Inventiveness of cricket

The switch-hit raises implications for other laws of the game, notably in the definition of law 25 concerning the wide and especially the leg-side wide of the one-day game, and law 36 regarding the lbw regulation.

Necessity, it is said, is the mother of invention: an adage which cricket has never been slow to acknowledge. In the archaeological era of the game, when bat held sway over ball and “Shock” White of Reigate tried to extend that dominance by batting with a bat so wide that it completely covered the stumps, the law-makers of the Marylebone Club were quick to restrict the bat’s width to 4-1/4 inches. In 1807 they allowed John Willes to bowl with a straight b owling arm: a law which they extended to round-arm bowling in 1828 and over-arm bowling in 1864. In 1930, the great Australian batsman, Don Bradman, made a nonsense of human batting standards by notching 974 runs at an average of 99 in a Test series: an action which caused the England skipper, Douglas Jardine, his Surrey colleague, Percy Fender, and their professional ‘tool’, Harold Larwood, to invent the reaction of “Bodyline” — the bowling of short express deliveries directed at the batsman standing clear of his stumps.

Bradman answered by moving to the leg-side and playing every delivery into an off-side field denuded of players by the demands of the Bodyline tactic.

Who won that contest can be gauged by the fact that Bradman still averaged fifty with the bat in the 1932/33 rubber. Cricket has always been a game of cut, thrust and parry — and a balanced competition between bat and ball. In 1931 the stumps were heightened by one inch to give the bowler a better chance of hitting the stumps. The wrong ’un came into the game in the 1900s for the same reason. To further mystify the batsman, “Jake” Iverson and “Johnny” Gleeson invented their famous folded-finger spinner in the 50s and 60s.

Closer to the present day the one-day international has become as much a batting entertainment as a competition. So much so, that the organisers of the limited-overs matches have spiced their product by introducing fair-ground distractions into the staging of their games — side-shows, round-abouts and rock-groups — just to keep the younger element occupied. Cricket buffs, however, like to see their entertainment embedded in the game itself. They want to see the batsman hit sixes and fours. Fair dinkum spectators want to see batting displays on good pitches — not batsmen struggling to score singles on ‘sticky’ wickets. They want to witness close results in a brief match context. Pressure is applied to batsmen by the keen fielding requiring their opponents to maintain a high strike/scoring rate over a set number of deliveries. For its part, the fielding side pressurises its opposition by stifling its quick-scoring ambitions. To further augment that pressure, extraneous influences are introduced: hence a bowling team makes scoring more difficult by cramping the batsman’s strokes and directing its bowling line close to the batsman’s body — or making him reach for his shots wide of the off-stump. Extra Power Play pressure segments are slotted into the game to permit the fielding team to introduce supplementary fieldsmen into the game for a set period of time.

When the limited-overs game was introduced into the first-class and international format, it appealed to most of the spectators — but only for a limited period. Then its 50-over span and the predictability of that duration began to tell against its attraction. Batsmen developed a scoring sequence: first establish a sound opening. Then consolidate the innings between overs 20 and 30 — and finally finish batting with a hitting flourish, with wickets in hand. But this batting plan resulted in “Dullsville” between the first over and over number 30 — the period when the side on strike preferred safety first, and made little or no effort to take the initiative and force the pace.

The call went out for the Holy Grail of immediate amusement and sustained rapid scoring. Enter Twenty20 cricket and out of the window went batting style, grace and the aesthetic qualities of cricket. The game became a race to test the scoring capacities of teams over a 20-over sprint. Thus if one team batted for a mere 20 overs, it maximised the scoring opportunities of those overs by batting aggressively. Conversely bowling sides confronted with attacking batting action reacted with defensive bowling. England’s adopted South African batsman, Kevin Pietersen, encountered such negative tactics in county cricket from the moment he stepped on to English turf. Initially his counter was to employ his long reach, lengthen his open stance and slog the ball through the fielder-packed covers or, dangerously, over long-on.

But the bowler’s direction went wider and to follow was to risk rupture! Pietersen’s lateral thinking then moved him to adopt revolutionary batting methods. With the right-hander’s off-side field blocked, as the bowler moved in to deliver, Pietersen switched his stance to that of a left-hander. His right side was now his leading side. Importantly, the crowded off-side field, stripped of its packed off-side population became the left-hander’s leg-side and full of gaps. Scoring on that side of the wicket suddenly became much easier as instead of driving as a right-hander, he hooked and pulled as a left-hander!

But the switch-hit raises implications for other laws of the game, notably in the definition of law 25 concerning the wide and especially the leg-side wide of the one-day game, and law 36 regarding the lbw regulation. Law 36.3 also defines the off-side of the striker’s wicket as determined by the batsman’s stance at the beginning of the bowler’s run-up and needed re-examination. It is therefore refreshing to see the normally conservative Marylebone lawmakers accept the innovation of the switch-hit — on the grounds of: it needs a great deal of skill to execute, has risk for the batsman and offers the bowlers a good chance of taking a wicket. Variety, risk and excitement add to the allure of cricket. In the past, the initiative of a South African Barlow cutting over the head of slips; Mynn or Felix ‘drawing’ the ball between their legs; or Bosanquet bowling his ‘googly’, have all added flavour of discovery to the game. The inventiveness of Pietersen and the radical thinking of like men ensure the continuum of their voyage of discovery in the modern game.