The Ashes – Skill and Execution

 

 

 

I’m in awe of the skill of Test cricketers. Always have been.

 

As a kid I loved playing cricket. Fancied myself with the bat. Could handle the taped-up tennis ball on our downhill pitch on the road outside the house. Though in later years, as my younger brothers advanced their cricketing skills and mine remained stagnant, they worked out my shuffle across the stumps and regularly had me doing a Harry Brook swipe at the ball too far away from my body. Third slip got a workout.

 

In year seven at secondary school (1976) I came in batting at five or six with the team in all sorts of trouble. Four for thirty-odd I think? It would be my last competitive game of cricket. I made a very breezy and entertaining twelve from four balls.

 

My first shot was a rather pleasing pull just forward of square leg that raced to the boundary. My second shot was a flick outside off stump that caught the edge and flew into the gap between second and third slip. Neither fielder wanted to catch it. Short arm fielding. The ball was travelling at the speed of light. My third shot was a throw-the-bat-at-it job. It careened over the slips and, if there was a fence, it would have made an almighty racket when it smashed into the palings. Alas there were only scraggy banksias lining the oval. But by this stage the three spectator dads and the PE teacher were on their feet. Remember this was 1976. Bazball was still a gamete.

 

The fourth ball smashed into my stumps.

 

But what really disturbed me about that inning was that I couldn’t see the ball. Not a bit. So I determined that cricket wasn’t for me. However, some years later I was in a history lecture at university, by the peerless Geoffrey Blainey, who had written a few pertinent thoughts for consideration on the blackboard behind him (remember blackboards?). The people around me were scribbling down the words but to my eyes they looked like a Monet. White smudges in a distant galaxy. I thought I might need glasses so I went to an optometrist.

 

“You need glasses” she said.

 

My conclusion was that I’d retired from competitive cricket too soon. The problem wasn’t my batting technique, but my eyes. Of course I was deluded.

 

Watching the Tests between Australia and England, despite the shortcomings in both camps, has reignited my appreciation for cricketing skill.

 

I used to work with a bloke who despised cricket. He argued that no bowler had control, that a good ball was a fluke, that whether the ball would swing one way or the other was down to mother nature, that if the ball hit the seam, it was a one-in-a-million shot. He couldn’t be more wrong. His contention was a bit like suggesting that a masterful oil painting was also a fluke because the paint on the canvas had been arranged haphazardly. But witnessing the masterclass of Mitchell Starc’s bowling was like watching an artist at work. He looks for the killer ball, the unplayable, but also builds a portfolio of work with a particular batsman in mind. The nuances are sublime. Slightly fuller, a smidge wider, a drift away, or into, the batsman. He has as much control as a bowler can have. As much control as Michelangelo holding a brush.

 

Poor old Harry Brook, as naturally talented a batsman as I’ve seen since Mark Waugh, doesn’t seem to comprehend what he is so good at. He seems to have seventeen seconds to hit the ball but goes for the trashy sugar rush rather than the contemplative inning-builder. Starc gives him the rush, then delivers the exit. Brook needs to chat with David Gower. He needs to understand the game.

 

And Steve Smith is an infuriating delight. The twitches, constant pulling at his sleeves, adjusting the pads, twirling of the bat drives me mad. But for all that, for all his crabby shuffle across in front of his stumps, he is quite still when he hits the ball. The cover drive is magnificent. Not magnificent like a Caravaggio, but magnificent like a beautiful piece of music. You feel his shots as much as see them. He shuffles, gets front-on (almost), raises the blade like a conductor pointing his baton at the violins, inviting them into the orchestral symphony, before bringing the bat down so sweetly and casually and cannons the ball through the covers. If Starc is Michelangelo, Smith is Antoni Gaudi.

 

Even the lesser lights are so gifted. The batsman has a nano-second to pick up the length, detect which side of the ball has the sheen, find the seam, move his feet into the right position, then execute a shot. The calculations he makes are mathematically impossible. The ancient Greek philosopher, Zeno, in his contemplations about plurality, illusions and motion, would have studied cricket closely. The game may have blown his mind.

 

The only thing I have missed in these Ashes tests so far is top notch spin bowling. Will Jacks has rolled a few over and shows promise. But he’s not a conjurer. Not yet anyway. I long for another Derek Underwood or Warnie or even Nathan Lyon at his best. The loop, the dip, the subtle change of pace, drift on the breeze, hitting the foot marks. They are the Artful Dodger. The necessary contrast to the fast mediums. Cricket without these tricksters loses a dimension.

 

I’ll try and watch or listen to most days of this test series. There will be magical moments that transcend the hyped-up contest of team versus team.  The field-piercing shot that draws breath, the ball that is the culmination of a long thought out plan, that catches an edge and lands in a pair of hands at second slip as if by divine intervention, the thunderbolt that clatters into the stumps and sends lights flashing and pulses racing, the chin music that knocks a bloke off his feet. But we will also admire the balletic forward defence, foot to the pitch, elbow bent, ball under the eyes, a shot of enormous skill. One I could never play.

 

 

Read more from Dips Here.

 

 

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