Who Wants to be a Batsman?

CHAPTER 1

Dicing With Death

I haven’t scored any hundreds, but I’ve given away a few. And I’ve seen a few more. This story is about the players like Richards and Tendulkar and Pietersen and de Villiers and Sangakkara who made those hundreds. How are they able to consistently crack 90mph deliveries to the boundary, deliveries that many of us can barely see? What makes them so good? How do they control their emotions when the pressure is intense out there in the middle? And, for us normal mortals, what is it like to be walking to the wicket to face a 6ft 6in ogre, fearing the worst? This is about the triumph and torment and trials and tribulations of the men who try, and sometimes succeed, and often fail, to make runs for a living.

Watching the brilliant Brendon McCullum slaying a fearsome fast bowler, Dale Steyn, in the 2015 World Cup semi-final, hooking him into the crowd and driving him spectacularly over the sightscreen, demonstrates the power and exhilaration of batting. Seeing the taut features and stuttering footwork of the once-prolific Jonathan Trott, dismissed for another single-figure score, is a reminder that batting can be a fraught and precarious business.

Batsmen have the best, and worst, of times. They have the most fragile existence of anyone in sport. They are out on their own being preyed upon. They have half a second to react to the ball. They are walking the tightrope between success and failure. One minuscule error and they’re toast. Terminé. Caput. McCullum was bowled for nought in the first over of the World Cup final. And then they have to slope off in front of everyone, keeping their heartache to themselves. It’s like watching a man walking to his grave.

And yet when they stay in and their feet are moving beautifully and the ball is pinging off their bat and the bowlers are at their mercy and they reach the promised land, they feel a huge surge of pleasure and a rush of blood to the head that only one other activity in life can offer. And you can’t do that in public. Well, not legally anyway.

Whether you’re able, or whether you’re not, in cricket, everybody has to bat. There’s no choice. You can’t say, at the sight of a large marauding fast bowler armed with a ball as hard as rock and a menacing stare, ‘Sorry skip, I don’t fancy it today.’ You’ve got to go out there and face the (chin) music. It’s dicey and dangerous and, reflecting on the freakish death of the unfortunate Phillip Hughes, occasionally deadly.

I wasn’t a good batsman, but in a 15-year professional career I batted more than 300 times and encountered many of the problems that a good batsman has to handle: ferocious pace, late swing, devious spin, a tricky pitch, a dodgy umpire, a sledging bowler, bright light, bad light, self-doubt, overconfidence, a blow to the head, opening the innings, 10 to win off nine, or holding out for a draw with everyone round the bat.

I didn’t overcome too many of these predicaments, but I understood the mistakes I made and I tried to correct them. I mostly failed. But I’ve worked out, over the course of 30 years of playing and then analysing every ball in slow motion from 28 different angles, and talking to the great and the almost great, what batting entails. I’m fascinated in unravelling this complex art and the characters it reveals.

Anyone who’s vaguely interested in cricket has dreamt at least once of playing a match-winning innings for their country. Is it an attainable dream? Can you make someone into a top batsman? What ingredients would they need? Think of two batsmen who indisputably were great – Geoff Boycott and Graham Gooch – and you realise that the answer is not a simple one. You couldn’t imagine two men with such contrasting personalities. The proud, indefatigable, call-a-spade-a-spade Yorkshireman who repelled hard-working bowlers with almost sadistic glee, keeping his own score like a king counting out his money. And the self-effacing, laconic chap from Leytonstone with a falsetto laugh which betrayed a murderous intent. He’s like the Michael Caine character in Get Carter.

I’m interested in finding out if the best batsmen all have certain characteristics in common. How do they overcome the mental and physical hurdles? Why do some of them have such odd routines? How do they hit a bouncer travelling at 90mph? Have the requirements of batting changed as the game enters a more explosive era? And ultimately, why would anyone want to be stuck out there on their own with just a bit of wood for protection against 11 ruthless hunters knowing that one false move will be your last? Is it a job for which only masochists should apply?

I was driving back down the M1 from Trent Bridge in the summer of 2011. It was 11pm. My mobile rang. It was not a number I recognised.

‘Is that Simon Hughes?’ It was an Australian voice.

‘Yes,’ I replied, a little circumspectly. ‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s Shane Watson,’ said the voice. ‘Australian opening batsman.’

‘Really?’ I said, imagining it was probably one of Michael Vaughan’s mates winding me up. ‘Where are you?’ (I thought it was a good way of checking if it actually was him.)

‘Melbourne,’ he said. ‘I wonder if we could have a chat.’

My heart sank. The only time current players called me was to complain about something I’d written or misquoted. Or, occasionally, to write a not-very-humorous piece for their benefit brochure. With Watson, who I had met properly only once at a charity evening I was compering – at which I semi-humiliated him by getting him to chew on a wichetty grub – it could only be a complaint.

‘Why, what have I done?’ I said defensively.

‘Well, you’ve written about my failure to convert fifties into hundreds,’ he said.

Oh here we go, I thought, another precious international player tearing me off a strip for daring to question their ability when I had an iota of their talent. ‘How many Tests have YOU played?’ and all that. I was bracing myself for a lecture while trying to negotiate the contraflow near Newport Pagnell. I was praying for the mobile signal to die. Sod’s law it never does when you want it to.

‘Well, I’ve only written about that a bit, and that was ages ago, in the Ashes,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t say that made you a bad player. I mean, you made more runs than any other Aussie in that series.’ Ugh, I was crawling to him now.

‘Look, it’s OK,’ he said, ‘I’m not pissed off. I wanted to ask your advice.’

‘My advice?!’ Images of me being knocked over for not many by a succession of West Indian fast bowlers and South African fast bowlers and English fast bowlers, and spinners, and medium pacers, and in fact just about anyone who could turn their arm over, flashed through my mind. The sound of Geoff Boycott lambasting a second-rate spinner on commentary, saying, ‘You could ’ave ’it that lollipop, Simon, and you couldn’t bat!’ was ringing in my ears.

‘My advice . . .?’

‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘I know you analyse the game carefully and write a lot about batting and I want to pick your brain and see if I can learn anything. I have to do SOMETHING. I can’t keep making nice fifties and then getting out. It’s driving me nuts. I thought you’d be the man to talk to about trying to improve.’

‘Really?’ I said, trying to conceal the incredulity in my voice. ‘You’re serious?’

‘Deadly serious,’ he said. ‘Of course, I understand if you feel uncomfortable about helping an Aussie . . .’

Well I did, but there’s divided loyalty everywhere these days, isn’t there? Swedes and Italians have helped the English footballers, Zimbabweans and Australians have worked with the English cricketers, the Welsh and Irish rugby teams are coached by Kiwis. So I thought, what the hell. I’ll probably just confuse him more anyway, to England’s potential benefit.

We talked for so long that I got all the way back to London, and I was sitting in my car outside my house at about half past midnight when we finally terminated the call. And in the course of our conversation we talked about everything to do with batting. I told him everything I’d gleaned from watching and interviewing leading players. We discussed preparation, visualisation, concentration and distraction. We talked about the inherent loneliness of being a batsman and of the importance of working in pairs and the value of strong body language in concealing from the opponent what you are really thinking. We talked about expectation and inspiration and desperation and the rarefied air of total domination. I don’t know if any of it helped, but it got him thinking.

It got me thinking, too. Watson began life as a fast bowler who batted at No.8. I wondered if you could make someone a good batsman from modest beginnings, or are they born with the talent? If you were seeking to create the ideal player in a laboratory, Frankenstein-style, what raw materials would you need?

A bit of common sense, to start with. Boycott and I were watching the Pakistani Shahid Afridi smacking a few boundaries with typical abandon against England in a one-day international. Predictably, with the match almost won, Afridi had a big wahoo and was bowled.

‘What was Afridi thinking?’ I said on commentary.

‘It’s hard to think, Simon, when you’ve got nothing between your ears,’ Boycott retorted.

So, despite Afridi’s brilliant hitting ability, you wouldn’t want his head. Joe Root’s would be more suitable. He seems a more balanced sort of chap. But should your ideal batsman be tall or short, strong or nimble, left-handed or right-handed (or both?!)? Do you need 20/20 vision and amazing reflexes? Or is concentration more important than co-ordination? Is it better being a brash show-off or a selfish loner? Given the importance of a batsman maintaining a look of innocence when they get a faint nick to the keeper, should you be the kind of character who never admits it when they fart?

And once you’ve established the basics, how do you get better? Is there one practice technique that works above all others? Can you train yourself to handle genuine fast bowling? Can you learn how to read mystery spin? Why do you lose confidence and where can you find it again? How can someone bat for ten hours and not get tired, or bored? Is all the effort and trauma really worth it? Ultimately is making a hundred better than sex?

If you’ve ever wanted to be a batsman or wondered what it’s like to be alone in the middle being hunted down by 11 heartless assassins or are intrigued by this mysterious, painful-sounding world of flying hooks and square cuts and rip-snorters and vicious leg breaks, then this book is for you. It will make you realise that being a batsman is a sporting version of the Hunger Games.

CHAPTER 2

Don’t Annoy the Coach

‘Go on, my son!’

I always wanted to be a batsman. The inspiration was my Uncle Tony. He grew up idolising Denis Compton – England’s first modern celebrity cricketer – primarily for his ability to waltz in to the Lord’s dressing room the morning after a big night out (still wearing his dinner jacket) and, having been roused from a nap, grab a colleague’s bat, stride out and make a scintillating hundred. ‘If you can play you can use the leg of a chair,’ Compton was fond of saying.

Unable to effectively combine claret-quaffing with run-making, Uncle Tony chose me to atone for his wasted sporting talent. He bought me a Ben Warsop bat and a copy of Wisden for my eighth birthday. I kept the Wisden by my bed. I liked the Cricket Records section. Two statistics stood out: Garfield Sobers’ 365 not out – the highest score in Test cricket – and Hanif Mohammed’s 499 for Karachi v Bahawalpur (he was run out trying to be the first man to make 500).

When I saw England’s Colin Cowdrey on TV score a century in his 100th Test, in 1968, my mind was made up. Cowdrey made batting look so easy. A portly figure, he glided about the crease stroking the ball effortlessly into gaps. He was like an overweight Ian Bell. (Apparently he sometimes didn’t walk if he nicked it either.) I loved his elegance and style and the nonchalant way he raised his bat to acknowledge the crowd’s applause.

I tried to emulate the feats of these celebrated batsmen in the back garden, throwing a tennis ball against the wall and hitting the rebound, just as the great Don Bradman did (only he hit a golf ball with a stump, which is just a tiny bit harder). I was either Cowdrey driving an Australian fast bowler on the up, or Ted Dexter hooking Wes Hall, or Geoff Boycott going up on his toes to steer a single past gully. I had an exceptionally bouncy tennis ball to replicate a quick wicket in Brisbane, and a scuffed, bald one to recreate a dry turner in Lahore. Helped by the fact that the wicket was a milk crate and there was only one fielder – my sister Bettany’s pram at short mid-wicket – I made umpteen fifties and raised my bat to Jasper, the cat, dozing on the kitchen window sill.

Dexter was a friend of the family and I liked his majestic batting and his Aston Martin parked outside. I visualised myself as him taking guard at No.3 for England against Australia at Lord’s, surveying the field, noting an inviting gap at extra cover and exquisitely driving my third ball towards the Tavern boundary to the impressed Hampshire burr of John Arlott on BBC radio: ‘Young Hughes made that look as simple as blowing the head off a dandelion . . .’ It would have been an assured beginning, if not quite as memorable as David Gower’s first-ball pull to the square-leg fence against Pakistan, or as outrageous as Jason Roy’s second-ball reverse sweep for four on his England debut in September 2014. OK, it was a T20 match, but it still took balls to do that.

I imagined stroking a few offside boundaries and unfurling an immaculate straight drive, dabbing a single or two and pulling the Australian off-spinner resoundingly over mid-wicket to lead the players off for lunch, 46 not out, to rousing applause, the members in the pavilion seats standing in appreciation, the clapping rising to an echoing climax in the Long Room as I passed the approved glances of Sir Donald Bradman, W.G.Grace and Lord Harris looking down from their portraits on the wall, and winked at Uncle Tony downing a bucks fizz in the Long Room bar.

And so the dream went on.

I set out to make it reality. Most nights of summer I was up the road at my local club, Ealing, facing the off-spin of my Sri Lankan friend Dilip in the nets, or driving the ball against the fence if Mac, the cantankerous old groundsman, couldn’t be bothered to put the nets up, or fending off Dilip’s tennis-ball bouncers in a nearby car park if Mac shouted at us to ‘get off the fucking grass – I’ve just mown that!’

My father was invaluable. He mowed a strip on the lawn exactly 22 yards long and trained as a cricket coach and took over a small indoor cricket school behind a pub and bowled to me till his shoulder ached and his voice was hoarse from saying ‘Play straight!’ He umpired my colts matches and always shook his head dismissively when I was hit on the pad and said, ‘NOT out, son!’ Even when he was standing at square leg.

He was a keen carpenter and he built a portable wicket out of old broom handles and a chute to feed the ball out of, and a table-tennis table ‘to sharpen your reflexes’. He planed and repaired and oiled old practice bats and stuck down the rubber grips with bright green gaffer tape.

My bowling got me plenty of wickets, but I took my batting more seriously. Batting was quite easy against kids who couldn’t get the ball down the other end with any speed. Batsmen were the lords and masters. They got congratulations and free kit and man of the match awards. Bowlers just got blisters.

I watched the top batsmen closely on TV – Boycott and Gavaskar and Greg Chappell and Gordon Greenidge. I noticed that most of them were shortish in stature like me. I tried to copy Gavaskar’s wristy clip off his pads and Chappell’s statuesque driving and Greenidge’s astonishing flick-pull and Boycott’s incessant chewing. A large photo of Boycott’s trademark square drive adorned my bedroom wall. And it’s true: his 1970s bat was barely thicker than a stick of rhubarb.

I read books on batting, lingering on every word of Tony Greig’s enticingly titled Cricket. Well, OK, I looked at the pictures anyway. There is a wonderful image of the left-handed Sobers launching a ball over the sightscreen, front leg cleared out of the way, bat wrapped against his backside, the finish like a full-blooded golf swing (see plate section). It could have been Chris Gayle, minus the helmet and thigh pad and ludicrous gold chain. I’ve seen thinner bike-locks.

I went to Test matches and one-day finals at Lord’s and saw Sobers make 150, and Dennis Amiss 188, and Bob Woolmer 120, and Keith Fletcher 178. I dutifully filled in the scorecards and stuck them in my scrapbook. We spent the summer holidays in Kent, and my father took me to Canterbury and Folkestone where I watched the accomplished Kent batsmen with great fascination – Luckhurst and Woolmer and Denness and an ageing Cowdrey and the dashing Asif Iqbal and the brilliantly eccentric Alan Knott – and cut out the match reports from the Daily Telegraph.

Brian Luckhurst captured my imagination. He had opened for England and fended off Lillee and Thomson, and there was something simple and straightforward about his method. He hit the ball crisply and always made runs when I watched, including several centuries. I also liked the fact that his bat was different from the rest. It was a Lillywhites and the black sticker glinted impressively in the sunlight when he brandished it at the crease.

I opened the batting for the school team and drew a black Lillywhites logo on the back of my Ben Warsop. I overheard opponents wondering what was that ‘weird black smudge on that show-off’s bat’. Undeterred I made a few decent scores. I painstakingly recorded every innings in a book, kept a cumulative total and calculated my average to two decimal points.

I got to 50 against Alleyn’s and was clapped by the opposition as I held my bat aloft. The umpire, Alleyn’s cricket master, patted me on the head and said well batted. The pitch was easy and the bowling friendly. I got to my highest score, 84, when I noticed there were three fielders behind square on the leg side. I knew that was illegal so I had a big slog and was bowled. I pointed out the three men behind square. ‘That’s not allowed,’ I said. ‘It’s a no ball.’

‘Are you arguing with the umpire?’ the Alleyn’s cricket master challenged.

‘Yes!’ I replied indignantly.

‘That’s not allowed,’ he retorted, ‘now bugger off, you cocky sod.’

Shame my dad hadn’t been umpiring.

A Room with a View

I played a few games for Middlesex colts and ended up in the county Under-19s. I was picked as an all-rounder and batted at No.8. There wasn’t much chance to make a decent score from there. But someone must have liked the look of me because I was selected for a national Under-19 trial match. It was a two-day game at Lord’s. This was my chance to get noticed.

I whitened my pads and boots that night and practised my backlift in the bedroom mirror, as Boycott said he did in Play Cricket the Right Way. I looked down the list of England’s Test hundred-makers in Wisden – Cowdrey and Hammond (22), Barrington (20), and further down Luckhurst (4) and wondered if I’d ever be on it. I checked my bat rubber and the protective tape on the inside edge and tarted up the Lillywhites logo which had faded a little.

I had watched many games at Lord’s – Tests and one-day finals – but only once been in the pavilion. The scale of the building and the shiny, squeaky floors strike you when you walk in. And the obvious disdain of the stewards if you are not immaculately dressed. ‘Straighten your tie, boy,’ a whiskery bloke said as I entered.

I was playing for the National Association of Young Cricketers XI and we changed in the home dressing room which Middlesex and England used. It was the size of a church hall, with a spectacular view of the ground. There was a table laden with chocolate bourbons and custard creams in the centre of the room, a large fluffy white towel hanging over each seat and a big red payphone in the corner. I changed next to it. It rang several times before play and I answered it. First it was a slushy-sounding girl called Trace, then another who referred to herself as The Minx. They asked if ‘Wayney’ was about. I realised they were referring to Middlesex’s fast bowler Wayne Daniel and I was in his spot.

The batting order was read out. I was disappointed to be down at No.8. I reminded myself that Luckhurst began life as a left-arm spinner batting at No.9, and so indeed did Garfield Sobers. (I didn’t know then, of course, that Kevin Pietersen would bat at No.8 when he first played for Natal.) When it was my turn to bat, our match manager said we needed to get on with it a bit. I descended the pavilion stairs excited at the prospect of traversing the famous Long Room on my way out. But it was closed for cleaning so I had to exit through a side door. The pitch was on the extreme edge of the square on the Grandstand side. The boundary on one side was barely 40 yards.

The pitch was beautiful and the ball seemed to ping off my bat. I clipped some singles, flicked a two and swept a couple of legside fours off a left-arm spinner. I felt confident and was enjoying myself. Then out of the blue we declared. A sprinkling of spectators – the parents – clapped us off.

The pitch was faster than anything I had ever seen before and I took some wickets with the ball. I had a spell of four for 10. Driving home my father was a bit grouchy about a couple of no-balls and thought I had ‘played across the line a bit’. I could tell he was pleased though. I had had a good day. The following morning, as I was loosening up on the outfield, the match manager approached me accompanied by a little old man with a stick. He was introduced as Gubby Allen, Middlesex stalwart, former England captain and Test selector. I knew his name from reading about the Bodyline series. He was the one who had refused to bowl leg theory.

I thought he was going to compliment me on my batting, offer a couple of tips and perhaps promise me a county contract. Middlesex were looking for a new opener to partner Mike Brearley. But, in a surprisingly thin, reedy voice, he said: ‘Hughes! Pitch it up more and don’t warm up like that –