The modern face of cricket

Three countries have transformed modern cricket in one of the three aspects of the game. The Sri Lankans have remade batsmanship, the Pakistanis have extended the fast bowlers' art and the South Africans have invented a new orthodoxy for fielding. MUKUL KESAVAN on the changing trends.

CRICKET commentators associated orthodoxy with science and unorthodox play with instinct. So Jayasuriya is all flair and "eye" while Mark Waugh is classical perfection: this delicately suggests that Jayasuriya is good while he lasts, while Waugh lasts because he's good. Commentators are good at explaining how an eccentric back lift gets players out or how an angled bat can induce an inner edge on to the stumps; they are much less inclined to explain why these eccentricities work for players, or why, despite them, they get lots of wickets and tons of runs.

Cricket's a game that is played side-on. Bat and pad close together. Foot to the pitch of the ball. The trouble with cricket punditry today is that the maxims of orthodoxy no longer fit the modern game. Contemporary commentators seem inadequate when confronted with Sanath Jayasuriya or Lance Klusener or Waqar Younis because they haven't (with one two hounourable exceptions) allowed for the revolution that modern bats, sub-continental ingenuity and the limited overs game have wrought in Test cricket. Shaun Pollock has a lovely high-arm action. So what? Younis has a lovely low-arm action and he's done very well for himself. Conventional cricketing wisdom today is at the same stage that tennis commentary passed through in the "Seventies, when the side-on address and the low flat forehand were considered the foundation of good play. Well, Borg played the high, top-spun forehand, chest-on like a table tennis player and won Wimbledon from the baseline. He had to do this five times before tennis pundits realised that the game had changed.

Batting

Jayasuriya is the most significant batsman in contemporary cricket. He is a hugely successful heretic, the Martin Luther of modern cricket. He has made the rules of orthodox batsmanship (getting to the pitch, getting in line, playing along the ground and that holiest of holies, playing with a straight bat) seem overstated and dogmatic. Jayasuriya needs to play away from his body because he routinely hits the ball on the up; he plays with his bat at an angle of 45' because he is not trying to show the whole face to the ball. He is precisely trying to hit with an angled blade, and in common with some young batsmen today, he uses timing and hugely powerful forearms to get elevation and power. What is more, he has done this successfully in Test cricket, with a treble 100 against India and the magnificent double century against England which, as much as Muralithran's bowling, won them the match. It was probably the greatest attacking innings played in the last decades, played as it was to force a result in limited time.

Is he exceptional? Not really. Take Shahid Afridi or Adam Gilchrist: they got their starts in the one-day game which defined their methods, but they already have Test centuries to their credit. Both of them can hit straight but they often do this with horizontal bats, they drive through cover by swinging straight but with an angled face, and Afridi plays short pitched balls by squaring up and angling the bat so acutely that the ball slides through slips. The freedom of the air that one-day cricket has brought, and the resulting willingness to loft the ball, has changed the pull shot. More and more pull shots are hit, not on the back foot with the ball taken at the top of its bounce, but off the front foot without the batsman going back and across. Batsmen will routinely pull balls that are barely short-of-a- length and they aim the shot at mid-wicket or straighter rather than square-leg. Bats with more carry, therefore a greater likelihood of clearing the field are partly responsible for the change.

It could be my imagination, but batsmen do not drive on the half- volley the way they used to. Batsmen like Ganguly prefer to take the balls higher in its bounce when they leave the crease because they are aiming for elevation and power, rather than the safety of keeping the ball down. And the reason they are aiming for a six is that modern bats make lofted shots more likely to go the distance. Observe Tendulkar and Ganguly drive: they nearly always drive on the up. We have got so used to this that the sight of Devang Gandhi driving in his debut Test was a bit like watching the MCC coaching manual come to life. He got right to the pitch to stifle the bounce and ironed the ball along the ground.

The classical batting stance (side-on, feet six inches apart) is no longer the rule. Batsmen like Jayasuriya, Jacques Kallis, Cronje and Klusener stand with their feet a yard apart. They do not go forward or back - they just shift their weight, rocking onto the back foot for the cut and pull, or flexing their front leg to drive and flick. As Boycott acutely observed, they play like batters in baseball; if the ball is in the zone, if it is there or thereabouts, it has to go.

More than modern bats and one-day cricket, the biggest change in contemporary batting has been wrought by fear. Or the absence of fear. Packer changed cricket in many ways: with lights, coloured clothing, big money and brilliant television coverage, but most of all he changed it by making helmets respectable. Nothing has altered cricket more than the helmet. The helmet removed the risk of death and unbearable pain. I remember the relief we felt in the Sixties and the Seventies when Chandrasekhar achieved his prescribed duck and left because now he couldn't be maimed. I can hear Alan McGilray speaking out of my Philips radio early one winter morning, describing Madan Lal's retreat towards square leg as Lillee ran in. I can still remember the brave Mohinder Amarnath walking out in a sola topi, hamstrung by the menace of bouncer. And I can still see Gavaskar, the greatest opening batsman since the Second World War, playing five consecutive short balls from Imran, each one rearing towards his heart, each one played down with one hand, the right hand off the handle. Luckily Imran did his hamstring on the last ball and all of us at Kotla sighed with relief. Not because the Master was not up to the challenge; nobody played the short ball better, but there was always the chance that one would slip through ... and we had been brought up on Indian cricket's gruesome cautionary tale: Contractor's head and how it cracked when he ducked into one from Charlie Griffith.

If, as a spectator, I have not felt that vicarious spit-drying fear in nearly 20 years, think of how much better the batsmen must feel. I have seen Tendulkar get pinged by Donald and the ball ricocheting off the helmet, leaving Tendulkar unhurt. Fast bowlers can still intimidate but they cannot inspire mortal fear. With the helmet, the psychological balance of power shifted decisively towards the batsman: they now take guard knowing they can be hurt but not killed. That simple truth has liberated them. There are no Brijesh Patels in modern cricket and if there are, they put on helmets and become Mohammed Azharuddins. Armed with great new bats, fitter than before, protected by the helmet and coddled by the bouncer rule, batsmen who would once have chosen discretion, now affect valour.

Bowling

The conventions of fast bowling have been stood on their heads. The menace of the new ball has given way to the paradoxes of reverse swing in the middle overs. Donald comes in first change in the limited overs game, as does Waqar Younis; Imran routinely said that the new ball was wasted on Waqar. Where Lindwall was a great exception, now Pakistani fast bowlers routinely bowl with a low arm to inswing their yorkers. The bouncer has been legislated into relative unimportance and reverse inswing has some of the glamour that was reserved for the "lovely outswinger" of the days of Botham and Kapil Dev.

During an e-mail question-and-answer session on Channel 9, Mark Taylor was asked why McGrath was designated a fast bowler while Damien Fleming was only granted a fast-medium tag. Was it speed, a minimum miles-per-hour benchmark? The question was asked because the speedometer had timed Fleming as generally faster than McGrath in the first Test against Pakistan. Astonishingly, Taylor said that being fast was more about method than speed. Bowlers like Fleming, according to Taylor, depended on movement or "shape" for wickets whereas men like McGrath concentrated on line, bounce and aggression. The first part of Taylor's answer, that fast bowlers aren't mainly defined by their speed, is one of those involuntarily daft things that all TV pundits end up saying. What he meant was that most fast bowlers do not depend mainly on movement for wickets: men like Holding and Marshall all bowled straight, at the batsman all the time. So does Donald. These are great fast bowlers. But the Pakistanis have been trying to redefine fast bowling. Men like Waqar, Imran, Shoaib Akhtar and Wasim Akram, swing the old ball at tremendous speed. Oddly, they do not depend on bounce for wickets: more often than not they trap batsmen in front or bowl them. And their ball of choice is the banana inswinger.

Heresy of heresies, the great mantras of spin bowling as exemplified by Bedi, flight and a teasing good length, have yielded to the blacker arts of the unreadable delivery and enormous turn. Warne, not a great flighter of the ball, relies on his flipper and the obscene turn he gets from the rough. Kumble, well, who knows why he gets wickets, but apart from the fact that he turns his wrist over, its hard to see how he is a spinner at all. Saqlain while slower, depends mainly on his unreadable floater for wickets, Muralitharan on prodigious turn, Mushtaq on his googly, Adams on the novelty of his eccentric action.

There are no Nadkarnis in modern cricket and, tragically, no Bedis either. The foot down the wicket and the bludgeoning crossbat swipe has accounted for flighted good length bowling. The best left arm orthodox spinner in the world today is ... Daniel Vettori! The two offspinners to command respect depend on a deformed, double-jointed arm and the mysterious equivalent of an offspinners googly. Spinners who toss the ball up without being big turners of the ball get murdered by quite ordinary batsmen. The classic example is Cronje, whose target area is mid- wicket and whose mainstay is the cowswipe or jhadu-shot played on one knee. Protected from real pace by the helmet and the limitations on bouncers, mediocrities like Cronje terrorise conventional medium pace and spin bowling with cross-bat shots.

The changing game

The straight bat, the long innings of attrition or in defence, surviving the new ball, setting out your stall and playing forever, genuine slow bowlers wheeling their way through dozens of overs, none of these things will disappear from the game, but they are ceasing to define Test cricket and as a result the game is changing. It is rather like the decline of serve-and-volley tennis: it will not become extinct and there will always be the stray Stephen Edberg, but where once first-serve-and-into-the-net used to be the staple of the men's tour, now the game is defined by ground-strokes. Modern racquets give baseliners such power that rushing the net has become a low percentage ploy.

It is not a coincidence that there are more results in Test matches of late. This is partly because batsmen carry their one day idiom into the longer game, partly because their defensive techniques have deteriorated through neglect, partly as a result of much improved fielding (more catches taken, more run outs effected), partly because glory now decisively belongs to the swashbuckler and the solid anchor is likely to be seen as a stolid barnacle. Cricket, even Test cricket, is now played to force a result, not to effect a successful holding action. The strategic draw is becoming obsolete.

Three countries are responsible for transforming modern cricket and conveniently enough, each one has specialised in one of the three aspects of the game. The Sri Lankans led by Jayasuriya have remade modern batsmanship, the Pakistanis through Imran, Wasim and Waqar have extended the range of the fast bowlers art and the South Africans led by Rhodes have invented a new orthodoxy for fielding: the sliding, curving stop, the lightning recovery from proneness, the javelin over-arm throw from the deep, the elevation of point to the pivotal status once enjoyed by cover.

The exemplary modern cricketers are Jayasuriya, Waqar Younis, Shane Warne, Muralitharan and Jonty Rhodes. Wasim Akram, Donald, Tendulkar, Lara are great players but they are not revolutionaries, they have not changed cricket, they have, as great players do, taken what suits them from the innovations of the modern game. The foundation of Tendulkar's game may be Bombay's grounding in the basics, but the front-foot pull, the up and over shot that deposits the ball beyond mid-wicket's ropes, and most of all, that one-side skip as he makes room to pulp the ball with the inside-out drive are tributes to modern bat-making, the demands of one-day cricket and his genius, not necessarily in that order.

Innovation has not uprooted orthodoxy; innovation never does: it is a tincture that colours the game, subtly changing its momentum and its rhythm. The most successful team in contemporary cricket is Australia and it is, in many ways, a very old fashioned team. McGrath is all line and length and bounce, Fleming is a regulation outswing bowler and the batsmen, even the young ones like Ponting, cut, pull and drive out of the text book. The Aussies are a good example of how well the old verities can be made to work by a bunch of tough, professional cricketers. But Australia have Warne, the most revolutionary slow bowler of the last quarter-century and they have Gilchrist whose style and success owes everything to the precedent blazed by Jayasuriya and the Sri Lankan transformation of batsmanship. Change is everywhere: another five years and even commentators might trade their cliches in for new ones.

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