Back in the mad, bad old days when I worked on magazines for a company that seemed invincible but no longer exists, I had a theory, probably rubbish, that most mags had a maximum of about six people at any one time that they could put on the cover and get a guaranteed sale. It was based on the notion that in any specialist area - musical genres, blockbuster movies, football - that was about the number of acts that the entire readership would have an interest in. It was a rolling cast and as some dropped out, others arrived, but six was roughly the number.
If you strayed outside of the six, you were taking a risk with a commercial property. Yet the frequency of most magazines meant there were more covers than there were guaranteed bankers to put on them without resorting to the kind of trivial repetition that you see so often now (token bitchy comment, but nonetheless true).
One way around it was to come up with a 'list feature' - the hundred best this, the twenty sexiest that and so on. It was particularly popular at Christmas when there was nothing else going on, and if you gave it enough of a spin, it was pretty failsafe, especially if it was compiled by some sort of reader vote on the winner.
This week has proven the concept retains its catnip qualities, with Wisden announcing an 'All-Time Text XI' and Patrick Ferriday publishing Masterly Batting, a book that ranks the best Test hundreds ever made.
C'mon, admit it, you need to know who's there don't you... I did, and there's something about human nature that wants to see a list and then disagree with it (the first thing you learn about the list feature is that it is made to be disagreed with - it's the only way that it will achieve any sort of traction with the reader).
The point is, it's a trick, it's a trap... you're joining in a zero-sum game when you take up the argument. The Wisden All-Time Test team picks eleven from more than 2,600 people to have appeared in a Test match across 150 years of the Almanack's life. Masterly Batting selects 100 centuries from 3,649 scored by 697 players. The mathematical chances of agreeing with them are approaching those of winning the lottery, and that's before the emotional arena is approached.
Even the act of typing out the Test XI - Hobbs, Grace, Bradman (c), Tendulkar, Richards, Sobers, Knott (wk), Akram, Warne, Marshall, Barnes - has the fingers creeping towards other keys... (Hobbs - really? and Bradman, well he was no captain was he, and it's great that Richards is in but for me it's the wrong one because my love for B.A. is irrational, and does anyone still think Sobers was a better all-rounder than Kallis, and where are all the South Africans and New Zealanders and Sri Lankans, because surely Hadlee's a good shout isn't he and old Murali took a wicket or two, and what sort of conditions are these teams playing in anyway? Are Wisden seriously trying to contend that any judge worth their salt would pick Alan Knott over Adam Gilchrist, and as for Barnes with his dibbly dobblers on a modern track - cannon fodder, and even if he bowled on a greentop, well everyone on earth would rather face him than Thomson or Holding wouldn't they? And who was it that left out the man who made both the highest Test and first-class scores?) and so on, ad infinitum.
In Masterly Batting, Patrick Ferriday measures each hundred in ten categories: size, percentage of team score, speed, bowlers faced, the pitch, chances offered, match impact, series impact, compatibility of attack and conditions, and finally intangibles (a get out of jail card if ever there was one), and these are worthy measures. It's just that my favourite hundreds have little to do with any of those criteria, or at least they're tangential and not at the core of their appeal.
Would I have enjoyed Boycott's hundredth hundred any less if England hadn't won (at least I think they won - it doesn't matter now), or KP's 158 in 2005 any more had it been less manic and flukey and chanceless? What about all of those Steve Waugh tons when I loved him and hated him at the same time, and why did I get a lump in my throat when he hit that boundary from the last ball of the day at the SCG?
And yet none of those thoughts really detract from the nature of the Test XI or the best centuries, because they brought them back to me. I felt them once again, and that's a nice thing. In Masterly Batting, choosing the hundreds is actually secondary to the chance to write well about cricket and stand out a little on the shelves. Wisden had a couple of days' worth of headlines and they're always useful if the noble name is to survive and prosper for another century and a half.
But c'mon, really, did they even consider the fall-out if Bradman tried telling Grace where to stand...
Friday, 25 October 2013
Friday, 27 September 2013
The relative nature of time and speed
Ever wondered why it's so difficult to swot a fly with your hand? I'd always thought it had something to do with its angled take-off, how it can throw itself sideways as well as upwards. New research has discovered something else though, something about the way that the fly perceives time itself.
In simple terms, the smaller the creature the more slowly time passes. The fly's compound eyes offer it life in stop-motion, the hand moving towards it a gathering shadow rather than a speeding car. The research opens up the notion that, in this relative, elastic time, the fly feels that its life lasts as long as long as ours. The mayfly lives its endless day, while, for the elephant, or the giant tortoise, the years blur past...
The brilliant Andy Bull wrote at length for the Spin on fast bowling and whether it's actually that fast any more. His piece highlights a great anomoly that exists in many arenas of sport: progress is spiky. Records move in clusters and then seize up for a generation. Quick bowlers were quicker in the 1970s than they are now. In part, this is natural. In the same way, the world records of Bob Beamon and Sebastian Coe stood for decades in athletics; heavyweight boxing exists in the shadow of Ali and Tyson; there wasn't a footballer as good as Maradona until Ronaldo and Messi. There will be someone as quick as Thomson or Holding along someday.
But it's also a question of perception. Part of the legend of fast bowling comes from the man playing it. In the wild west of cricket in the 1970s, batsmen had no helmets, pads and gloves were by comparison rudimentary and the way in which fast bowlers could bowl at them was unregulated. Not only was it fast, it was genuinely dangerous (and everyone should read Christian Ryan's wonderful, impressionistic essay on the quickest spell Jeff Thomson ever bowled for an idea of how it must have felt to bat in that era).
In the same way that time moves differently for the fly, so fast bowling feels different depending on who's facing it and when. In his majesterial The Art And Science Of Cricket, Bob Woolmer highlights some experiments conducted in the early 1980s by Tim Noakes, a South African researcher, in which an old-style static bowling machine was set at 130kph. Peter Kirsten faced up to it, and was unable to hit the ball without the complex series of visual clues a batsman picks up from the bowler's run-up and delivery stride (during his long career Kirsten faced all of the world's quickest bowlers out in the middle, playing deliveries at speeds of 150kph). Yet spat without notice from the cold eye of the machine, the ball came towards him too quickly for him to accurately plot its course.
From this, Noakes observed that the best players did not necessarily have better eyesight, but were somehow better at interpreting the bowler's approach and angle of delivery. He conducted another experiment in which the bowling machine was wired to the lights at an indoor net. Less than 200 milliseconds after the ball was fired, the lights were shut off. Kirsten was still able to anticipate the trajectory of the ball and hit 70 per cent of the deliveries he faced. Some provincial players brought in to bat in the same circumstances were so unnerved they ran out of the way of the ball.
It was clear that international batsmen had a kind of visual early warning system that enabled them to play the very fastest bowling. And so all 'fast' bowling is relative, in that the experience of facing a ball delivered uncomfortably quickly is available to any player. The only variable is the speed. A good club bat might be on the edge of their capability at 80mph, while a Test match player can handle 95mph. Both experience the same sensations and emotions while doing so.
Every batsman, though, is human and subject to the quotidian variations of biorhythms and mood that affect us all. Fast bowling that is survivable, even hittable, when the brain is sharp and the feet quick and everything in its place may not be when the body is injured, the mind jaded, the ego assaulted by doubt and fear.
These are the variables that make the game what it is. The fastest bowling will always have a mystique about it that has nothing to do with the speed gun or the stats. It's about that moment when bowler and batsman are both stretched to the limit of their ability, locked in a visceral, physically dangerous duel that might end in any way at any moment.
It's a glinting, alluring knife-edge that doesn't happen often, but when it does it sticks in the imagination, it gets written about and talked about and passed down into the annals. It's magical, and necessarily rare.
In simple terms, the smaller the creature the more slowly time passes. The fly's compound eyes offer it life in stop-motion, the hand moving towards it a gathering shadow rather than a speeding car. The research opens up the notion that, in this relative, elastic time, the fly feels that its life lasts as long as long as ours. The mayfly lives its endless day, while, for the elephant, or the giant tortoise, the years blur past...
The brilliant Andy Bull wrote at length for the Spin on fast bowling and whether it's actually that fast any more. His piece highlights a great anomoly that exists in many arenas of sport: progress is spiky. Records move in clusters and then seize up for a generation. Quick bowlers were quicker in the 1970s than they are now. In part, this is natural. In the same way, the world records of Bob Beamon and Sebastian Coe stood for decades in athletics; heavyweight boxing exists in the shadow of Ali and Tyson; there wasn't a footballer as good as Maradona until Ronaldo and Messi. There will be someone as quick as Thomson or Holding along someday.
But it's also a question of perception. Part of the legend of fast bowling comes from the man playing it. In the wild west of cricket in the 1970s, batsmen had no helmets, pads and gloves were by comparison rudimentary and the way in which fast bowlers could bowl at them was unregulated. Not only was it fast, it was genuinely dangerous (and everyone should read Christian Ryan's wonderful, impressionistic essay on the quickest spell Jeff Thomson ever bowled for an idea of how it must have felt to bat in that era).
In the same way that time moves differently for the fly, so fast bowling feels different depending on who's facing it and when. In his majesterial The Art And Science Of Cricket, Bob Woolmer highlights some experiments conducted in the early 1980s by Tim Noakes, a South African researcher, in which an old-style static bowling machine was set at 130kph. Peter Kirsten faced up to it, and was unable to hit the ball without the complex series of visual clues a batsman picks up from the bowler's run-up and delivery stride (during his long career Kirsten faced all of the world's quickest bowlers out in the middle, playing deliveries at speeds of 150kph). Yet spat without notice from the cold eye of the machine, the ball came towards him too quickly for him to accurately plot its course.
From this, Noakes observed that the best players did not necessarily have better eyesight, but were somehow better at interpreting the bowler's approach and angle of delivery. He conducted another experiment in which the bowling machine was wired to the lights at an indoor net. Less than 200 milliseconds after the ball was fired, the lights were shut off. Kirsten was still able to anticipate the trajectory of the ball and hit 70 per cent of the deliveries he faced. Some provincial players brought in to bat in the same circumstances were so unnerved they ran out of the way of the ball.
It was clear that international batsmen had a kind of visual early warning system that enabled them to play the very fastest bowling. And so all 'fast' bowling is relative, in that the experience of facing a ball delivered uncomfortably quickly is available to any player. The only variable is the speed. A good club bat might be on the edge of their capability at 80mph, while a Test match player can handle 95mph. Both experience the same sensations and emotions while doing so.
Every batsman, though, is human and subject to the quotidian variations of biorhythms and mood that affect us all. Fast bowling that is survivable, even hittable, when the brain is sharp and the feet quick and everything in its place may not be when the body is injured, the mind jaded, the ego assaulted by doubt and fear.
These are the variables that make the game what it is. The fastest bowling will always have a mystique about it that has nothing to do with the speed gun or the stats. It's about that moment when bowler and batsman are both stretched to the limit of their ability, locked in a visceral, physically dangerous duel that might end in any way at any moment.
It's a glinting, alluring knife-edge that doesn't happen often, but when it does it sticks in the imagination, it gets written about and talked about and passed down into the annals. It's magical, and necessarily rare.
Sunday, 15 September 2013
Paying it forwards
The end of the season is almost here, with its rain and with its retirements, with its shadows that fall longways across the ground and the inevitable melancholy that it brings. It is a cliche of sorts to acknowledge the feeling, yet it's always there and always the same, a kind of longing that cannot be fulfilled. It's always worse before the last game too. Afterwards it seems to run away quite quickly.
As the seasons tick by, it's heightened by the realisation that they too are finite. One of the geniuses of the game is that it is complex enough to offer a different face to each age of the player.
Once you pass the point at which professionals retire, it takes on a new hue. Before that moment, however delusionally, you can convince yourself you're playing the same game that you always have. You're not yet entirely divorced from the young kids who come in to thrash their 60-ball hundreds or mark out their 20-yard runs. Soon though, there's something different in the way that they look at you, and you realise that they are occupying a psychological terrain that you have surrendered.
It's not the death of ambition, more the adaptation of ambition to circumstance. You still play because you want to do well. What's changed is your definition of 'well'. The elements of the game that you take pleasure from have shifted.
Matthew Hoggard is pulling off the bowling boots for the final time in a week or so. When he was dropped by England in the brutal way that sometimes happens, Hoggy, understandably, had a difficult time accepting it. The cruelest thing, though, was that it was fair. The real bad guy was sport, where one day you are at your peak, and the next the slow descent has begun.
Yet there are some sunlit uplands here, too, on this plateau of the old fart. If you carry on putting yourself into the game, it sometimes gives you something back. Cricket can seem like a capricious sport, especially for batsmen, but in reality it's just implacable, neither for you or against.
My friend and team-mate Tony has, like most of us, had his moments. He played a lot of his early cricket in the unforgiving North, and, back in '86, once made 99 in a league game somewhere in the shadow of the Satanic Mills. He thought that maybe the chance of a hundred had passed him by forever on that day.
In one of our last games of the season, on a golden afternoon at a wonderful ground, he got himself in and past fifty. The runs kept coming, and he had 80-odd by the time I went in to join him. He hit a couple more boundaries away and came down the wicket.
'Eleven more,' he said.
'It's just a number mate,' I replied, but we both knew it wasn't.
We batted on. He went to 95 and then got a long hop, which he pulled for four.
For once in my life, I was genuinely prepared to make any run he called, even if it ran me out, but I didn't have to. The next ball was a full toss that he hit hard to boundary. In a little speech he made in the bar afterwards, he admitted that he'd thought of that 99 almost every night before he went to sleep. Well he doesn't have to think of it any more.
That is what the game sometimes gives you. It's why we miss it as it slips away for another year.
As the seasons tick by, it's heightened by the realisation that they too are finite. One of the geniuses of the game is that it is complex enough to offer a different face to each age of the player.
Once you pass the point at which professionals retire, it takes on a new hue. Before that moment, however delusionally, you can convince yourself you're playing the same game that you always have. You're not yet entirely divorced from the young kids who come in to thrash their 60-ball hundreds or mark out their 20-yard runs. Soon though, there's something different in the way that they look at you, and you realise that they are occupying a psychological terrain that you have surrendered.
It's not the death of ambition, more the adaptation of ambition to circumstance. You still play because you want to do well. What's changed is your definition of 'well'. The elements of the game that you take pleasure from have shifted.
Matthew Hoggard is pulling off the bowling boots for the final time in a week or so. When he was dropped by England in the brutal way that sometimes happens, Hoggy, understandably, had a difficult time accepting it. The cruelest thing, though, was that it was fair. The real bad guy was sport, where one day you are at your peak, and the next the slow descent has begun.
Yet there are some sunlit uplands here, too, on this plateau of the old fart. If you carry on putting yourself into the game, it sometimes gives you something back. Cricket can seem like a capricious sport, especially for batsmen, but in reality it's just implacable, neither for you or against.
My friend and team-mate Tony has, like most of us, had his moments. He played a lot of his early cricket in the unforgiving North, and, back in '86, once made 99 in a league game somewhere in the shadow of the Satanic Mills. He thought that maybe the chance of a hundred had passed him by forever on that day.
In one of our last games of the season, on a golden afternoon at a wonderful ground, he got himself in and past fifty. The runs kept coming, and he had 80-odd by the time I went in to join him. He hit a couple more boundaries away and came down the wicket.
'Eleven more,' he said.
'It's just a number mate,' I replied, but we both knew it wasn't.
We batted on. He went to 95 and then got a long hop, which he pulled for four.
For once in my life, I was genuinely prepared to make any run he called, even if it ran me out, but I didn't have to. The next ball was a full toss that he hit hard to boundary. In a little speech he made in the bar afterwards, he admitted that he'd thought of that 99 almost every night before he went to sleep. Well he doesn't have to think of it any more.
That is what the game sometimes gives you. It's why we miss it as it slips away for another year.
Monday, 2 September 2013
Not knowing how: Batting's emerging question
Here is a group of players: Chris Rogers, Ian Bell, Michael Clarke, Alastair Cook, David Warner.
And another: Jonny Bairstow, Phil Hughes, Joe Root, Jonathan Trott.
And a third: Kevin Pietersen, Chris Gayle, Virender Sehwag.
And finally: Sachin Tendulkar, Kumar Sangakkara, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Mahala Jayawardene.
There is a humming undercurrent to the critique of modern batting, that increasingly idiosyncratic and macho pursuit. You hear it on commentary and in analysis, and while it's hazily defined, it's usually expressed in one of two ways: 'He wasn't sure how to bat' or 'He didn't know how to play'.
They're phrases that need a little context, because they're obviously not literal. Any batsman who has made it as far as the international game clearly knows how to bat. Any player playing at the top level evidently knows how to play.
Instead, it's to do with circumstance, the demands of format, the ebb and flow of the red ball game. The longer the batsman is asked to bat, the more nuanced his batting must become. The task in 50-over cricket is almost rote now, its formula exhausted by repetition, while the blunt challenge of T20 remains brutally simple to compute. By contrast the challenge of the five day game shifts under the batsman's feet even as he is at the crease.
Not knowing how to bat, in context, is not knowing how to tune yourself into the fluid set of circumstances that the game produces. Here, self-knowledge is everything.
The first two groups of players above competed with varying levels of success in the Ashes series. The difference between them is that group one essentially batted the way that they always bat. They lived or died by the quotidian fluctuations of form and luck, the natural run of good days and bad. Chris Rogers, for example, with the benefit of 20,000 first class runs behind him, battered a quick 80-odd at Old Trafford and accumulated a careful hundred in Durham. Both innings fitted with the rhythm of the match they were played in. Aside from the pressure of Test cricket, there was nothing new about any of it for Rogers. Both were innings of a type regularly required of an opening batsman, and he responded with the touch of a craftsman.
Bell had the series of his life and Warner one that he'll never forget, but both did what they always do. Clarke fought his stiff back and Cook battled a technical fault but neither panicked nor changed their method. They stuck it out, because experience tells them that they will come good again soon.
The second group are (pretty obviously) the batsmen that didn't know how to bat, the players who weren't sure how to play. Phil Hughes*, the Australian among them, is a talent betrayed, first dropped from the side when his Test average was above 50, then thrown up and down the order, his method questioned and ridiculed. No wonder the light has gone from his eyes.
Joe Root and Jonathan Trott demonstrate how delicate the equilibrium of a batting order can be. Sometimes absence becomes a player like nothing else, and Andrew Strauss already has a post-retirement glow about him. At his best, Strauss was the most bullish of the triumverate he formed with Cook and Trott. His solidity and tempo let the others be themselves.
Root allowed himself to be lulled into periods of stasis, an understandable reaction to the match stretching out before him, and yet also the response of a young man who felt that his natural game may equal irresponsibility (here he can be contrasted with Rogers, a less talented player, but one who has spent years doing the job).
The knock-on effect on Jonathan Trott was less predictable. He had built his reputation on being impervious to external forces, yet his crease rituals always hinted at his need for certainty. With Cook and Root at sea, Trott played a series of uncharacteristic innings, quick forties studded with boundaries that built a discomforting momentum he didn't seem able to halt.
Jonny Bairstow didn't know whether to stick or twist and it showed. Playing his natural game kept getting him out, and yet he didn't seem to have another beyond the same glacial slowness that descended on Root.
The third and fourth groups are rarely unsure how to play, of course. Pietersen, Gayle and Sehwag have controlled every format with the same unorthodox force. They are outliers blessed with a freakish talent that can be expressed any way - devastating in a single over or a day and a half of batting. Their method is uncompromising.
And the final group are the last generation to have grown up without T20 cricket, whose path to the Test game was always clear and rising before them. It was their ultimate aim, their career peak, and they spent their early lives preparing for it. The way they bat actually reflects that: their skill sets were honed for Test match play, their mental strength built by its adversity.
Last week Aaron Finch played an extraordinary innings at the Ageas Bowl. Could he be a Test match batsman? That's a well-intentioned question anyone who doesn't really follow the game may ask. Well he's 26 years old and has played 33 first class matches. In those, he averages 29. He debuted in 2007, and in 2009-10 had his best season in the Shield, with 416 runs at 37.81. That same year, he became a star in the Big Bash and that is where he has stayed, typecast as a talented slugger. He doesn't have to worry about 'how to bat'. In fact, he doesn't really have to worry about first-class cricket at all, unless Australia decide he's worth a punt.
In Finch's brutality, in Bairstow and Root's uncertainty, in Australia's bare cupboard and England's wavering second string (what awaits Buttler and Hales and Ballance and Morgan and the rest?) lays the conundrum facing the modern batsman. How do you play?
It's interesting to note that some of India's finest young blades - Kohli, Pujara, Dhawan - are less afflicted. What is different about their thinking? Now there's a question.
NB: I blogged about Phil Hughes for the Cordon here.
And another: Jonny Bairstow, Phil Hughes, Joe Root, Jonathan Trott.
And a third: Kevin Pietersen, Chris Gayle, Virender Sehwag.
And finally: Sachin Tendulkar, Kumar Sangakkara, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Mahala Jayawardene.
*
There is a humming undercurrent to the critique of modern batting, that increasingly idiosyncratic and macho pursuit. You hear it on commentary and in analysis, and while it's hazily defined, it's usually expressed in one of two ways: 'He wasn't sure how to bat' or 'He didn't know how to play'.
They're phrases that need a little context, because they're obviously not literal. Any batsman who has made it as far as the international game clearly knows how to bat. Any player playing at the top level evidently knows how to play.
Instead, it's to do with circumstance, the demands of format, the ebb and flow of the red ball game. The longer the batsman is asked to bat, the more nuanced his batting must become. The task in 50-over cricket is almost rote now, its formula exhausted by repetition, while the blunt challenge of T20 remains brutally simple to compute. By contrast the challenge of the five day game shifts under the batsman's feet even as he is at the crease.
Not knowing how to bat, in context, is not knowing how to tune yourself into the fluid set of circumstances that the game produces. Here, self-knowledge is everything.
The first two groups of players above competed with varying levels of success in the Ashes series. The difference between them is that group one essentially batted the way that they always bat. They lived or died by the quotidian fluctuations of form and luck, the natural run of good days and bad. Chris Rogers, for example, with the benefit of 20,000 first class runs behind him, battered a quick 80-odd at Old Trafford and accumulated a careful hundred in Durham. Both innings fitted with the rhythm of the match they were played in. Aside from the pressure of Test cricket, there was nothing new about any of it for Rogers. Both were innings of a type regularly required of an opening batsman, and he responded with the touch of a craftsman.
Bell had the series of his life and Warner one that he'll never forget, but both did what they always do. Clarke fought his stiff back and Cook battled a technical fault but neither panicked nor changed their method. They stuck it out, because experience tells them that they will come good again soon.
The second group are (pretty obviously) the batsmen that didn't know how to bat, the players who weren't sure how to play. Phil Hughes*, the Australian among them, is a talent betrayed, first dropped from the side when his Test average was above 50, then thrown up and down the order, his method questioned and ridiculed. No wonder the light has gone from his eyes.
Joe Root and Jonathan Trott demonstrate how delicate the equilibrium of a batting order can be. Sometimes absence becomes a player like nothing else, and Andrew Strauss already has a post-retirement glow about him. At his best, Strauss was the most bullish of the triumverate he formed with Cook and Trott. His solidity and tempo let the others be themselves.
Root allowed himself to be lulled into periods of stasis, an understandable reaction to the match stretching out before him, and yet also the response of a young man who felt that his natural game may equal irresponsibility (here he can be contrasted with Rogers, a less talented player, but one who has spent years doing the job).
The knock-on effect on Jonathan Trott was less predictable. He had built his reputation on being impervious to external forces, yet his crease rituals always hinted at his need for certainty. With Cook and Root at sea, Trott played a series of uncharacteristic innings, quick forties studded with boundaries that built a discomforting momentum he didn't seem able to halt.
Jonny Bairstow didn't know whether to stick or twist and it showed. Playing his natural game kept getting him out, and yet he didn't seem to have another beyond the same glacial slowness that descended on Root.
The third and fourth groups are rarely unsure how to play, of course. Pietersen, Gayle and Sehwag have controlled every format with the same unorthodox force. They are outliers blessed with a freakish talent that can be expressed any way - devastating in a single over or a day and a half of batting. Their method is uncompromising.
And the final group are the last generation to have grown up without T20 cricket, whose path to the Test game was always clear and rising before them. It was their ultimate aim, their career peak, and they spent their early lives preparing for it. The way they bat actually reflects that: their skill sets were honed for Test match play, their mental strength built by its adversity.
Last week Aaron Finch played an extraordinary innings at the Ageas Bowl. Could he be a Test match batsman? That's a well-intentioned question anyone who doesn't really follow the game may ask. Well he's 26 years old and has played 33 first class matches. In those, he averages 29. He debuted in 2007, and in 2009-10 had his best season in the Shield, with 416 runs at 37.81. That same year, he became a star in the Big Bash and that is where he has stayed, typecast as a talented slugger. He doesn't have to worry about 'how to bat'. In fact, he doesn't really have to worry about first-class cricket at all, unless Australia decide he's worth a punt.
In Finch's brutality, in Bairstow and Root's uncertainty, in Australia's bare cupboard and England's wavering second string (what awaits Buttler and Hales and Ballance and Morgan and the rest?) lays the conundrum facing the modern batsman. How do you play?
It's interesting to note that some of India's finest young blades - Kohli, Pujara, Dhawan - are less afflicted. What is different about their thinking? Now there's a question.
NB: I blogged about Phil Hughes for the Cordon here.
Monday, 19 August 2013
Careful with your kinetic flow, Shane...
Neil D'Costa, known for the years he has spent coaching Michael Clarke as well as for his work with Phil Hughes and Mitchell Starc, gave a barbed little interview to the Sydney Morning Herald last week, pointing out various 'fundamental flaws' in the 'non-negotiable basics' of Australia's top order.
Such is the depth of Australia's trauma, another filleting with the knives of the press barely registered, although D'Costa had a few hurtful zingers in his armoury. Yet this was a piece that could be read another way, too, because it was a story that said something about modern coaching.
We are about to enter the second age of the coach. The professional game is reaching an apex of analysis as science reveals more of the physical realities of batting and bowling. It's not quite golf - yet - but it will be one day. As players become highly-priced freelance contractors, why wouldn't they employ a personal coach to micro-manage each aspect of their game? And why would those coaches not become high-earning mini-celebs in their own right? Golf after all has its swing gurus and its putting specialists, its mind-managers and its conditioning champions.
As in golf, a new language is developing to describe function and form, a mix between management-speak and pop-science. D'Costa's piece is studded with it: he talks about 'kinetic flow' and the 'entry and exit points' of various shots. Yet at heart, this new language is another way of analysing principals that are as old as the game.
D'Costa offers this jargon-heavy paragraph on David Warner: ‘Warner has what in swing mechanics is called a reverse swing. His weight is distributed as if he’s a right-handed batsman facing the wicketkeeper. The shoulder facing the bowler is high when, in fact, it should be lower at the time the ball is released. That would enable Warner to enter his shots with the correct weight shift and put his nose over the little toe on his front foot. What I see is Warner’s leaning back. That allows him to cut easily but, when he comes forward, his balance is off. Having too much weight leaning back also makes him susceptible to lbw when the ball is swinging.'
Or as my taciturn former coach Jim Cameron would say: 'lean into the ball' (or 'lean into the f**king ball' - he was Australian) .
D'Costa on Shane Watson: 'Watson has a similar shoulder angle and alignment problem to Warner. He shifts his weight back when he sets up. Watson is a big build, so it’s worth comparing him to Kevin Pietersen or Jacques Kallis, who each get their front shoulders down and stand slightly open at release so they can lean into the ball, chin-forward.'
Or, get your head over the the ball.
Brad Haddin: ‘You cannot recalibrate your judgment if you move your head and Haddin moves his head around, both when he’s batting and wicketkeeping. Like Khawaja, he drops head when batting and keeping, losing milliseconds of vision.'
Keep your head still.
Usman Khawaja: 'He breaks rule No.1 – keep your head still. He’s tracking the ball by dropping his head. After his dismissal in the second innings of the fourth Test, Nasser Hussain asked ‘How did he miss that?’ The answer is, he dropped his head before the ball arrived and was looking at the ground instead of the ball. Until he changes that habit and is able to track the ball in and out with his head still, the rest doesn’t matter.’
Watch the ball.
We're at a juncture, as the late Bob Woolmer pointed out in the title of his majesterial book, of the Art and Science of Cricket. The fundamental principals of the game have been known to every player since the age of Grace. Science is, at the moment, engaged in explaining why the art works. It has value, and as the demands of its formats drive further, richer evolution of its methods, it will have a widening area of study.
But the oldest lessons should always be learned first, and they don't need decorating. Watch the ball. Keep your head still. Hit it when it's under your nose. The song remains the same.
Such is the depth of Australia's trauma, another filleting with the knives of the press barely registered, although D'Costa had a few hurtful zingers in his armoury. Yet this was a piece that could be read another way, too, because it was a story that said something about modern coaching.
We are about to enter the second age of the coach. The professional game is reaching an apex of analysis as science reveals more of the physical realities of batting and bowling. It's not quite golf - yet - but it will be one day. As players become highly-priced freelance contractors, why wouldn't they employ a personal coach to micro-manage each aspect of their game? And why would those coaches not become high-earning mini-celebs in their own right? Golf after all has its swing gurus and its putting specialists, its mind-managers and its conditioning champions.
As in golf, a new language is developing to describe function and form, a mix between management-speak and pop-science. D'Costa's piece is studded with it: he talks about 'kinetic flow' and the 'entry and exit points' of various shots. Yet at heart, this new language is another way of analysing principals that are as old as the game.
D'Costa offers this jargon-heavy paragraph on David Warner: ‘Warner has what in swing mechanics is called a reverse swing. His weight is distributed as if he’s a right-handed batsman facing the wicketkeeper. The shoulder facing the bowler is high when, in fact, it should be lower at the time the ball is released. That would enable Warner to enter his shots with the correct weight shift and put his nose over the little toe on his front foot. What I see is Warner’s leaning back. That allows him to cut easily but, when he comes forward, his balance is off. Having too much weight leaning back also makes him susceptible to lbw when the ball is swinging.'
Or as my taciturn former coach Jim Cameron would say: 'lean into the ball' (or 'lean into the f**king ball' - he was Australian) .
D'Costa on Shane Watson: 'Watson has a similar shoulder angle and alignment problem to Warner. He shifts his weight back when he sets up. Watson is a big build, so it’s worth comparing him to Kevin Pietersen or Jacques Kallis, who each get their front shoulders down and stand slightly open at release so they can lean into the ball, chin-forward.'
Or, get your head over the the ball.
Brad Haddin: ‘You cannot recalibrate your judgment if you move your head and Haddin moves his head around, both when he’s batting and wicketkeeping. Like Khawaja, he drops head when batting and keeping, losing milliseconds of vision.'
Keep your head still.
Usman Khawaja: 'He breaks rule No.1 – keep your head still. He’s tracking the ball by dropping his head. After his dismissal in the second innings of the fourth Test, Nasser Hussain asked ‘How did he miss that?’ The answer is, he dropped his head before the ball arrived and was looking at the ground instead of the ball. Until he changes that habit and is able to track the ball in and out with his head still, the rest doesn’t matter.’
Watch the ball.
We're at a juncture, as the late Bob Woolmer pointed out in the title of his majesterial book, of the Art and Science of Cricket. The fundamental principals of the game have been known to every player since the age of Grace. Science is, at the moment, engaged in explaining why the art works. It has value, and as the demands of its formats drive further, richer evolution of its methods, it will have a widening area of study.
But the oldest lessons should always be learned first, and they don't need decorating. Watch the ball. Keep your head still. Hit it when it's under your nose. The song remains the same.
Friday, 9 August 2013
Cricket and ignominy: the man whose trousers fell down
Sometimes the game does not want merely to defeat you. Sometimes it
demands something more, a new kind of humiliation or embarrassment, simply because it can.
The other week our opener got out early for not very many, and as he walked sadly towards the boundary rope, a group of Japanese tourists came running up and asked if they could have their picture taken with him. In fact they didn't really ask, they just draped their arms around him and started.
Then one of them took a piece of paper out of his pocket and asked if he knew the way to a local tourist attraction.
Later, when I was batting, I took what should have been a single to third man, but as the fielder ran after it his trousers fell down, so we got two instead.
For the pro, the moment of ignominy is a rare interruption to normal service. Their skill level tends to overwhelm the possibility of farce and their egos are robust enough to shrug it off when it visits. The rest of us have no such shields.
I was once fielding at slip to an off spinner, quite close to the bat. He bowled a short one, the batsman went back to cut and the next thing I knew I was seeing stars. The batter had got a top edge that smacked me on the forehead before I could get my hands up.
Instead of concern or sympathy, all I could hear was laughter. Apparently the ball was traveling remarkably slowly. As the story evolved, the ball got slower and slower, and the time I was on the ground longer and longer. I even heard my dad telling someone about it once, giving a little mime of my hands flapping as the ball got nearer.
Very slowly, of course...
The other week our opener got out early for not very many, and as he walked sadly towards the boundary rope, a group of Japanese tourists came running up and asked if they could have their picture taken with him. In fact they didn't really ask, they just draped their arms around him and started.
Then one of them took a piece of paper out of his pocket and asked if he knew the way to a local tourist attraction.
Later, when I was batting, I took what should have been a single to third man, but as the fielder ran after it his trousers fell down, so we got two instead.
For the pro, the moment of ignominy is a rare interruption to normal service. Their skill level tends to overwhelm the possibility of farce and their egos are robust enough to shrug it off when it visits. The rest of us have no such shields.
I was once fielding at slip to an off spinner, quite close to the bat. He bowled a short one, the batsman went back to cut and the next thing I knew I was seeing stars. The batter had got a top edge that smacked me on the forehead before I could get my hands up.
Instead of concern or sympathy, all I could hear was laughter. Apparently the ball was traveling remarkably slowly. As the story evolved, the ball got slower and slower, and the time I was on the ground longer and longer. I even heard my dad telling someone about it once, giving a little mime of my hands flapping as the ball got nearer.
Very slowly, of course...
Thursday, 1 August 2013
All back to Alf's
A few weeks ago, I took a journey that I have made many times before, but not for many years. It always used to be by car, but this time it was on foot, at least the last part of it was - around the Wandsworth one-way system, past Zodiac Records (still strange and unwelcoming, still forbiddingly shuttered and with its little sign 'open Saturdays 10-6pm') and then halfway up East Hill, on the left, next to Wandsworth House...
It's just a side turning now, blink and you'd miss it, the street sign the only clue to what it was. 'Cricketers Mews' it reads, and it leads to a block of apartments that say all there is to be said about early '90s architecture. They are as unremarkable in their way as the building that stood there before them, beyond the vanished garage forecourt: a whitewashed frontage with a slender side door, and behind it a creaking and gas-lit hall of indeterminate vintage.
Nothing lasts forever, and Alf Gover's cricket school was demolished in 1989, shortly after Alf and his son John sold up upon the grand old man's retirement from coaching at the age of 82 (well, sort of - Alf was born on leap year's day, so technically he was a quarter of that). But Gover's is going to live again for half an hour on Saturday, when Charlie Connelly's documentary is broadcast on Radio 4 (I blogged here on my time there, and got to write a little more about Alf for the Nightwatchman).
There are contributions from Mike Selvey, Sir Trevor McDonald, Mickey Stewart, family members (it was great to hear that John is alive and well and living the high life in Monaco) and even Nicholas Parsons. Alf's was open to anyone with the fee for a net, as well as to the young pros sent to pass under the eye of the master: thus Viv Richards, Andy Roberts, Barry Richards, Mike Procter, Sunil Gavaskar, Garry Sobers and Brian Lara are joined on the list of alumni by John Major, who used to save his pocket money for lessons, and Harold Pinter, who had a portrait of himself batting there above his writing desk.
But everyone who went has their own cast list, and as I stood outside Cricketers Mews with Charlie mine came back to me with a great and melancholic force: Noble, lovely Alf of course, and John downstairs in the shop; Terry the barman, who'd once delivered a fridge to Dave Vanian of the Damned and who could bowl rapid, skidding bouncers when the mood seized him; my coach Jim Cameron, a wise, hard-living and Biblically-bearded Australian; my good friend Simon, who ended up as one of Alf's coaches himself, and with whom I shared mad, high-speed car-rides back down the A3; old Joe, who started drinking brown ale in the bar at lunchtime and had the last net of the day; Monty Lynch, Surrey's middle-order thumper, battering ball after ball through the long winter afternoons...
More than that, I felt the sounds and smells and look of the place. To me, it still lives, in its way.
I was lucky to meet Charlie again through cricket, and to be asked to take part. It's a particular kind of luck, one we owe to Alf. His over-arching philosophy was not to impose technical perfection (although he could do it, if required) but to offer to everyone a way to love the game for life. That is Alf's greatest legacy.
NB: There are some terrific pictures here. Alf's leaning against the legendary snooker table in the first; in the second he's in his office, just off the snooker room, with his wife Marjorie; the third is up in the nets, which no-one who saw them will forget in a hurry...
It's just a side turning now, blink and you'd miss it, the street sign the only clue to what it was. 'Cricketers Mews' it reads, and it leads to a block of apartments that say all there is to be said about early '90s architecture. They are as unremarkable in their way as the building that stood there before them, beyond the vanished garage forecourt: a whitewashed frontage with a slender side door, and behind it a creaking and gas-lit hall of indeterminate vintage.
Nothing lasts forever, and Alf Gover's cricket school was demolished in 1989, shortly after Alf and his son John sold up upon the grand old man's retirement from coaching at the age of 82 (well, sort of - Alf was born on leap year's day, so technically he was a quarter of that). But Gover's is going to live again for half an hour on Saturday, when Charlie Connelly's documentary is broadcast on Radio 4 (I blogged here on my time there, and got to write a little more about Alf for the Nightwatchman).
There are contributions from Mike Selvey, Sir Trevor McDonald, Mickey Stewart, family members (it was great to hear that John is alive and well and living the high life in Monaco) and even Nicholas Parsons. Alf's was open to anyone with the fee for a net, as well as to the young pros sent to pass under the eye of the master: thus Viv Richards, Andy Roberts, Barry Richards, Mike Procter, Sunil Gavaskar, Garry Sobers and Brian Lara are joined on the list of alumni by John Major, who used to save his pocket money for lessons, and Harold Pinter, who had a portrait of himself batting there above his writing desk.
But everyone who went has their own cast list, and as I stood outside Cricketers Mews with Charlie mine came back to me with a great and melancholic force: Noble, lovely Alf of course, and John downstairs in the shop; Terry the barman, who'd once delivered a fridge to Dave Vanian of the Damned and who could bowl rapid, skidding bouncers when the mood seized him; my coach Jim Cameron, a wise, hard-living and Biblically-bearded Australian; my good friend Simon, who ended up as one of Alf's coaches himself, and with whom I shared mad, high-speed car-rides back down the A3; old Joe, who started drinking brown ale in the bar at lunchtime and had the last net of the day; Monty Lynch, Surrey's middle-order thumper, battering ball after ball through the long winter afternoons...
More than that, I felt the sounds and smells and look of the place. To me, it still lives, in its way.
I was lucky to meet Charlie again through cricket, and to be asked to take part. It's a particular kind of luck, one we owe to Alf. His over-arching philosophy was not to impose technical perfection (although he could do it, if required) but to offer to everyone a way to love the game for life. That is Alf's greatest legacy.
NB: There are some terrific pictures here. Alf's leaning against the legendary snooker table in the first; in the second he's in his office, just off the snooker room, with his wife Marjorie; the third is up in the nets, which no-one who saw them will forget in a hurry...
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