It's Competition Time!

A few years ago, my Australian friend Trev who will, I suspect, feature again in these posts, come up with a brilliant idea for a fantasy competition based on the Ashes. Rather than go through the agony of having to pick a whole team, and rather than over-complicate matters by factoring in the number of runs a bowlers concedes or any other such fripperies, the genius of this idea was its simplicity. Everybody picks six players for each test, including at least one from each side. Each player scores one point for each run that he scores, twenty points for each wicket that he takes and fifteen points for each catch or stumping that he completes. It is cricket distilled down to its purest form.

This is curiously addictive. We have a hardcore of fifteen or so participants and it’s reached the point where it’s hard to imagine an Ashes series without it. We do some other series as well (and once, ill advisedly, the Champions’ Trophy) but the Ashes is, quite rightly, the pinnacle.

Trev relocated back to his native Melbourne a couple of years ago and so he is able to give us an antipodean take on proceedings (aided by not having to get up in the middle of the night to watch). We also have Johan in Johannesburg, who can act as a neutral voce. The daily score update is one of the highlights of the day and is almost always followed by a trail of email correspondence which varies from the pithy (my father’s contributions) to the surreal (everybody else’s). At one point in 2009 there was a lengthy side conversation about Ancient Greek.

The striking thing this year is how many people are going for predominantly English line-ups, a marked departure from the past. If they still are when the teams fly into Sydney then England will have one hand on the urn.

As an aside, by my reckoning the highest individual score using this system in a single test was by Graham Gooch against India at Lord’s in 1990 when his scores of 333 and 123, combined with a wicket and two catches, gave him a whopping total of 506 points. No-one came near that in 2009, but Stuart Broad finished top of the form guide.

I’ll post updates sporadically through the series. Let the games begin!