“It’s a bit like being stumped,” said Greig Wright, cricket development officer for the Isle of Man. “You might as well be stumped by six feet as by an inch. In the end, this is classed as a loss, no different to any other.”
Wright was referring — with admirable stoicism — to the most remarkable scorecard of this or arguably any other season: the Isle of Man’s 10-wicket defeat to Spain on Sunday
In a T20 international played at La Manga, Wright’s men were bowled out for 10, with Spain’s opening bowlers Mohammed Kamran and Atif Mehmood collecting four wickets apiece. To make matters worse, the visitors’ opening bowler Joseph Burrows then got off to an iffy start.
“The first ball was off the pitch,” Wright told Telegraph Sport. “It was a wide and a no-ball. Then there was a free hit, which went for six. Next ball: six again. I said ‘Thanks very much, let’s go to the pub.’ Normally we have a no-drinking policy when we’re away, but in this instance I thought that maybe the best medicine comes in a pint glass.”
It is hard to see Spain’s two-ball chase being bettered — or should that be worsened? — in international cricket. It smashed the previous record — held jointly by Kenya and Rwanda, who both chased down 32 in 2.3 overs independently in the space of a couple of weeks last year — for the shortest men’s match by a distance.
Wright — a former performance officer at Derbyshire County Cricket Club — described scenes that might have left some coaches with post-traumatic stress. Fortunately, he is a level-headed character with a wry sense of humour.
“We trained quite hard but they had the wood on us from the first ball,” said Wright. “Their opening bowler, Kamran, was a bit too quick for the boys. He and Mehmood, his partner, were quite aggressive. But if you can bowl fast, why not?
“They were both left-arm quicks and they were happy to use both ends of the pitch: full and short, nose and toes. The first wicket went down first ball. Our lad was caught behind — deemed to be off the bat, after the umpire consulted with the square-leg umpire — though he told me it was off the pad, and he’s one of the most honest people I’ve met.
“There was only that one wicket in the first over, but two more in the second, and three in the third. A couple of inswinging yorkers made a bit of a mess of the stumps, though fortunately we were using spring-back stumps, which don’t look quite as bad. One batsman walked for an LBW and said ‘I wasn’t even gonna look up because I knew I was plumb.’ We managed to last about nine overs for those 10 runs.
“Fraser Clarke, one of the younger lads, made a 12-ball duck — and it was probably the best 12-ball duck I’ve ever seen. He got hit a couple of times, was tested out on the helmet, but he wore it. Fraser is our 17-year-old leg-spinner, and not what I would call a batter. I’m not sure he had his eyes open, mind you.
“Ed Walker managed a nine-ball nought not out. He’s now nicknamed ‘The Wall’. Ed took our plan to play aggressive cricket to the nth degree in the other direction. But then his father is from Yorkshire, so he is a stubborn bugger. In the end, their seamers ran out of overs, so they threw the ball to a leg-spinner to finish it off with the last two wickets.
“There was some emotion straight after the game, as you can imagine, but you can laugh it off. I told the boys it’s something they won’t experience again. One of the lads is learning Spanish, so I said ‘In 70 years’ time, you can tell your grandkids you played in that game. You don’t have to tell them which side you played on.’”
As you can see, Wright is a good sport — as well as a human embodiment of Kipling’s advice to “treat those twin imposters just the same.” But once we have enjoyed a moment of schadenfreude at the Isle of Man’s expense, we should stop to sketch in some of the context.
The Isle of Man stand 39th in the International Cricket Council’s T20 rankings, having climbed from 77th a year ago with the help of victories over Romania, Serbia and Turkey. They were also blinking their way into the daylight after a winter of indoor nets — even if they found the weather in Spain to be colder, wetter and windier than it had been back home.
They were in Spain for an extremely intensive bilateral series: six T20 matches in three days, which is the most cost-effective way to achieve the minimum activity levels required by the ICC. The two-ball chase came on the last afternoon, after the Isle of Man batsmen — who were hitting the wall by this stage, rather than the ball — had scored a creditable 134 during the morning match. Not that Wright was under any illusions about the quality gap between the teams.
“Our lads in some of the middle games dug in the occasional bouncer,” he said. “To try to give them a bit of their own medicine. But we were fetching it from the next field. It was like we were bowling with a sponge ball, and they’ve got a bouncy ball. Their bats seemed to be six feet wide.
“They only batted first once, and they scored around 180. They did have a very strange method. One lad who got over 100 was batting really nicely. His partner was on 20 off 40, and they retired this second lad out for scoring too slowly, sent in someone else to give it a crack. I’ve never seen that before in international cricket.”
Offers to play for Isle of Man have come from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
The two nations also have contrasting methods of recruitment. Wright said that only one of the home players “sounded remotely Spanish”, and only one had a Spanish passport, with the others all qualifying by residency. This is increasingly the norm in “associate nation” cricket, with Italy leading the way when it comes to recruiting Australian or South African players like the former Derbyshire batsman Wayne Madsen.
Wright said he has no problem with the way Spain assemble their team, describing the Isle of Man’s opponents as “really nice lads who played well, played hard, and were considerably better than us.” But he was amused to receive a deluge of emails on Sunday night from countries such as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia and Dubai.
“These were all people saying ‘I can come and play for the Isle of Man and make you better’,” explained Wright. “But we’d rather stick with our homegrown youngsters.”
