Ah, James Vince. A breathy sigh across
the face of the game, a player that, even when hitched up to the runaway train
that is England’s one-day batting, transports you to way-stations that no-one
else can. Take Cardiff, the T20i against Pakistan last month. He hit one
through cover so hard the ball seemed to leave a slight vapour trail behind,
pixels of white-light. ‘Are you watching this?’ said one of my direct messages.
‘It’s not just the timing, it’s the power…’ Or Nottingham, where he opened
against Pakistan and oozed the second ball of England’s innings to the boundary,
a shot that produced from the crowd the kind of deep ‘aahhh’ of satisfaction
that comes from air being taken in rather than expelled from the lungs.
Vince made 36 at Cardiff and 43 in
Nottingham, scores that populate that strange hinterland of Vince-ness in which
both fans and haters find their fuel. There is a vacancy for an enigma in
English cricket, has been since Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash became the last
two men to score one hundred first-class centuries. At the centre of any enigma
is mystery, and Vince’s lies somewhere between those of Ramprakash and Hick.
Like Ramprakash there is a dissonance between how he looks when he’s batting and
how he feels. Like Hick, there is a woozy sense of diffidence, of not appearing
to be quite present enough.
Here’s James Vince talking about how it
feels from the inside, speaking to the writer Jonathan Liew: “Every now and
again, you feel like your rhythm’s on, you can do pretty much anything. But
those days are very rare. It always feels like a grind. There’s never an easy
run.”
Then there’s the diffidence, the
maddening repetition of fifteen of his twenty-two Test innings ending with
catches somewhere between the wicketkeeper and cover. An analysis by the
Cricviz website found that he was the unluckiest batsman in world cricket. Another,
by Jarrod Kimber, focussed on the number of runs Vince scored in boundaries -
around 62 per cent of his Test tally came that way, a figure as high as
Sehwag’s.
Both analyses had value, both could be
right, and also wrong. Enigma sometimes exists as disparity between how
something appears and how it performs. Vince’s blessing, and his curse, is to
make something that everyone knows to be difficult seem as natural as
breathing.
A cricket bat maker once gave me a
wonderful analogy about the way he approached the bats of this new era: “fast
cars look fast,” he said.
James Vince looks fast. For the
aesthete, his grace at the crease can be overwhelming. He creates a sense of
possibility when he bats and when he gets out in the ways that James Vince gets
out, he leaves behind a sadness for what hasn’t happened, for what won’t now be
seen.
Some people, pragmatists generally, a
group into which many professional and ex-professional cricketers fall, don’t
really feel that loss in the same way. They were always on at Ramprakash and
Hick, and now at Vince too, mainly for giving the appearance of being something
that they’re not.
It’s hard to make the case that they
are wrong, in this moment of extraordinary fecundity in England’s one-day
batting. The line-up is as freakish as its results suggest, so James Vince will
play the role of spare man, a state almost as tantalising as one of his
thirties or forties.
Teddy Sheringham spoke recently about
Manchester United’s 1999 Champions League victory. Sheringham was a substitute
on the night of the final, and with United losing 1-0, Alex Ferguson told him
that if another fifteen minutes went by without a United goal, he’d be playing:
“I didn’t want Bayern to score because then it’s really hard to get back in the
game. But I didn’t want us to score either, because then I probably wouldn’t
get on…”
It’s a perfect summation of where James
Vince is right now. Wanting but not wanting. Hoping but not hoping, just like
Teddy, who pulled it off in the end.
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