Boswell incident exposes bad action
There are those, saturated by televised cricket, who have come to regard these finals as a mundane, minor event, serving only to remind us that the football season is well under way. But for the committed and there were at least 7,000 Somerset folk and less vociferous bands of supporters from Leicester at Lord's yesterday - the traditional finale of the season is a day of sweaty palms.
If ever we needed confirmation that it is a daunting, tension-soaked occasion for those actively involved, it came from the terrible experience of Scott Boswell, Leicestershire's unlikely opening bowler. He bowled only two overs, but sadly this constituted 21 balls. In his second over he propelled eight wides. He tried holding the ball across the seam; he tried bowling around the wicket; beads of sweat flooded from his forehead and seemed to terminate in his right hand.
However hard he tried he could not get the damn thing to land on the cut strip. It was agonising to watch, even for those urging Somerset towards their first trophy in 18 years. To make matters worse, the Somerset batsmen sensed blood and started stealing twos down at third man. Once he dived despairingly in an attempt to prevent a boundary but all he managed to do was gouge out a huge chunk of turf, leaving a hole that, unfortunately, was not quite big enough to swallow him up.
Quite what any Aussies lingering in England after their Ashes triumph would have made of it, I'm not sure. In all probability they would have seen those two overs as confirmation of the paucity of talent in English county cricket. 'No better than our grade cricket,' they would say. Dennis Lillee might have a view, since Boswell attended his Pace Foundation in Madras in 1996. Clearly he returned home with a few rough edges to be ironed out.
Boswell was Leicestershire's hero in their semi-final against Lancashire, taking four for 44. He is by all accounts a gutsy Tyke, a bright man, who is a graduate of 'Wolly Poly' (Wolverhampton University), but this was of no help to him when he got the cricketing equivalent of the yips. The reason that he struggled so spectacularly is that he has a bad action. Under normal county conditions he can compensate, but when the pressure is really on the quirks in that action - the low arm and open chest - can cause havoc. He had nothing to fall back on. Without wishing to be cruel, the Aussies could be right: the fact that Boswell opens the bowling for one of the country's premier sides may be an indictment of English county cricket.
Not that Boswell was the only one to suffer nerves. Even Jamie Cox, phlegmatic Aussie and Somerset captain, looked on edge. After 18 balls he had scored just one run and had flapped airily at several deliveries from Jimmy Ormond. Briefly he looked hamstrung by the occasion, burdened by the knowledge that he has played in four finals (one with Somerset, three with Tasmania) without a win. He was almost too desperate to do well. But unlike Boswell, Cox survived and went on to make an important contribution to the Somerset total (44 runs from 64 balls) and the reason for that was that he has a technique he can trust. In times of stress that aids survival.
But there were one or two, who were unmoved by the parochial enormity of the occasion. Unsurprisingly, Shahid Afridi was one of them. He may not appreciate the tradition of the domestic one-day final after such a brief sojourn in county cricket, and he's certainly used to playing before packed houses. So it was business as usual, though yesterday, contrary to expectation, it was his bowling rather than his batting that had an impact on the match.
On such a fine pitch Leicestershire needed something unusual to conjure their wickets and Afridi's fizzing wrist-spinners provided it. They don't spin much but their trajectory was deceptive enough to bowl three of the Somerset middle order, thereby pre venting mayhem. Afridi's batting was more predictable, the usual rate of two runs per ball, the ball briefly exploding in every direction except that anticipated. Fortunately for Somerset he only scored 20.
His departure came when Rob Turner tiptoed around a rapidly disintegrating slip cordon to take one of the highest skiers to be seen at Lord's. That catch indicated that Turner was up for the occasion. He had plenty of time to ponder the consequences of dropping it. But he willed the ball into those gloves. Another Somerset local, Keith Parsons, unlikely hero, was also rising to the occasion. His two sixes from the last two balls of the Somerset innings punctured Leicestershire's rescue act in the field, while his dismissal of the fluent Trevor Ward and the dangerous Vince Wells were timely - for the committed.