose, how long they’ve been held by each country. Still, overall Test victories and defeats is an indirect indication of relative strengths over the whole sequence; and England have not had the lead since the First World War. If I were a Pom I’d be wanting England to catch up.

Dan Hodges reports on having been overcome by a feeling of ‘Englishness’ with respect to the destiny of the present Ashes series. This is what Englishness means in Dan’s account of it:

I always thought that to be alive during a period of great English cricketing success would be sublime. But it’s not. It’s a curse.

Yes, I want them to win. But I want them to win in the English way. That means Edgbaston 2005, or Cardiff 2009 (technically a draw, but a win really). And by extension, it also means them losing.

If England win at Lord[‘]s then the series is effectively over. And if they do go on to whitewash Australia then it will mean that the predictions were true: Australia really will have turned out to be rubbish. It will also mean a whitewash in Australia later this year is on the cards. At which point, the Ashes ceases to be a sporting contest. And what does it mean to be an Englishman if you no longer have the Ashes?

Ceases to be a sporting contest because of a period of English dominance? That really seems to be what he believes.

For the Ashes to live, England must lose. By all means, lose in an English way… But lose they must. If they win, then we may well have witnessed our last great Ashes series.

When England emerge on to the hallowed turf at the home of cricket on Thursday, I will be praying for an Australian victory. Every true Englishman must do the same.

I, too, am hoping for Australian victory, or if not that, then that Aus at least put up a creditable fight over the whole series. But this is because I support Australia; I always have in Ashes cricket. However, the idea that the Ashes would be over as a contest if England retain them decisively in the two series this year lacks all historical perspective. Australia were dominant throughout the 1990s and beyond, and look what then happened. Or look at what happened to the long period of West Indian supremacy centred on the 1980s. It turned to ashes, as one might say.

Later I will offer some statistical support for this observation about Anglo-Australian cricket. In the meantime I join Dan in wanting Australia to win, but not in his pessimism about Ashes cricket should they lose.

To follow up on my post about Chomsky’s opinion of Slavoj Žižek, here’s an amusing clip in which John Searle talks about Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and the French philosophical need to be somewhat incomprehensible.

(Via.)

Further to this post about Stuart Broad and the Decision Review System, there’s a letter from J. H. C. Leach in today’s Times (£) defending Broad’s decision not to walk:

Sir, “Non-walking” is far from new. Most famously, in the first Test at Brisbane in 1946, Don Bradman, then on 28, slashed Voce to Ikin in the slips. He did not walk, and when Hammond belatedly appealed, he was given “not out”. Bradman went on to score 187, and England, caught on a sticky wicket after a thunderstorm, were heavily defeated. It is hard to blame Broad.

I’m afraid the Times’s correspondent has the wrong end of the stick here. Walking and not-walking in this context are only relevant when a batsman knows, or at least thinks, he is out. A batsman who doesn’t think so obviously has no reason to consider walking.

I ‘remember’ this particular incident well, not because I followed the Brisbane Test at the time (I was only three), but because I’ve read about it. This is from Bradman’s account in Farewell to Cricket:

Voce bowled me a ball which was near enough to a yorker. I attempted to chop down on top of it in order to guide the ball wide of the slip fieldsmen. Instead it flew to Ikin at second slip.

In my opinion, the ball touched the bottom of my bat just before hitting the ground and therefore it was not a catch. Accordingly I stood my ground waiting for the game to proceed.

Somewhat belatedly there was an appeal. Without the slightest hesitation umpire Borwick at the bowler’s end said, “Not out.”

In ‘Testing Time’ for England Denis Compton wrote that the fielders close to the bat were stunned at the not-out decision and ‘felt that a great injustice had been done’. The journalist Bruce Harris wrote, in With England in Australia:

I must say that from my distant seat I thought the ball came “off the deck.” So apparently did the umpire. But our fieldsmen had no doubt in their minds that the catch was good. Bradman told me afterwards that if he had thought he was out he certainly would not have remained there.

It has ever been thus, but in any event the case is not pertinent to the issue of walking or not walking.

[For links to the other posts in this series, see here.]

An Iranian film director visits Israel and offers some reflections on his reasons for doing so:

One of Iran’s most famous film-makers, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a former revolutionary who spent four years in jail under the late shah’s rule, has made headlines again after breaking a taboo by visiting Israel.

Makhmalbaf, who was invited by the Jerusalem film festival, said he went as “an ambassador for peace” to promote Iranian art in a country that has previously threatened to launch a pre-emptive strike against his homeland. His visit last week has stirred a heated debate among Iranians.

“I went there to take a message of peace,” he told the Guardian. “I try to unite people through arts, I am citizen of cinema, and cinema has no border, and in fact before my journey to Israel my film travelled to that country many years before.”

Makhmalbaf, a leading figure in Iranian cinema’s new wave movement, is the most prominent Iranian figure to visit Israel since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Iranian passports are not valid for travel to Israel and those visiting the country risk a jail sentence of at least five years under Iranian law.

The 57-year-old director lives in exile in London. He left Iran after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, and has since become an outspoken critic of the Islamic republic. In 2009 he became active in support of the opposition Green movement.

“I am one of the ambassadors for Iranian art to Israel and my message was of peace and friendship,” he said. “When I flew to Israel last week, I felt like a man flying to another planet, like a man flying to the moon, because it was not very ordinary since I had officially and publicly announced that I will be in Israel as an Iranian artist.”

Makhmalbaf, director of the award-winning 2001 film Kandahar, which is in the Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest films, screened his latest work, The Gardener, at the festival. It is a docudrama about a son and a father talking about religion, especially the Baha’i faith, which Makhmalbaf made in collaboration with his son Maysam.

He said he was overwhelmed by the welcome he received in Israel. “There was an amazing reaction, they showed The Gardener three times and each time the theatre was full and hundreds of people queuing up outside who wanted to come in,” he said. “They clapped for so long. And I asked them if you are so much interested in our art, why is [it] that your government is going to attack us?”
…..
Makhmalbaf described the taboo against visiting Israel as a “cancer” looming over Iran’s intellectual community for over 60 years. He said he respected the British scientist Stephen Hawking for his decision to boycott an Israeli conference this year, but it was not a decision he would have made.

“If I make a film in Iran and you come to my country to watch it, does it mean you confirm dictatorship in Iran and you have no respect for political prisoners in Iran? If you go to the US, does it mean you confirm their attack on Afghanistan and Iraq?” Makhmalbaf said it was this mentality that allowed him to head the jury of the Moscow film festival last week in spite of his opposition to Vladimir Putin’s support for the Syrian regime.

“I already need a visa to go to Israel, why should [there] be another barrier? A cultural visa?” he asked. “Almost two million Palestinian and Arab people live in Israel, why should I not go there? If Palestinians and Israelis are trying to solve their problem by diplomacy, why [should we] insist that they fight with each other?”
…..
In his speech at last week’s festival, Makhmalbaf, dedicated his prize to all the people who struggled for peace between Iran, Israel and Palestine. “We, the Iranian intellectuals, are divided into two groups. Of course, both groups yearn for peace. But one group, apart from yearning, struggles for it as well. The other group is sitting, waiting for Israel to attack, and then issue statements condemning Israel. Why not light a candle rather than curse the darkness,” he said.

Some of our own benighted boycotters could benefit from these words.

I’m a little bit late on this one, but on normblog a late Jane is much better than a hole where her face should be. Does Jane Austen deserve a place on our £10 notes? John Mullan thinks so ‘given her own remorseless attention to the power of money in people’s lives’. I would like to concur. Think only of this exchange from Pride and Prejudice, when Lizzy Bennet is questioned by her sister Jane:

“My dearest sister, now be serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let me know every thing that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved him?”

“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

A worthy occupant of the tenner, no question about it.

‘As a singer, George Jones stands shoulder to shoulder with Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday in originality and importance.’ You’ll find that claim made here. It gets no quarrel from me.

There’s a report in the Guardian of a recent remark by rightwing Italian senator Roberto Calderoli. In this he suggested that Cécile Kyenge, a government minister born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has ‘the features of an orangutan‘. There has been much horrified reaction in Italy, and rightly so. The report says nothing much about what was in Calderoli’s mind when he made his remark or about whether it was merely directed at Kyenge as an individual or had some wider application. The remark is taken to be unacceptable in itself.

This is because it belongs to a tradition of anti-black racist abuse. Compare and contrast.

In the Test match recently concluded at Trent Bridge – another fantastic game to add to the already great tradition of Ashes cricket, and a game for which both teams are to be congratulated – there was much drama and much for lovers of cricket to talk about. One of the main talking points was the non-dismissal of Stuart Broad in England’s second innings, when he got a thick edge and was caught at slip by Michael Clarke but was given not out and decided to stand his ground. Having already used up their permitted number of referrals under the Decision Review System, the Australians were powerless to seek a ruling from the third umpire, and the mistake was left in place. Broad continued his innings.

Yet, if my own watching, listening and reading impressions are anything to go by, almost the entire cricket commentariat missed the real story. For the vast majority of them the biggest aspect of the episode was that Broad didn’t walk – that is, accept that he was out and go, voluntarily correcting the umpire’s mistake. What!!!? He didn’t walk? OH MY GOD. This is supposed to be a story? Not walking in cricket is a practice so old that if it were a man with a beard, his beard would be full, white and reach from his head way down below his knees and trail along the floor. Why, there was a famous occasion as long ago as 1998, involving Michael Atherton; and, as anyone will tell you about Australians, they have been not-walking practically forever.

True, this was a particularly brazen case, but I don’t see how not walking when you know you’ve put bat or glove to ball can be OK when it’s only a nick but not OK for anything more clear cut than that. Being out caught in cricket is a yes/no sort of thing, rather than a matter of very out or out by only a bit. So Broad’s cheek may be of interest but that he didn’t walk isn’t the essence of what was noteworthy.

Also secondary, in my view, is that Australia had made careless use of the Decision Review System on this occasion by wasting one of their two referrals on a doomed LBW appeal – though they did indeed do that. Had they not, they could have had Broad back in the pavilion before they finally did. But the real problem lies in the maximum limit of two requests for review by the third umpire. The rationale – a perfectly sensible one – is to discourage merely frivolous requests and a never-ending series of these. But the trouble is that errors by umpires, though not all that common, also don’t obey any statistical law of two or fewer per innings. It is quite possible that a team will have used up its two referrals on reasonably sensible appeals, only to find some stinkers coming along later on.

The real story, therefore, as mentioned in passing by Gideon Haigh in today’s Times (£), is this: that ‘[a] system designed to eliminate “howlers” protected one’ here; and this can happen in future again and again. I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m confident one could be found. Maybe it would involve giving the third umpire independent authority to overrule the umpire on the pitch in extreme cases.

Much work and ingenuity in this.

All for an ad for a smartphone, is the legend here. You don’t have to watch it; it exists because the trees do. (Thanks: DMcN.)