Graeme Smith: the size and the shape

During the Oval Test, Shane Warne described Graeme Smith as 'a gentle soul'. Warnie had formed this unlikely view during the downtime the pair shared at Rajasthan Royals, and while they probably weren't nipping off together to recreate Lady Di's famous pose in front of the Taj Mahal just for japes, it was telling that one of cricket's uncompromising characters was prepared to accept another in such a way.

Everything about Smith's public persona mitigates against the notion, and it seemed even more incongruous while he undertook his umpteenth mighty blunting of England's bowlers, obscuring the stumps, blotting out hope, casting shade and spreading doubt. Iron-jawed, thin-lipped, unshaven, gazing at the world through the same sun-bound squint as Steve Waugh, he is both a prosaic destroyer and a technical enigma.

Like a giant Heath Robinson engine, Smith's batting shouldn't work. Recreated under scientific conditions with another player, it almost certainly  wouldn't. He has scored the bulk of his eight thousand plus Test match runs with half a bat for a start, his choking grip offering a closed face to the world. A right arm bowler pushing a delivery across Smith's ample bow and away towards the slips might find himself being driven anywhere from mid-on to backward square leg, the ball flying from a semi-visible slither of willow. However wide the cherry might be spearing, Smith's head will probably still be outside of it, his weight rolling across the crease behind, hence England's fleeting period of success against him when Matthew Hoggard brought the ball late and fast back into his pads.

The laundry list of shots Smith cannot hit is long, and even if he could cover drive, would anyone want to watch him do it? It's one of the great cosmic jokes that he is so often partnered with the symphonic Hashim Amla, the brutal orthodoxy of Kallis, the mercurial AB de Villiers.

Yet Smith has a daunting physicality that not even the Leviathan Kallis can match. He succeeds in part because of his scale. Cricket is a finely calibrated game, the size and weight of bat, ball and stumps, the length of the pitch, the distance to the boundary allow players of all sizes and various skills to compete. James Taylor at five feet four, can face Morne Morkel at six feet six, in a contest that few other arenas would allow. Scale, though, has its edges as Will Jefferson has demonstrated. Graeme Smith is on the right side of that edge, a man whose odd technique combines with his size and shape to offer a unique proposition. He has a brilliant eye - he must have to keep middling the ball with such a sharply angled bat - and by standing the way he does, he all but eliminates the target.

His approach offers a different psychological challenge to the bowler. He barely sees the stumps and he will be hit into odd areas often and deliberately. It's hard to practice for a batsman like Smith because there is no other batsman like Smith. And because he doesn't look like he should be able to bat, there is a certain tiny, rat-like corner of the brain that is affronted by an inability to dismiss him. There can be few opponents who frustrate England as often and for as long as Graeme Smith. The gentleness does not extend as far as the pitch. He is cracking them, bit by bit.

Boucher and Ramps, and the manner of their leaving

Retirement had already suggested itself to Mark Ramprakash and Mark Boucher, it just arrived more abruptly than either thought it would. Ramprakash might have imagined a golden late summer afternoon somewhere in the Shires, the last few balls of his professional days ringing from his bat like the echoes of so many before, perhaps one final hundred to sign himself off. Boucher had the stats uncannily aligned: a thousand dismissals in international cricket, 150 Test match caps with the last of them at Lord's, and the chance to scrap his beloved Proteas to the number one spot as he went.

It was not to be, of course. Boucher leaves those stats hanging tantalisingly, with their Bradman-like rows of nines. His injury was horrible, not the way his most riled opponent would have wished him to go, but once it has healed (as we all hope it will) the sadness will soften. His career is rounded, and the stats bracket longevity and drive rather than exceptional talent. What comes to mind is the bristling fighter that he was was; a backs to the wall merchant, a classic wingman, a Healy not a Gilchrist.

Boucher has, spookily, weirdly, embodied the South African cricket team. It was he who blocked out the final ball after Shaun Pollock's infamous World Cup miscalculation. He was at the crease when England were beaten in that totemic first away series win since readmission. He was dropped for being too arrogant and sure of himself; he spent his last couple of seasons in private introspection. It was Boucher who talked Herschelle Gibbs into coming clean before the King Commission.

There's a much-viewed youtube clip of Boucher sledging Zimbabwe's Tatenda Taibu - another keeper who retired this week - and it sums up the dichotomy he reveled in. Zimbabwe were 62-4 at the time, and there's a slightly queasy feeling at the lunking, muscly South Africans bullying them, a notion magnified by Taibu's schoolboy looks.

But then come Boucher's sledges. They are not hectoring, but subtly undermining. He plays on Taibu's ego - the sarcastic 'that's a big shot Tatenda'; then his size and appearance - 'I'll walk you back to the pavilion'; and finally his performance: 'You must know your average. Nine? Ten? We'll give you 9.5'. It is sly, clever, experienced, calculated, and inbetween it all, he takes a ball that barely bounces with a minimum of fuss.

Mark Boucher will settle in the memory like so many fulfilled cricketers before him. Time came for him, as it does for them all. Mark Ramprakash, brooding prince of Surrey CCC, county cricket's Heathcliff, leaves behind something far more complex. It's been interesting to watch his followers and commentators trying to work out what it is. Regret is too obvious and too easy. If Boucher was emblematic of South Africa, then who better to be emblematic of England in the 1990s than Ramprakash, thwarted by ambition and misdirection, denied by better players, consistently out of time.

Yes, it would have been more aesthetically satisfying to watch Ramprakash score the runs that his buddies Hussain and Thorpe did, but his unfulfilment as an England player gave us one of the great second acts in English lives. Viewed as an act of revenge, as an expression of fury and beauty, it becomes compelling, unmissable; what's more it is unique. For two consecutive seasons, he averaged more than a hundred. How spectacular and magnificent. Lots of players have had Test careers like Thorpe or Hussain or Butcher. No-one else in the history of the game has done that.

Too much time has been spent thinking about what he didn't do, and not enough gazing in wonder at the scale of what he did. What drove him, on all of those quiet weekdays? Maybe not even he knows.

The comparison most often drawn is between Ramprakash and Ian Bell, the tenderly-handled beneficiary of a winning, nurturing environment. But come on... do we really want Ramprakash to be Ian Bell? Sure, Bell plays prettily, but he is an identikit modern international, monotone, locked in, moulded. Ramprakash was something far more interesting and alive. If he'd scored sixteen Test hundreds, he'd be just another player. As it is, he is an enigma, an emblem, a legend, a star. The players that live on are the ones who grip our imagination, and Ramprakash has done that and will continue to do so. Now that is a legacy.

Garry Sobers and ODIs

Through the summer rains of Monday night came an odd, slight coincidence. The weather had exhausted Ian Ward's not inconsiderable ability to soak up screentime by leaving longer gaps between his words, and Sky reverted to filler shows. The first was a vaguely Shakespearian half hour on Shane Warne - who was Shane: Hamlet, Henry, Falstaff, Iago, Bottom...? - the second a prog about Garry Sobers.

I was too young to have seen Sobers, and for most of my callow youth I harboured an unexpressed and needless resentment of the man simply because no-one ever seemed to shut up about him. I never had to wait long to hear my heroes, Bad Bas Richards, King Viv (then merely heir to the throne of his namesake), the emergent Beefy, Javed, Geoffrey Boycott, compared unfavourably to him.

Sky's film began, annoyingly even after all these years, with Ian Chappell saying something like, 'Don Bradman was the greatest batsman of all time, but Sobers was the greatest cricketer'. Oh yeah? One thing that struck me right away was the amount of colour footage they had. Part of my irrational dislike was probably stirred by the fact that Sobers was almost pre-TV; he'd existed through the black and white images of his six sixes, which was all anyone ever seemed to show of him. Yet here he was, lithe and loose, a technicolour big cat. He did look pretty good, admittedly.

The coincidence was just that I'd been looking at Sobers' record in comparison to Jacques Kallis's and seen that Sobers had played a single one-day international, against England at Leeds in 1973, the eighth such match ever staged.

It was a game that had a kind of novelistic symmetry and irony to it; or at least, you'd have thought twice before inventing its details. The great all-rounder, the man many would say was built for the form and all of its successors, made nought, took a single wicket, and bowled the final over from which the winning runs were scored.

The game wasn't a great one, reflective of the fact that no-one really knew what the format was, or what it might become (in fact the most aware seemed to be the sponsors, Prudential Insurance, who'd got in early). It was a 55-over affair. West Indies batted first and were all out for 181 from 54. Sobers was caught by Bob Taylor from the bowling of Chris Old for a six ball duck.

England had reached 157 for 5 when Sobers bowled Old, returning the favour, completing the circle. They staggered into the final over with four required and the last pair at the crease. Bob Willis was on strike, Sobers to bowl. Willis hit Sobers back over his head for two from the first delivery and squirted the next through third man for the win. Mike Denness was man of the match because, as the Almanack noted, 'he'd batted splendidly for 66 off 41 overs in under two and a half hours'.

And that was it. Sobers began and ended his ODI career on the same day, and finished up with more wickets than runs. Bradman had made nought in his last international innings, and Sobers had followed suit. If Wisden's remarks about Denness weren't enough to suggest the distance between then and now, the stats I found on Kallis and Sobers would do. Sobers' 93 Test matches took 20 years to play. Big Jacques played the same number in ten, and while he was doing so, made 211 ODI appearances. Sobers was a man from another time: it just wasn't mine.

No good at ODIs though, was he, Chappelli...

Talent and Tom Maynard

There were many tributes today to Tom Maynard, and some, from his mates and fellow cricketers, were heartbreakingly raw, such is the immediacy of the form in which they now come. As you get older what you feel most is the weight of life unlived. Twenty-three years is half a lifetime away from me now - all of those days he cannot have seem very poignant.

Among the Twitter posts was one from Scyld Berry that said: 'Tom Maynard was so talented that when at Millfield [school] he played for the neighbouring village of Butleigh, batted left-handed and hit a 100. RIP.' 

Stories like that one are really about the difference between us, the distance between not just the amateur and the pro, but between professionals and internationals and between internationals and the genuinely great. Ultimately, they see the world differently. Martin Amis described it brilliantly as 'the natural severity' of the truly talented ball-player. What they do is different; when they strike the ball it makes a different sound, it goes to a different place, at a different speed.

Barry Richards once made a fifty against a club side while turning the bat sideways and using the edge, back in the day when the edge of a bat was slightly thicker than a padded envelope. David English recalled the time that Richards turned out for his charity side, the Bunburys: 'He flew from Queensland specially to play against Norma Major's XI at Alconbury. He had no gear, just a well worn pair of golf shoes. With hastily borrowed equipment and a bat so old cobwebs still adorned the handle, the Master, bespectacled, stood at the crease and proceeded tentatively at first, to perform his strokes from memory. He had not lifted a bat for 12 years but scored 52.'

Just this weekend, Mark Ramprakash tweeted that he'd loaned Viv Richards a bat for a charity game, and Richards had made 40 with it. Jeff Thomson remembered a net with Don Bradman in India: 'On a rest day, Bradman was around in the nets. I was bowling only legspin to him, but he had a couple of young blokes trying to get him out. With no pads, no nothing ... for a 68-year-old, he belted the hell out of them on a turf wicket. And he hadn't batted for 20 years.'

It's the same in other sports. My dad, a very decent representative table tennis player in his day, once played against Johnny Leach, the world champion, who beat him using a matchbox instead of a bat. Andre Agassi used to talk about beating players 'both ways' - playing left and right handed. Ben Hogan was said to have thrown some golf balls down on the fairway and hit one onto the green using every club in the bag from driver to putter.

That's the difference, and most of us can only imagine what it must be like to occupy it, as Tom Maynard did.

Will the second-best T20 batsman in England go to the World Cup?

England are now so good, they can admit out loud that certain Test matches mean more than others regardless of what they charge for the tickets, the staging fee or the TV rights, and they can divest themselves of their best T20 batsman, a man in no small part responsible for their only ever international title, in the pincers of contractual small-print. Either that, or hubris is beginning to set in.

They might go to Sri Lanka for the title defence without their second-best T20 batsman too, because that is Owais Shah and they don't seem to like him much, either. But the great meritocracy of sport sends its messages whether they are acknowledged or not and on Shah the free market has spoken. Pietersen aside, he is the one successful English player in the IPL. He has been bought on four different occasions by four different teams, and this year got his first decent run, for Rajasthan Royals. He played 13 games and made 340 runs at almost 38, at a strike rate of 132. That put him inside the top 20 batters in the tournament. In the Big Bash, where he played for Hobart, he averaged 70 at a rate of 150 over eight games.

At the crease he is a magnificent oddity, a one-off, a wired bundle of quirks and ticks, eyes wide and brain burning with the sheer range of possibilities he brings to each delivery. Last year he played the shot of the season at Chelmsford, a defensive prod that went over the stand. With his limber wrists, he might just have easily got the same ball through fine leg, or slipped it past third man. Equally, on another day, it might have struck him plumb in front, or been popped back to the bowler from a leading edge. In attitude, in approach, in appearance, he is an enigma; in short, everything that England distrusts.

The other day, he came in for Essex in a CB40 match with the game won and Ravi Bopara on a hundred. He played incredibly straight; his bat looked like a barn door. He flicked one to the boundary, took a few singles and did nothing really extraordinary, but that was sort of the point: even in so little there was something about it that illuminated Bopara's conventionality. Bopara is very good, and his desire and attitude deserves respect. But the shimmer of something extra.... no, it was all down the other end.

More than any other format, because it is condensed and amplified, T20 cricket needs that something extra, some dynamism from players who will walk the tightrope. Pietersen did, Eoin Morgan does, and so does Shah. It's a quality that's most effective and magnetic when the player has learned to control it, to bring it out when it's needed, and Shah seems to be at that point now.

He should replace KP, but he won't. In fact, they should both play, but neither will. Last year, in the post about Shah's shot of the season at Chelmsford, I wrote that he had 'a racehorse temperament' that had stopped him playing more for England. This was disputed in an anonymous first-person response underneath. I have no idea whether it was genuine or not (it's still there, if you scroll down) but I regret writing it now anyway: it's too glib a description of a complex player. Shah has made his case in the arena where it counts. Wonder if England are going to notice?

The art of not fielding, while fielding

In a game at the start of the season, we fielded for 47 overs in the bone-deep cold. The distant pavilion glowed like a cottage in the paintings of that old fraud Thomas Kinkade. The grass on the outfield was thick and stringy, the ground soft and heavy underfoot. I was wearing trainers following a pre-match incident with the sole of my boot. We didn't even get drinks, but then they would probably have been brought out by a St Bernard. In the warming clatter of the pub afterwards, a team-mate said that he thought that the moments that the field came together after the fall of a wicket were a way of reconnecting with the game after the solitary time spent in one position or other. That seemed true.

No batsman goes to his grave thinking, 'I wish I'd spent more time fielding'. Time in the field is the other side of an unequal equation. No-one can really like it can they? The only similarity between the two is the sense of absorption, although it is absorption of two different kinds. Batting really well (admittedly more of a memory than anything else these days) induces an interior state that you don't really want to come out of, because when you do you have to confront ordinary life again. It is not something that you want to end. Fielding for long periods is about introspection of another kind, starting in bursts of claps and shouts and then slipping gently into fairly eventless solitude as the overs tick past.

In Netherland, Joseph O'Neill describes the 'pulmonary' rhythm as the field walks in and out. It's a lovely image, but a little too lyrical for the aimless trudge it becomes after an hour or so. Fielding's tasks are essentially menial: returning the ball to the bowler, stopping the odd one, hoofing after the ball when necessary (and what fresh hell is this relay throw - two of you chasing it now, can't just leave it to the other bloke who's you know, nearer...). The chance of a catch is a hiding to nothing, and a drop often reminds you of how withdrawn from the rest of the game you've become; its shame and embarrassment and exposure.

Not liking fielding is one of the game's dirty little secrets. You have to pretend it's alright. It's a team thing, and more than that it's a game thing, because if you didn't field there wouldn't be one. It's different for bowlers, because it's their arena and time in the field will be punctuated by what they do. But for batsmen it remains a deal made in order to play the game. It's a deal that feels slightly different every time. Fielding before you've batted is different to fielding afterwards, and fielding after you've scored runs is different to fielding after you haven't.

Most of all though it's a mood thing. Sometimes, on a beautiful ground it's just too churlish, too ungrateful, to do anything except be thankful that you're there. Other times it's about smothering anxiety, killing boredom, finding humour and life in the little things. Occasionally it's just about getting it over with, and every now and again it can be extraordinary. The art is to do it while not doing it, to let it wash over you, its lulling effect opening the window to an implacably calm interior state that can resist its length and its demands and takes you somewhere else until you come up smiling.

Even so, 47 overs. I mean, come on...

Chris Gayle: Grace, Bradman

A few days ago, two of the three top stories on cricinfo were about one man. The headline of the first was: 'West Indies want to mop up 'residual matters' with Gayle'. The second read simply, 'Gayle goes berserk in Pune'.

The two were connected, but laterally rather than literally. Gayle was not yet on the roof of a municipal building negotiating to release his hostages if only Ernest Hilaire would agree to stop Skyping him. His carnage was of the more usual kind - he'd just hit Bhuvneshwar Kumar for four sixes in five balls, in the process re-emphasising the hold he has on his board and on the game.

Next year, professional T20 cricket will be ten years old. It has distorted thinking more than Bodyline did, reshaped finances more than Packer could, demanded the most complete revolution in technique since Grace began hitting across the line, offered players a new career model beyond central contracts. Chris Gayle's employers have included the Barisal Burners, the Matabeleland Tuskers, Sydney Thunder, Royal Challengers Bangalore, West Australia, Kolkata Knight Riders, Jamaica and of course the immortal Stanford Superstars, and they have had value for their coin. If not T20's Bradman, then Gayle is its WG, its Ranji. In its infant years, he is a conceptual force, its vision of the future.

Even to those looking towards us from the not-so-distant 1990s, the limp times after the Windies and before Waugh introduced four an over to Test cricket, Gayle would seem like Kubrick's Obelisk, dressed in his space-garb, his gold pads and his gridiron helmet, his muscle shirt tight on his giant shoulders, beefed-up bat in his shimmering gloves, a quarter of a billion people watching on TV as his blade scythes through...

One in every nine deliveries that Gayle has faced in T20 cricket has been hit for six. One in nine. It feels like a key indicator of how he is shaping a format in which we are really not sure what the prime stats should be. Certainly the side that hits the most sixes usually wins. But even measured in the old-school way, Gayle is getting ahead of the rest by the sort of percentages that Bradman did. By the blunt tool of average, his mark of 43.81 is miles beyond those who can reproduce his strike rate (155.48), while those who can come within five of that average cannot approach his speed: Kieron Pollard strikes at 161.34, but averages 28; Sehwag 159.83 but averages 29; Kallis averages 39.64 but strikes at 113, Sachin 37.48 but at 123. Or consider this: Gayle has as many T20 centuries as Kallis, Pollard, Pietersen, Warner, Sehwag and De Villiers added together.

Lots of other batsman can do what Gayle does once or twice, it's just that Gayle does it so often. His last nine innings in the IPL have been 87, 4, 86, 71, 26, 82 not out, 57, 6 and 128 not out. He has the most runs at the highest average, as he did last year, and it is over that period that Gayle has really separated himself from the rest. Because the T20 game is shortened and heightened, his refinements are harder to spot, but they are there.

His 128 not out from 62 against Delhi illustrated perfectly his current thinking. He didn't score from his first eight deliveries, and by the end of the first powerplay had 10 from 17. In his 'berserk' 57 from 31 against Pune, he had four from his first eight deliveries and 17 from his first 16. In his 82 from 59 against Delhi in the match before that, he had two from his first ten and 22 from his first 19; in his 71 from 42 against Kings XI, it was 21 from his first 19; in his 86 from 58 against KKR he had 23 from his first 25.

The other half of the equation is that the acceleration, when it comes, is unprecedented. Gayle's strategy is not just to hit boundaries but to clear the ropes. He has hit more sixes than anyone in T20 cricket, his 279 put him 81 ahead of the next best, Kieron Pollard. And he is ratcheting it up; in this year's IPL, he has 57 in 14 games. A loose study of his boundary counts shows that he tends to hit fours in his first 20 or so deliveries and then moves on to sixes.

It would be fascinating to hear him talk about it, but he is deliberately enigmatic. His Twitter stream is a flow of emoticons. He rarely gives interviews and when he does, like his mate KP, they tend to yield the wrong kind of headlines. He sees no benefit in demystifying himself, and in truth it is adding to his legend.

All of this makes that lateral connection between those cricinfo stories. Players have always been exiled by boards, but Gayle's illuminating brilliance in T20 cricket, on a global platform, is a mirror that reflects the WICB's own stupidity back at them.

Cricket will reach its agreements with T20, and years from now people will recall its first quaint decade and smile at how old and proper it all looks. A few sages, cryogenically preserved, will be able to say they saw Chris Gayle bat, this format's Grace, this format's Bradman. WG would certainly approve of how little he says, and of how little he runs.