From a purely fun point of view it has always seemed a bit of a shame Stuart Broad didn’t end up making it as a top-order batsman, which was the plan coming through the age groups, right up until the moment he started eating ravenously and grew almost a foot in his eighteenth year.
Bowling it was, then, although the ghost of that restless adolescent batsman has lurked at the fringes for the past nine years and 100 Tests. If the most remarkable thing about Broad’s bowling has been its sense of surgical control, his batting has remained the opposite, a ragged, scarecrowish delight, whether he’s coming in to thrash wildly from a position of strength, to thrash wildly from a position of weakness or to thrash wildly from a position of parity.
At the start of Broad’s England career there was some hopeful talk about him knuckling down and playing like a “proper” batsman. This was always a bad idea, even before he was fatally spooked by Mitchell Johnson’s fire and that blow on the nose from Varun Aaron. Broad is instead most effective as an improper batsman, trudging to the wicket like a bundle of sticks, tent poles and deckchair slats bundled up in some pads, every now and then unfurling a range of wonderfully pure attacking stokes beyond the reach of many top order batsmen, and in between thrashing about like a man swatting flies away from his ankles with a squash racket.
Beyond this, life as a bowler has worked out pretty well. The wicket of Gautam Gambhir at the start of the third day in Rajkot was Broad’s 361st in his much-feted 100th Test. Not bad going for someone who first played for England as a great floppy, half-formed, fairy child a year after that growth spurt, who learnt his craft in public, and who had 52 wickets at an average of 40.21 after his first 20 Tests.
Broad has now travelled full circle. It is easy to forget that in those early years he was routinely cast by some as overrated, brittle, unduly favoured.
Aged 22, he was nicknamed “Stuart Fraud” by the Aussie press in his first Ashes series, a nickname that didn’t make it past the Oval Test and the first sight of that warrior-mode, when the hour strikes Broad o’clock, the gears click and suddenly anything seems possible.
England’s star workhorse is, if anything, a little underrated. The past three years have brought Broad 144 wickets at an average of 25.5. Another three years of the same – which seems to be the plan – would nudge him up close to 500 Test wickets and a fair claim on the largely meaningless, but hotly contested, title of England’s most prolific and adaptable fast bowler of the modern age.
There is, of course, no real need to go down that road, not least when Broad has been, above all, a brilliant team player. Looking on from a distance there was a genuine warmth to the celebrations in India for his 100th Test this week. Still, though, the urge to rank and rate and categorise always lurks when a landmark like this approaches.
Jimmy Anderson has been constantly lionised in recent years as the greatest, the most skilful, the all-timerest. With this in mind it seems fair to float a little stardust the way of Broad, whose record against the nominal top three Test teams, Australia, India and South Africa, is substantially better than Anderson’s; who is the youngest England bowler to make it to 100 Tests; and who has done so while still easing it down close to 90mph, still capable of pulling himself up to his full height and dragging a session and a series his way.
There are a few things worth pointing out as he enters the hundred club. The most obvious is Broad’s relentless improvement, a rare thing in any top-level sports person. For five years Broad had no Test record to speak of outside England. The past five have brought 63 overseas wickets at 26, with success in India, where he played through injury in 2012, the final frontier. Broad will succeed on this tour. You can feel it. His big moment will come, if only because big moments just seem to happen to him. Sixty of his Test wickets have been Michael Clarke, AB de Villiers, MS Dhoni, Steve Smith, Brendon McCullum, David Warner, Marlon Samuels, Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar. No English bowler since the 19th century has as many wickets in Ashes Tests at a better strike rate. In the best possible sense, he really has been England’s big-time bowler.
Really, though, the thing that will define Broad is his ability to surge, those Broad afternoons when you can tell just from his run-up something in the weather has shifted, the birds have started to bark, the sun turned white, the skies swirling with unbound possibilities. There is a kind of irresistible maths here, something about Broad pitching a bit further up at full pace from his full height. Perhaps the best of them all was that 6-17 in Johannesburg this year, although the 8-15 against Australia in the summer of 2015 will resonate more, Broad gliding in like a birch tree sapling leaning into the wind, sending the ball snaking about on a malevolent length and drawing a collapse in the truest sense, an acquiescence in the face of pure, seductive sporting will.
The other thing about Broad, for now, is perhaps the basic question of why he hasn’t been more popular. The hysterically over-seasoned non-scandal of his failure to walk after a thin edge at Trent Bridge had carried to first slip off Brad Haddin’s glove didn’t help. I once read a newspaper diary piece in which the author described seeing him at a party and finding him so handsome it was almost impossible to look at him directly. That kind of thing isn’t ideal either.
Perhaps he simply doesn’t fit the template. The best England fast bowlers have been gloomy in aspect: chuntering, Trueman-ish, dark, angry. Broad, on the other hand, simply looks quite pleased with things. He follows instructions. He gets better. For all its brilliance, his England career still has the feeling of a really successful and well-planned decade-long trip round the world, the greatest gap-year anybody ever had.
He isn’t finished either. From here, Broad’s main ambitions seem to lie in white ball cricket, where he remains England’s highest wicket-taker in T20s despite being rather pointlessly dropped from the team two years ago. Broad will play for the Hobart Hurricanes in the Big Bash this year, a typically lovely, fall-on-your-feet kind of place to spend the northern winter. The longer plan is to sign off at the 2019 World Cup in England, which already looks like a key date in the sport’s ability to re-implant itself, to mint new heroes after a certain ambient dying back. A hundred Tests and one relentless nine-year run down the track, you wouldn’t bet against it.
