THE SMALL PORTABLE television at the far end of the Fenner’s pavilion was on. It was in that corner where the players would watch the game. I was already out and had done my grieving, and so was ready to speak to some of my colleagues again now.
As I got closer to the television, I could see that it was not showing any usual programme. Instead it was showing footage of a batsman in action in the nets.
You must remember that these were the days long before rigorous video analysis in cricket was applied. I took a closer look at the batsman. ‘Doesn’t look a bad player,’ I thought. ‘He’s seriously ugly, though. There’s an awful lot of movement before the ball is bowled.’
Graham Saville, the former Essex batsman, was the Cambridge University coach. ‘You’re looking OK,’ he said to me. I very nearly keeled over. I took a double take. ‘What, that is me?’ I thought to myself.
I did not let on, though. I quickly composed myself, mumbling something like, ‘Yeah, but my head’s still falling over a bit.’ And then I took myself away to mull it over.
That was how I looked at the crease. My God! All those years of batting, and I had never realized. You conjure visions in your mind of classical elegance and textbook technique, driving like Viv Richards with a flourish and defending like Geoffrey Boycott with a high front elbow. But instead I looked like some tall, fretting, ever-moving batsman who knew that he probably should be getting forward, but was never sure whether he could.
These days young batsmen probably discover how they look at the crease by the time they are 10, but here I was past my 20th birthday and only then discovering that I was probably going to be one of the ugliest batsmen ever to play county cricket.
I instantly thought that I would never make it. Surely I needed to look better than that?
That is not so, of course. Even the great Viv Richards says so. ‘I am a simple individual about what I needed to do on a cricket field,’ he says. ‘Too many people put undue pressures on themselves. Sometimes I would hear them worrying out loud about the elbow not coming up and other technicalities. You cannot be textbook correct every ball you face from an express bowler or a top spinner. There is not time to be pretty. It is an instinct thing. If you are able to prepare yourself quickly and make quick decisions, these are the solutions for reacting to a quick delivery.’
Looking back, this is a sharp glimpse at how the game has changed, though. It has become so much more scientific and analytical now. Counties video every ball of every game, and analysts log every ball too. I was just watching some grainy footage gathered from a simple camcorder.
For instance, Graham Gooch adopted his famous stance with bat held high off the ground after viewing some video tapes of an Ashes series recorded from the television by his wife’s Auntie Grace.
‘I watched the tapes again and again,’ he said. ‘And each time I was staggered. They showed how crouched my style was and how my head kept falling over towards the slips.’
Nowadays the system used by the counties is called CricStat, and you see dismissed batsmen rushing to view it. The problem is that you can pick holes in every dismissal. Anyway, you will see only the consequences of a poor technique, not the causes.
Former England and Glamorgan coach Duncan Fletcher would always use a dominoes analogy. With a batsman’s dismissal it is like a line of dominoes having been pushed over but the last one has not fallen. Somewhere along the line one of the dominoes is out of place. Working out which one is the key, and it is not a simple process. An angry batsman viewing a video screen immediately after being dismissed is not going to be able to work that out.
One of my favourite retorts to commentators who describe a departing batsman as having played a poor shot is to ask: ‘Have you ever seen anyone out to a good shot?’ As it happens, I reckon my pull for four off Steve Watkin at Cambridge, when I clipped my leg stump with my boot, was a good shot, but you get my drift.
And often shots look a lot worse than they actually are. Panic and overcompensation can often ruin the final milliseconds of a shot.
Say, for example, that you are advancing down the pitch to look to hit an off-spinner back over his head. Despite what a lot of observers reckon, that will usually be a predetermined move (as are 99 per cent of sweep shots, in my opinion) and you will be looking to get close but not too close (you can only hit the ball along the ground then) to the pitch of the ball.
For whatever reason, though, suddenly you find that you are too far away from the pitch of the ball, and then, horror of horrors, the ball turns a little. Now you are in serious trouble.
You are already committed to the big shot, and the chances of it coming off now are slim. You panic and look to hit with the spin in the vain hope you might make decent contact in doing so. The result is a horrible heave across the line and probably a ‘That is an awful shot there from James, bowled heaving across the line at the spinner’ from the commentator.
One of my biggest frustrations is trying to watch one-day cricket on television and not knowing where the fielders in the deep are placed, especially against spinners. So you often do not know why a particular shot has been played, simply because you don’t know where the field is.
And often when a batsman is caught in the deep he is not looking to clear the fielder. Yes, in this Twenty20 age, there are some ferociously strong hitters who can do that, but generally batsmen in one-day cricket will look to hit boundaries to untenanted areas.
So, the next time you see a batsman caught at long-off from an off-spinner, please reflect on the fact that he was probably trying to hit the ball over extra cover and maybe it held on him a little. Or if he is caught at long-on, he was probably trying to hit it between deep mid-wicket and long-on, and got too close to the ball.
And you would hope a batsman does not have to watch CricStat to see that. In that regard I’m glad that I did not play in this era. The only reason I would have wanted to view CricStat is to prove that I was not out, but that is a different story.
I certainly could not have viewed it to make myself feel good. It took me an awfully long time to realize that I would never look like, say, Mark Ramprakash at the crease, and that in fact that did not matter. It goes back to the old cliché: ‘It’s not how, it’s how many.’ The record books do not record how the centuries have been made, just whether they have been made.
The South African Graeme Smith has probably been the greatest example of that. The hulking left-hander – with his wide-of-feet crouched stance, a grip that lent new meaning to the term ‘bottom-handed’ and a pick-up that meant the bat face was so closed that it might have been shut for ever – was so ugly at the crease that even Hieronymus Bosch might have baulked at painting him.
Looking good can have its disadvantages anyway. For instance, Ramprakash was probably the most elegant batsman of my generation, and so that meant he was often labelled the ‘most talented’. That in turn meant that he carried the most expectation.
Observers like watching such players – David Gower was another – so it is almost as if different standards are set for them. Ramprakash became a truly great county player, but did not cut it at international level. For such a fine player he became the source of a great deal of frustration.
Was he more talented than his contemporaries? Or was it just that he looked more graceful? It was the same with Matthew Maynard at Glamorgan. I have often fallen into the trap of describing him as ‘the most talented player I have played with’. Was he? He certainly looked better at the crease than myself and Hugh Morris, but there were shots Morris and I could play that Maynard couldn’t, and vice versa.
We all had one thing in common: we had all worked exceptionally hard to develop a technique that worked in the first-class game, that could produce centuries consistently. Maynard had a reputation as something of a dilettante, but, believe me, he worked harder than most. His pre-season net sessions with his trusted coach, Bill Clutterbuck, were ferociously hard and long. He would basically spend two days batting in the nets.
A lot has been written in recent times about talent, for instance by the Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, who has studied the structure of expert performance in various domains such as medicine, music and chess, as well as sports, and concluded that elite performance is reached through long, deliberate practice where the participant is extended beyond his or her comfort zone. In other words, talent is not inherited, it is acquired by putting in the hours of work.
I agree with that. My father was a decent cricketer, but I did not inherit any cricketing skills from him. He was a bowler who could not bat. I became a batsman who could not bowl. I became a cricketer because I was always in an environment where I could practise the skills required. Others had the same opportunity but simply did not wish to put in the hours required.
Matthew Syed in his book Bounce also reiterates that it is relentless hard work – as expressed in Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice in his book Outliers – as well as the circumstances in which you can practise which eventually bring about exceptional sporting performance.
Syed, of course, was a British table tennis champion, and he tells the story of how the street in which he lived in Reading (Silverdale Road) produced a remarkable number of Britain’s top table tennis players. It was all down to the fact that one of the nation’s best coaches, a man by the name of Peter Charters, taught at the local primary school and that nearby was a table tennis club which was open 24 hours a day for those who wanted to use it.
Syed was lucky (that word again!), not least because his parents, who were not table tennis players themselves, had randomly bought a table for him and his brother to play on in their garage.
I was lucky that I was born into a cricket-mad family and was at a cricket ground from the day I was born, but even luckier again that I went to Monmouth School, a public school, where Graham Burgess became coach in my second year.
The production line of cricketers in England and Wales is always an awkward subject concerning privilege and fairness, and, with cricket in state schools having declined so rapidly, I know that I was lucky.
Much has been done of late to encourage cricket in state schools. There has been the Chance to Shine programme run by the Cricket Foundation, and latterly, to complement that work, the MCC Foundation’s creation of ‘hubs’ around the country to provide coaching to children in state schools. But any benefits from that have not really been seen at the top level. Indeed it is not certain that it is even being seen at club level, with still a very low percentage of players in these schemes progressing to club cricket.
In his book Luck, Ed Smith, who went to Tonbridge School in Kent, tells us that when England toured Pakistan in 1987/88, 12 of the 13 players selected were state-educated. He compares that with the England Test team which beat India at Lord’s in 2011. It included eight privately educated players and three state-educated ones.
In rugby union, at the 1987 World Cup, 62 per cent of the England team were state-educated. By 2007 that had dropped to 36 per cent.
‘Being state-educated makes it about 13 times less likely that you will play for England,’ Smith concludes of cricket. ‘That really is a waste of talent.’
In 2013 a poll of county cricketers revealed that 119 out of 431 of them were privately educated, which is almost 30 per cent and a large percentage above the 7 per cent of the population that benefits from such education.
When England played Australia in the final Test of their calamitous 2013/14 Ashes tour, there were five state-educated players in the side, but four of them were bowlers (if we include the all-rounder Ben Stokes). Only Michael Carberry as a specialist batsman stood out, and, along with Ravi Bopara, he has been a rarity in recent times as a state-educated batsman playing for England.
As Scyld Berry, my colleague at the Sunday Telegraph, wrote in 2012: ‘A decade ago 80.5 per cent of England’s Test runs were scored by batsmen who had come from state schools, like Marcus Trescothick, Michael Vaughan, Graham Thorpe and Andrew Flintoff.
‘This year the percentage has tumbled to 10.2 per cent. Almost all the batting is done by players who have come from private schools, or South Africa, or both.
‘The odds now seem stacked against any English batsman who does not grow up with privileged access to true grass pitches, qualified coaching and the network of first-class counties.’
Yes, to repeat again, I was lucky, not least because of the length of matches played in public schools. I could never have scored a century when aged 12 in a 20-overs match. I simply did not have the range of strokes or the physical strength required. I needed longer, and, fortunately, at Monmouth I got that.
But that is not to belittle the contribution made by my club, Lydney, and it is at clubs such as that where the void must be filled, through their links with local schools.
And I also think that the fundamentals of your batting technique will be established long before you go to public school anyway.
The story of Sir Donald Bradman is famous. As a young boy he would practise by using a stump to hit a golf ball rebounding off a water tank that was mounted on a curved brick stand. It was on a paved area behind the family home, and the golf ball would rebound at speed and at many different angles off the curved brick facing of the stand.
Bradman would hold the stump in his left hand while throwing the ball with his right hand, then quickly put his right hand onto the stump before hitting the ball. To me, then, it is unsurprising that Bradman ended up playing cricket with a rather unconventional grip, with his left wrist further behind the handle than usual – as he himself wrote in his book The Art of Cricket: ‘I unhesitatingly admit that the left wrist could be more towards the front than mine and be perfectly correct. W. G. Grace and Sir Jack Hobbs both favoured this latter method.’
When grasping a stump one-handed it is almost natural to do so with that sort of grip, especially when you are young and relatively weak in the arms. The more conventional cricket grip does not feel strong enough with one hand. It is something I did as a young kid with a tennis racquet, holding it in my left hand with that sort of grip while throwing the tennis ball against a wall with my right hand and then putting my right hand onto the racquet quickly.
Bradman also had a slightly unorthodox pick-up that was probably derived from that practice too. ‘My back lift was usually in the direction of second slip,’ he said. ‘This is what might be termed in golfing parlance, a slightly shut face. I think it helps to keep the ball on the ground, especially when playing on-side strokes.’
My grip changed a lot over my career, but we will come to those tinkerings shortly. Most batsmen’s methods, especially the very basics of grip, stance and pick-up, are ingrained young.
Their technique is honed early and it never becomes any less important throughout their career. As Duncan Fletcher says: ‘A batsman must make sure that his technique looks after him when he has made an error. That is what happens with the great batsmen. Their excellence is manifested in their technique getting them out of trouble when they make an error of judgement, rather than them playing shots more perfectly than others.’
If you are going to score a lot of centuries, you are probably going to make a lot of mistakes along the way. You need a good basic technique to see you through those tricky periods.
For the early development of a technique, take the great Sachin Tendulkar. He always gripped the bat low on the handle and adopted a short back lift. That is because when he was five, he was already using the bat of his brother Ajit, who was much older. The bat was too big and too heavy for him, so this was the only way Tendulkar could grip it and pick it up.
This is always discouraged in young batsmen – I can still hear the voice of my father in his sports shop advising parents that they must never let their son ‘grow’ into a cricket bat, as they might an item of clothing – but here it worked rather well.
Thereafter Tendulkar always used a heavy bat, and that suited the low Indian pitches. His coach Ramakant Achrekar tried to get him to change his grip, but eventually relented. The best coaches do not force a player to change against their will, after all. And while such a grip does suggest bottom-hand dominance, his top (left) hand was always very strong. He writes with that left hand.
At least Tendulkar had some formal coaching. Bradman did not. He mainly taught himself in a rather solitary upbringing in the rural town of Bowral in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales.
Bradman also thought Tendulkar to be the player in the modern era most similar to himself. ‘I saw him playing on television and was struck by his technique,’ he once said of Tendulkar. ‘So I asked my wife to come look at him. Now I never saw myself play, but I felt that this player is playing with a style similar to mine, and she looked at him on television and said yes, there is a similarity between the two … his compactness, technique, stroke production … it all seemed to gel!’
Bradman and Tendulkar met eventually, on the occasion of Bradman’s 90th birthday, when Tendulkar went along with Shane Warne to meet him. Bradman told Tendulkar that he was surprised that he had been coached.
‘Anybody who has been through coaches is told to play with the left elbow pointed towards mid-off,’ he said. ‘You don’t do that. I didn’t do that. That gives you flexibility to play in any direction anywhere.’
Brian Lara was largely self-taught, too. At his family bungalow in Santa Cruz in Trinidad, there was a large porch with a low wall. Lara used to bounce a marble against it and hit it with his bat or a ruler.
And, yes, I know that the left-handed Lara had a grip that was very much around the front of the bat, unlike Bradman’s, but maybe that was because there was not the uncertainty about the direction of the ball like there was for Bradman. And anyway it was a grip that did cause Lara a few problems in his career. Indeed Sir Garfield Sobers at one stage specifically advised him to alter it because he did not feel he was strong enough to keep control of the bat with it.
Just like Bradman, at an early age Lara was sharpening some remarkable reflexes and acquiring some excellent hand–eye coordination. But he was also doing something else here.
‘There were a lot of pot plants dotted around and I put them in fielding places,’ he says. ‘When I hit the marble, the idea was to miss them.’
Lara was also learning to place the ball. You don’t just hit cricket balls to score a century, you have to miss the fielders, find the gaps.
In my time as a player and a journalist, I have never seen a batsman place the ball as cleverly and with such pinpoint accuracy as Lara. The title of his autobiography, Beating the Field, was most apt.
I will tell you a little story to illustrate. When Lara made the previously mentioned 147 against Glamorgan in 1994 at Edgbaston, myself and Adrian Dale were fielding in the covers for much of it. Lara’s placement was ridiculously good. Time and time again he would thread the ball between us and we would not so much as get a fingertip on it.
So we decided to do something rather different. Instead of walking in as the bowler bowled, we decided to walk sideways so that we could close the gap between us, and maybe actually stop one of Lara’s drives.
So we did just that. And you know what happened? Lara just hit the ball into the space I had vacated. He looked and laughed as if to say ‘Good try, boys, but you can’t fool me!’ Remarkable.
I’ll give you an example from my generation in David Hemp, whom I’ve mentioned before. He did not have any bread-and-butter shots. He hit the ball better than anyone of my era, yet so many of his shots would either find fielders or shoot through the covers in the air. He was always hitting balls, not placing them. He could have done with practising as a kid like Lara did.
Lydney has always been a ground with low and slow pitches, and even when my friends and I created makeshift pitches on the outfield (there were no nets in those days at the club), there was little bounce then either.
No surprise then that I was a front-foot batsman, even if I probably never went as far forward as I should have done. Wilf Wooller, that legend of Glamorgan cricket as well as of plain speaking, who passed away before we won the county championship in 1997, spoke to me only once about my batting. ‘You’re a tall lad, for God’s sake get further forward,’ he said.
I was also renowned for guiding the ball down to third man. The title of my autobiography was Third Man to Fatty’s Leg. The second part of that was a rather obscure reference to a gammy knee that finished my career via a quote from the Welsh cult film Twin Town, but the first part was undoubtedly confirmation of where opponents considered that I scored the majority of my runs.
I had quite a reputation. In 1996 when I scored 235 against Nottinghamshire at Worksop (which I later discovered, thanks to Chris Arnot’s excellent book, Britain’s Lost Cricket Festivals, beat Geoffrey Boycott’s ground record of 214 not out), I was being watched by England coach David Lloyd. Mike Atherton was England captain at the time. At a break in play Lloyd spoke to me. ‘Athers has been on the phone,’ he said. ‘He wants to know why they haven’t got a third man!’
I always thought that scoring runs to third man was the poor man’s method of scoring. It made me feel inferior. In fact I would go as far as to say that I possessed a serious complex about it. It goes back to the start of this chapter and the issue of aestheticism. I thought that the best players drove elegantly down the ground, when the truth is that, because they usually play with such ‘soft’ hands, most opening batsmen at the higher level score a lot of runs down to third man, even if that fact is still only recognized mostly in jest.
Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook used to say to the rest of the England team that they should get paid more for the jobs they did at the top of the order, facing the new ball and laying the platform for the stroke-makers later. To which the frequent response apparently was: ‘You can’t get paid much for edging the ball down to third man!’
Likewise, when John Edrich passed 30,000 first-class runs, his Surrey team-mate Robin Jackman joked: ‘Yes, 28,000 have gone through third man!’
It is mostly assumed that to play the ball down to third man requires an opening of the face of the bat, which is always a risky manner in which to play. But I did not always do that. What I did was play the ball so late that it would run off a straight face of the bat that was not quite yet vertical to the ground.
It was only when Duncan Fletcher arrived as coach at Glamorgan in 1997 that someone really praised me for being able to play that shot so skilfully, especially as regards its benefits in rotating the strike in one-day cricket. ‘It’s a real skill to be able to do that,’ he told me. No one had ever told me that before.
It is also assumed that quicker pitches produce more runs to third man, but it is actually just as easy to score in that area on slow and low pitches, and you can actually open the face a little more if you want because the chances of an edge to slip are much reduced.
We develop techniques to suit our surroundings. Sometimes that can be good, sometimes that can be bad. Justin Langer wrote an interesting article on this matter in 2001. Langer was brought up in Western Australia, of course, and in particular the WACA ground in Perth, where the pitches mostly bounce like a trampoline. You cannot survive on that without a back-foot game.
Anyway, Australia had just played a tour match at Hove against Sussex in 2001 in which Richard Montgomerie had scored a century. And Langer was musing whether the prolific Montgomerie might one day be given a chance at international level. He mentioned me in the piece, actually calling me a ‘run machine’, which was nice, but he was clearly comparing my technique to Montgomerie’s when he wrote: ‘Day in day out, a player like Montgomerie plays county cricket on pitches like we are playing on at Hove this week. The surface is very, very slow, with very low bounce and a lightning fast outfield.
‘The chance for someone like Montgomerie to develop a technique and temperament ready for Test cricket is limited. After all, he will rarely be placed under the same pressure that he could expect when he enters the Test arena.
‘Although Brett Lee, Damien Fleming and Ashley Noffke were bowling their hearts out, the ball rarely lifted above bail height. And the pace of the ball gave scant encouragement for the bowlers trying to build pressure on the batsmen.
‘The reality of Test cricket is that the pitches usually give some assistance to the fast bowler and, as a batsman at that level, you can expect to play a large majority of balls faced off the back foot.
‘If a county batsman is rarely tested on the back foot, then it is unreasonable to expect them to be able to do it at the highest level.’
It is a very fair point, and it is an issue I tried to address halfway through my county career. My response to the short ball had always been to duck or sway. I was never a hooker or puller, although I would cut if the ball was well outside off stump.
And I remember talking to Steve Watkin about it. ‘If a batsman doesn’t hook or pull, I always know that I have got somewhere to go,’ he said. In other words, if he found himself under pressure, which, I have to say, did not happen that often because he was one of the most accurate seamers of my generation, he could always resort to a short ball to relieve that pressure.
As it happened, Watkin was a tail-end batsman who had particular problems with the short ball. He would often turn his head away from the ball and thrust the bat, held in only his top (left) hand, hopefully at it. He once hit Wasim Akram for four doing that – he said he had ‘hooked’ him! – but it was not a method that was ever going to be sustainable.
So together we decided to do something about this. One winter we spent session after session at the Neath indoor school working on the short ball using the bowling machine there.
I had been playing professional cricket for a number of seasons by then. Matthew Maynard had played only a handful of games when Glamorgan’s overseas professional, Javed Miandad, advised him that he had to work on an attacking method to play the short ball.
One of the reasons why I had never hooked or pulled was because I never felt that I had the reaction time to do so. But apparently there is little difference between the reaction times of the general population and top-level athletes.
As Peter McLeod, mentioned earlier as a member of Oxford University’s Department of Experimental Psychology, says: ‘There is surprisingly little difference between top-class athletes and good, fit ordinary people. In laboratory tests of reactions using unskilled tasks, most people show much the same reaction time of about a fifth of a second.’
But still in my opinion the hook and pull shots are two of the most difficult shots to play. The truth, though, was that I had never really tried to play them.
So Watkin set the bowling machine at quite a high speed, say about 85 mph, and angled it so that it was pointing halfway down the pitch. We used the slighter, softer type of machine balls so that if I got hit, which I did frequently, especially at the start of the process, it would not hurt too much. And I decided that I was going to hook or pull every single ball.
At first I could barely hit a ball. It was just too quick. I could not extend my arms fully out in front of me, which is the key to both shots. But gradually I started to hit one or two. And then more and more.
Somehow I developed my own technique of jumping in the air to ensure that I could hit the ball down. It was hardly textbook stuff but it actually became reasonably effective. Bowlers were surprised. They no longer had their get-out clause.
It was no coincidence that the next season was my most fruitful in first-class cricket. I scored 1,766 runs and followed it with 1,775 the following season, 1997, when Glamorgan won the county championship. And I did not get hit either. When looking to duck or just avoid the bouncer, you can easily take your eye off the ball. When looking to attack it, you simply have to watch it. ‘Always look to play the ball first,’ says Graham Gooch. ‘You watch it for longer then.’
But a confession. I became a ‘happy hooker’. I was not like, say, Herbert Sutcliffe, the great England opener and celebrated partner of Jack Hobbs, who used to hook in the air, but could be selective enough not to hook until he had made 40 in an innings.
Or Gooch, who says: ‘Before, say, Malcolm Marshall has bowled to me, I have decided whether I am hooking or not. I have assessed the conditions, I have assessed how quickly he is bowling, how old the ball is. If it is up front in an innings, I may have to duck or get out of the way.’
In other words, by the end of my career, I could not help myself. Anything short I went after. It occasionally got me into trouble, even though I got away with a lot because I always looked to hit the ball down. That was what the jump was for.
There was one match against Gloucestershire at Cardiff when we had just a couple of overs to bat before the close of play. Mike Smith, the left-arm swing bowler, who was given just one cap by England, was bowling.
Now, throughout my career, I had a problem with left-armers, especially when they could swing the ball back into me. It was because my natural set-up was to position my body towards extra-cover. That was where my front foot and shoulders were aiming when the ball was delivered. I would press with my front foot but would not reciprocate that with a complementary back-foot movement, as you should do to align yourself pointing back down the pitch.
So with the angle of a left-armer from over the wicket, if the ball swung into me late, I was always going to struggle because I would end up playing across the line. ‘Play it back to where it comes from,’ Graham Burgess would always urge me, and he is right.
And it is why the common advice for right-handed batsmen when facing left-arm over-the-wicket bowlers is to open up your stance. But with my set-up it was not always that easy. You still have to worry about the ball slanting across you, therefore you often end up still getting into the same position as you normally would.
It was quite heartening for me to hear Mark Ramprakash talking about this. I had just made my Test debut against South Africa at Lord’s and Ramprakash was discussing his next county championship match for Middlesex. It was against Essex, who had a left-armer, Mark Ilott, in their ranks. ‘He gets me out all the time,’ lamented Ramprakash. ‘Just watch now.’
As it was, Ilott did not get Ramprakash out in that game at Southgate in 1998. It probably helped that Mike Gatting (241) and Justin Langer (166) put on 372 for Middlesex’s first wicket before Ramprakash got to the crease, mind.
But the left-armer problem was one that never fully went away for him. In his autobiography he tells a good story of the championship match, against Somerset at Taunton, after he had scored his 100th first-class hundred, in 2008, and of a battle against the left-armer Charl Willoughby.
He had been having throw-downs with team-mate Scott Newman, a left-handed batsman, and he found himself considering why Newman did not fall over when he threw his right-armed throw-downs at him. He imagined himself being the mirror image of Newman and indeed, that evening in his hotel room, practised in front of the mirror, opening up his stance and ensuring that his front foot was pointing at the bowler, not down the pitch. Ramprakash scored 200 not out in that game!
Anyway, back to Cardiff and Smith. I was certain that he would be looking to swing the ball into me late and trap me lbw, as he had done on a few occasions before. That was all I was thinking about. I was thinking: ‘Don’t move too early. Try to play the ball back to him.’
And then from nowhere he bowled a bouncer. The pitch was typical of Cardiff at that time: horribly, horribly slow. Smith almost had to pitch the ball on his toes to ensure that it bounced high enough.
I saw it pitch and immediately thought: ‘That is going to bounce about hip-high – chest-high at most – and I am going to pull it in front of square for four. What a great way to finish the day.’
So the ball bounced and began rising. I got into position for the stroke. This was a freebie. A short ball on such a slow pitch. ‘Oh hang on, this is getting a little high,’ I suddenly thought. It was at that moment that I should just have pulled out of the shot. It would have been so easy to do. The ball was, with all due respect to Smith, slow and looping.
But for some reason I carried on regardless. The ball was well above my head and I thought I could still play a tennis smash and hit it down through mid-wicket. In truth I had no chance. The top edge was as inevitable as the humiliation that followed. The ball was caught at fine leg by Jon Lewis.
This was now the last over. So, as everyone knows, if you lose a wicket in the last over, that is it for the day. I could not even endure my shame alone. I trudged off with Gloucestershire fielders yelping around me, disbelieving that such an experienced player could make such a schoolboy mistake. Behind me was my young partner, Dan Cherry. I was supposed to be setting an example to him. I was ashamed. It was undoubtedly one of the worst moments of my career.
I know how Alastair Cook felt when he fell hooking Mitchell Johnson from only the seventh ball he faced as England attempted to save the Test against Australia in Adelaide in 2013. And that was nowhere near as high a bouncer either.
On a tour that was already showing signs of a shambles Cook was lambasted. ‘That’s totally out of character,’ said the BBC’s Jonathan Agnew on Test Match Special. ‘Alastair Cook? Caught hooking in the second over of an innings, when England are trying to survive? That’s not Alastair Cook. That’s not how he plays.’
Well, actually it is. Cook is a very fine puller and hooker. Those shots are very much part of his game. Statistical probability tells us that he will fall to those shots at various stages in his career because every shot, even a defensive shot, carries some sort of risk.
Yes, you could say that it was early in his innings to be attempting the stroke and especially when England had to attempt to survive for a draw, but that would be a hugely simplistic argument. Just because you need to play for a draw does not mean that you cannot play any attacking strokes whatsoever. You still have to try to score runs.
There is a saying that the best players are positive in defence as well as in attack. What that means is that it is easier to defend when a batsman is in a positive frame of mind and looking to score runs. That is because he will then get himself into better positions at the crease.
Passive defence usually only ends in one place: a horrible, deep hole from which there is simply no escape. Hardly any centuries emerge from there.
Few are the batsmen who can go out with just defence on their mind. Geoffrey Boycott, maybe, or Sunil Gavaskar or Chris Tavaré, but even Mike Atherton has confessed to playing better when thinking positively.
In my career I managed to play one innings with only defence on my mind. It was actually my first second-team century for Glamorgan, and it was at my home ground of Lydney against Gloucestershire.
In a three-day match we had been bowled out cheaply on the first day on a pitch with some dampness in it. Gloucestershire had then made a big score so that, with four sessions remaining, our only hope was to survive that time. I did so. I batted 135 overs for 125 not out. In cricketing vernacular I ‘blocked the shit out of it’.
That I could do so was down to that previously mentioned low and slow pitch, as well as some naivety on my part. I was still learning the professional game then and my own game was horribly limited. I could be so defensively minded because in truth all I was doing was playing my game. I did not have a range of shots beyond that.
It was an important innings for me, however. First of all it taught me that I could score a century at that level, and that I could concentrate for that length of time, but it also taught me that I had to expand my range of strokes if I was to be successful. I never played an innings like that again.
But that is not to say that defence is unimportant. On the contrary it is absolutely crucial, even for the most flamboyant and attacking of batsmen. For instance, when Kevin Pietersen made his Test debut, against Australia at Lord’s in 2005, it was his defence that immediately struck me.
Glenn McGrath was wreaking havoc from the Pavilion End with his off-cutters darting down the slope and most of the England batsmen could scarcely lay a bat on him. But as soon as Pietersen entered the fray it almost appeared as if an altogether different game was taking place.
Taking a huge stride forward with an impeccably straight blade, Pietersen smothered all of McGrath’s projected perils. If a man cannot defend, he cannot play. And that is what happened to Pietersen when he had that awful trouble with left-arm spinners later in his career.
Because of the arrival of the Decision Review System and a greater number of lbws for left-arm spinners as right-handed batsmen pushed forward, Pietersen suddenly found that he could not trust his defensive stroke. And it led to a horrible case of sinistrophobia.
The great Viv Richards had an immaculate defence when he wanted. He will always be remembered as the master persuader of balls from outside off stump towards the leg-side, but we should not forget his solid, technically perfect defence.
Bowlers talk of his sometimes unexpectedly blocking a whole over, as if just to take a break from his coruscating strokeplay. Ah, to be that good.
But I can also talk about being asked to throw him balls one day after play at Chesterfield and his blocking every single ball. Yes, he did not play one single attacking stroke. It must have been an awful disappointment to the large crowd that had gathered to watch, but Richards had something in mind. He wanted to tighten up.
I have also seen Sachin Tendulkar perform a practice session where he has placed a semi-circle of cones around him in his stance and tried to ensure that the balls thrown to him did not advance outside those cones.
He was practising ‘soft hands’, something that does not come readily to today’s players. ‘Batters go hard at the ball because of the way they are brought up now,’ Worcestershire’s director of cricket and former England wicketkeeper, Steve Rhodes, says. ‘When the ball’s moving around, the seamers are going to get the batters nicking off.’
You simply have to be able to defend. If you think about scoring a century in say 180 balls (which was quick for me, I might add), you will probably defend or leave 130 of those balls. That is over 70 per cent of your innings spent on defensive measures, playing either a forward defensive stroke, a back-foot defensive shot or simply disregarding the ball as it passes through to the wicketkeeper.
Leaving the ball is such an important part of playing any long innings. Nothing frustrates a bowler more than seeing a batsman blithely disregard all the effort he has just put into that delivery. It makes the bowler reassess, and often alter, his line. It is a game of patience. The batsman is saying: ‘I’m not coming to you, you will have to come to me.’
As Graham Gooch says: ‘It was always part of my plan. One of my little sayings was: “If it’s wide, leave it.” But I was always looking to play first. Leaving was the second option. It should not be seen as a negative option.’
Gooch’s ‘little sayings’ have become imbedded in current batting terminology. We will come to his ‘daddy hundreds’ later, but for now just let him recount the story of one of his first meetings upon becoming England’s batting coach in 2009 (he was a consultant until 2012, when he took up a permanent position, before departing in 2014).
It was on a tour to South Africa and he gathered the players around in East London. The then team director, Andy Flower, had articulated to Gooch that he liked short, sharp messages being given to the players. So Gooch just said: ‘Play late, play straight, be great.’
It became a catchphrase for the team. ‘They always took the mick out of me about it,’ admits Gooch. ‘But the point is that the players have to work it out for themselves, what is best for them. It has to be a short, sharp message.’
Although not necessarily one of Gooch’s sayings, ‘Knowing where one’s off stump is’ has also become a fashionable phrase, but it is vital if a batsman is to play a long and successful innings. After all, the bowlers are generally urged to hit the top of the batsman’s off stump, so it is rather a good idea that the batsman himself knows where the bowler is aiming!
The best way for a right-handed batsman to do this is to ensure that, once his pre-ball movements (his ‘triggers’ as they are called) have been completed, his right eye is over his off stump.
As Gooch says: ‘I took a leg stump guard, with my toes on leg stump. Where your bat is is irrelevant to me. It can be in the air, outside off stump, it’s where your feet are that counts.
‘Whatever your trigger movements are, when you get in the “ready” position, your head needs to be on off stump. That’s where you pick your line up from. I went back, not so much back and across, but the ball of my foot would be on middle stump and my head on off stump.’
Matthew Maynard ensured that he knew where his feet were by marking a line down the pitch rather than back towards the stumps. ‘At the end of my career I would take middle and leg [guard] and then draw a line out from the crease,’ he says. ‘Most people draw a line back to stumps. I stood with my bat between my legs so it was a little inconsistent – I had left the ball occasionally and it had hit my off stump. It was important that I knew where my feet were, then my trigger back and across to middle and off.’
I too tapped my bat between my legs in the later stages of my career. I found that it helped my balance, and had done it for no other reason than because a friend at Swansea University, Neil Pritchard, who played a few games for Gloucestershire, had suggested it at a time when I was struggling.
When the Australian coach Jeff Hammond arrived at Glamorgan in 2000, he was not impressed with this at all. He called it the ‘Glamorgan way’ and was unhappy that two such senior players as Maynard and myself were doing it, because it influenced all the young batsmen. He reasoned that it was not conducive to a good pick-up because you have to take your hands away from your body first from that original position in order to begin your backswing.
‘Tuck your wings in’ was his constant refrain, which basically meant to keep your hands close to your body in your pick-up. It worked for me, though, and if you have ever seen a photograph of Donald Bradman in his stance, you might notice that he too tapped his bat in between his legs.
You must also ensure that your eyes are level and that your head is still at the moment of delivery from the bowler. That stillness is absolutely crucial. A moving camera takes blurry pictures.
As previously mentioned, in the worst periods of my career, when I was standing with my bat upright, I think I was moving my head often as the ball was bowled. I was taking some seriously blurry pictures. If you want to see how the position of the head should be as the bowler delivers a ball, then you need look no further than a picture of Sachin Tendulkar at that very moment.
Mind you, if you wanted to base a batting technique on anyone it would probably be Tendulkar. The grip on the bat might be low, as is the pick-up, but the feet are shoulder-width apart, the knees flexed and the balance perfectly formed on the balls of his feet. And that head is so still, those eyes so level.
Leaving on width is obviously a crucial factor, but doing so on length is just as important in my view. For instance, much of my game was based on looking for width from the bowlers, whether that was to drive off the front foot or cut off the back foot. But I also had to be very careful, especially early in an innings, not to drive at balls that were not quite half-volleys.
But for me the ability to read length is often what distinguishes the very best players from the pack. Timing is what distinguishes the best in terms of aestheticism. Think of Brian Lara, Colin Cowdrey, David Gower, Mark Waugh and Sourav Ganguly.
According to Angus Fraser, we should not think of Mike Atherton, who was, apparently, ‘a natural mistimer of the ball’.
That is a little harsh because Atherton could time the ball nicely. He had to really, because he was certainly no power player.
But quite what timing is and how it is achieved is something that is very difficult to explain, and it is certainly even more difficult to coach. We all know when we have timed a cricket ball. The ball hits the middle of the bat and speeds away with the minimum of effort. It is a truly wonderful feeling. But how did we do it?
As with the correct execution of any cricket shot, it is a combination of factors coming together at the precise moment, mostly born of a solid technique: a fluent, well-timed backswing that accelerates through the hitting zone, ensuring the bat is still gripped tightly at the moment of impact and ensuring that one’s weight is moving into the ball rather than away from it.
And it will also require the correct reading of length. You will struggle to drive a ball too short for the purpose, and you will also struggle to play any shot of consequence off the back foot if the ball is too full.
We touched on reading length earlier in the book when considering the constant demand of ‘Watch the ball’ from a batsman to himself. The ball is not usually watched all the way, so instead it is about how and how quickly a batsman uses the visual cues given to him. As Peter McLeod, the Oxford University psychologist, says: ‘It lies in how they [batsmen] use visual information to control motor actions once they have picked the ball up.’
You can have the very best technique in the world, but if you cannot then read the length of the ball, it will mean nothing.
And on bouncier pitches, you can leave on length too. That is nowhere better seen than at the WACA ground in Perth where balls pitched in line with the stumps can be left alone with impunity, even if it might require some contortions of the body to avoid being hit.
As Gooch says: ‘People who leave the ball well, it looks as if the ball is cutting them in half. Mark Taylor was a great one for that. My first big change was when I was asked to open the batting five years after I started. Suddenly I had to be tighter. I had to think about how I left the ball and had to play straighter. It was a massive part of my evolution as a batsman.’
Of course, openers will naturally look to leave the ball more as they aim to set the tone for the innings. If you were thinking that I might write ‘see off the new ball’ there, then you were badly mistaken.
That phrase annoys me more than most in cricket. What on earth does it mean? To me it is nebulous nonsense.
At Glamorgan we would sometimes have meetings in which roles were established. Always when it came to the opening batsmen, on the board would appear ‘see off the new ball’.
I would love to know the precise moment when a new ball is seen off. Can the opener raise his bat then? Can he just walk off?
I think it is disrespectful to ask an opener merely to see off the new ball. That was never my job. My job was to score runs. I never felt as if I was some blunter sent out before the stroke-makers. I was there to score centuries.
Yes, opening is the toughest job for any batsman. I have certainly always felt that. The ‘tough nuts’ is how I used to describe us, as opposed to the ‘prima donnas’ hiding lower down the order.
But ‘to see off the new ball’? Does anyone really go out there with that purpose? ‘To see off the new ball is a negative tactic,’ says Gooch. ‘That’s survival. If you bat well as an opening batsman you do a number of jobs. You progress the score, you build a platform, you protect the middle order and you set the game up.’
Mike Atherton agrees. ‘I don’t think it is necessarily the opener’s job to get a dour 15 and make way for the pretty boys who can play in the middle order,’ he says. ‘If you are going through levels of technical competence then openers are supposed to be technically sound and competent. So if there is more movement off the seam, you are more likely to survive than perhaps some other players. But obviously when you get in, there is the same expectation to go on and get a big score.
‘Fundamentally your job is to go out and score runs. How you do it is down to you. Maybe you expect the No. 5 to get runs quicker than the No. 1, but it is the same job at the end of the day.’ Too right it is.
In a way I was fortunate to have to expand my game rather than constrict it. Over time, and it certainly does take time, a batsman has to work out his game. Alastair Cook has continued hooking since that Adelaide mistake because he knows that it is a shot that will bring him more reward than failure.
Others in history have ditched that shot, mind. Geoffrey Boycott did so, as did Steve Waugh. They considered it too risky, even though both could actually play it very well.
Andrew Hilditch wanted to ditch it, if you will excuse the pun, but never could. The Australian famously could not help himself hooking, especially in the 1985 Ashes when Ian Botham served up bouncer after bouncer.
Hilditch is an intelligent man, even if he copped huge flak in an unsuccessful stint as Australia’s chairman of selectors. He is a solicitor, no less. But his intended cure for an addiction to hooking was not particularly intelligent. Apparently he listened to audio tapes with the repeated command of ‘Don’t hook’.
Shame that no one told him the mind’s subconscious always ignores the negative part of such a dictum. All he was doing was urging himself to commit more sins of self-destruction. As Graham Gooch says: ‘He should have been telling himself: “Leave the ball” not “Don’t hook.”’
Gooch also mentions Tendulkar’s famous 241 against Australia in Sydney in 2004, when he eschewed the cover drive for so much of the innings. ‘I watched part of it and he didn’t play a shot on the off side,’ says Gooch. ‘I asked him about it and he said he hadn’t been playing that well, so he decided to say to himself: “Leave well.” He didn’t say: “Don’t play any cover drives.” The point is never tell yourself not to do something.’
In truth, what Hilditch was doing was playing outside of his limits. He was not a good hooker. It was not a shot that should have been part of his game plan. He should have worked that out much earlier than he did. Working out one’s game is a long and, at times, painful process, but it is absolutely vital if you are to become a consistently successful batsman and score the centuries we all crave.
You must know how you are going to score your runs, and also which shots you are going to eschew in order to avoid dismissal.
It is what Ricky Ponting brilliantly calls learning to ‘swim between the flags’. At the end of his career he said: ‘I’d worked out that to be a successful batsman I had to “swim between the flags”. At the beach the lifesavers decide where it is safe to swim and they put the flags in the sand to mark those boundaries. Drift outside those flags and even the strongest swimmers can get into trouble. I had to work out what shots I could play, when I needed to defend, when it was prudent to be bold. If I stayed within my limits, I was very hard to dismiss and I had the skill to score runs at a reasonable rate. However, if I ventured outside my flags, I might be OK for a while, might even play a big innings or two, but sooner or later I’d get into trouble. Eventually, I’d drown.’
It is a wonderful summation of the art of batting, indeed the art of centuries. As Jack Birkenshaw, the former Yorkshire, Leicestershire and Worcestershire off-spinner, said when talking about the art of batting when manager of Leicestershire in 1994: ‘Look at Allan Border. He’s scored 10,000 runs and he’s only got three shots: the cut, the cover drive and the pull.’
The left-handed Border actually scored 11,174 Test runs, crouched in his baseballer’s stance, with his bat raised ready to hop back and pull and cut. But the point was that he did not care how he looked or how he scored those runs.
As John Edrich also once said: ‘Far too many cricketers try to do things they can’t manage; they go out of their depth. I reckoned I could get away with about three main shots, plus the knack of being able to pick up ones and twos here and there.’
The last part of that quote is crucial. Picking up ones and twos is so important for any batsman. Those are his bread-and-butter shots, his release valves when the going gets tough.
How much to tinker with your technique, though? It is the hardest question for any batsman to answer throughout his career. As you move up through the levels, new and much stiffer challenges always present themselves and it is a question of how you adapt to them.
But the fundamentals remain. As Graham Gooch says: ‘There are different styles but there are a lot of basics for every player – you have got to move your feet, keep your head still, get your bat delivery pretty much coming straight – those basic principles, you have to keep them going.’
I’m not sure about the moving of the feet, because there have been some fine players who have not moved their feet a great deal – for example, Marcus Trescothick. The key in such an instance is the distribution of weight and the position of the head. Trescothick can drive beautifully when his weight is going forward and his head going into the ball.
My problem was that I always felt that the grass was greener on the other side. It is all too easy to think that a small technical change will bring huge rewards. I learnt the hard way that this is not the case.
My natural grip on the bat was very much like Donald Bradman’s in that my left wrist was behind the handle. It is a grip that is good for leg-side play but not so good for off-side strokes. So at school I was known as a good leg-side player but one who was not so strong through the off side.
But in my early days as a professional I decided to alter that. In fact it was between my first and second years at Cambridge University. I decided that I wanted to become a better off-side player and reasoned that the best route to achieving that was by changing my grip. So I brought my wrist round to the front of the handle. I consulted no one on this. I just did it myself.
It was to prove calamitous, very nearly costing me my professional career.
The problem was that my wrists and arms were not strong enough to facilitate such a change. What transpired was horrible. When the hand is too far round the front of the bat, it is very difficult to keep the front elbow up without opening the face of the bat. So the blade of the bat became very open in my pick-up and then started to waver out towards the slip cordon, resulting in a dreadful ‘inside-out’ movement.
As I was also persisting with a raised-bat method at the time, as previously mentioned, with my head moving around, this just got uglier and uglier. Even more so when, after finishing at Cambridge, I returned to Cardiff’s low pitches to dream up another variation, which was to stand with my front foot pointing down the pitch, opening up my shoulders in the vain hope of avoiding lbws.
If I thought I looked ugly on that television screen at Fenner’s this was something else altogether. In 1993 Glamorgan famously won the Axa Equity and Law Sunday League title at Canterbury, beating Kent in a glorious finale to Viv Richards’ career.
There is an excellent video tape of that day, but I have watched it once and will never do so again. I cannot bear the sight of my batting, however brief my role in that day was – I scored three and was dropped once in the process of making that many.
Somehow I managed to score some runs with this method, but how different it was from my original method is probably best summed up by the response of Graham Burgess when I went to see him at Monmouth School one day to work on my game. ‘What have they done to you?’ he said in exasperation.
He thought the various coaches working with me had changed my technique. They hadn’t. It had been all of my own making.
Eventually, after a lot of hard work, I got my method back to a state in which I could operate consistently. I did that by simply going back to basics; by tapping my bat on the ground and somehow achieving a straighter pathway for it after my pick-up.
It was a harsh lesson about the possible effects of trying to make radical changes to a technique. But I know now that I was hardly alone in my faulty thinking.
Far, far better players than me have fallen into the same trap. Take Andrew Strauss. In 2007 he worked a lot with the then England coaches Peter Moores and Andy Flower on driving the ball. Strauss had never been a particularly strong driver and opposition bowlers were no longer bowling short balls so that he could pull or cut, just as he had done when announcing himself so wonderfully on the Test stage in 2004.
The result? Strauss kept getting out driving and hardly scored any runs off the back foot. ‘I ended up going after balls that were far more dangerous to play,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘My far more productive back-foot game had been neglected and so my bread-and-butter shots were not coming off as often. No wonder I didn’t score many runs that season.’
And then the killer advice that I wish I had been offered before I began my uneasy journey through technical hell.
‘If a player came to me for advice about altering their game, I would always counsel against rushing into making wholesale changes to their technique,’ said Strauss. ‘Certainly, if you have reached international level, your technique, which has evolved over a long number of years, has got you to where you are. Your problem would have to be very serious indeed to throw away all that evolved knowledge. More often than not, your issues will lie with shot-selection, despite what the commentators might say. That is something that is controlled by your head, not your technique.
‘Looking back on my career it still frustrates me that I tinkered with my technique as much as I did. Perhaps that is inevitable if you are practising for thousands of hours every year, that you will try different things in practice in the constant search to become a better player. I think I would probably have scored more runs if I’d constantly honed my own technique rather than searching for a magical cure.’
I could not agree more. But that does not mean that little technical adjustments do not catch on.
Graham Gooch’s upright stance was copied by many, myself included. Justin Langer once got into the habit of twisting his head at the very last second to face the bowler. In Perth this soon became all the rage and before long the likes of Mike Hussey and Ryan Campbell were doing it.
There have been some more bizarre technical adjustments. John Wright, the former New Zealand opener who coached India, and was an endless fidgeter, for ever stopping the bowler because something or someone tiny had moved behind the arm, used to glue his top glove to the handle, in order to hold his grip in that position. And I’ll admit that I toyed with that idea when I was struggling with my grip. Thankfully I resisted.
Clive Rice, the South Africa and Nottinghamshire all-rounder, apparently wrapped strips of lead around the top of his handle to balance his very heavy bat.
Then there was Adam Gilchrist’s famous use of a squash ball in his glove when making 149 from just 104 balls in the World Cup final of 2007 in Barbados against Sri Lanka. Gilchrist put the ball in his bottom, left-hand glove to stop his hand turning on the handle.
Gilchrist had a very high grip on the bat, which can lead to a slightly whippy effect and a loss of control, especially if you are trying to defend against spinners. England’s Alastair Cook had a high grip like this (as did my opening partner at Glamorgan, Hugh Morris, and also the New Zealander Glenn Turner), and changed it when advised to do so by the then England coach, Duncan Fletcher.
But Gilchrist’s bottom-hand grip was unusual in that the hand was prone to going too far behind the handle. The squash ball was used to prevent this.
It was only the second time Gilchrist had done this, having previously made a domestic one-day hundred for Western Australia against Queensland using it.
The idea was the brainchild of Bob Meuleman, the former West Australian cricketer and selector, who coached Gilchrist.
‘I went to a squash centre before he went off [to the World Cup] and got him six squash balls that were a bit broken and were not as hard as a new ball,’ said Meuleman. ‘You don’t want it to crush right down but be a bit flexible. He had a few hits before he went off for the World Cup. He didn’t have the squash ball in and he hit them like he couldn’t even play fourth grade. He put it in and he then hit the ball so well.’
Upon reaching his century Gilchrist pointed to his bottom glove, but not many people realized the significance of that gesture until afterwards.
As Gilchrist said: ‘Bob’s last words to me before I left the indoor training centre in Perth were, “Well, if you are going to use it, make sure when you score a hundred in the World Cup final, you show me and prove to me that you have got it in there”. So I had to stay true to that.’
If only all centuries came on demand like that.