Rule one in baseball, according to Hammerin’ Hank Aaron, is to always keep swinging. “That’s my motto,” Aaron said. “Whether I was in a slump or feeling bad or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.” Worked for him too. He broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record in 1974, and his final tally of 755 stood for years till Barry Bonds broke it in 2007. But then baseball is a slugger’s game. Test cricket is anything but. The best innings are measured in hours, sessions and days. Or at least, they are supposed to be. Here at Edgbaston they have been clocked in minutes, balls and overs. It has felt like a very modern sort of match, a Test of the T20 era. Rapid, compact, intense. Helter-skelter cricket.
In the months before this Test, some bright spark in Warwickshire’s head office decided that the club should take out insurance against any possible loss of earnings in the event of an early finish, mainly so they could cover the weekend’s takings if the match did not make the fourth day. Bright idea, as it turns out. Given the claim they’re about to put in, the club may find that their insurer has jacked the premium up next time around.
Whoever Warwickshire’s insurer is, they will have been grateful for Peter Nevill, who batted sensibly through the late hours of the second afternoon. He is 37 not out overnight, off of 117 balls, which makes his the longest innings of the match so far, and by a distance. No one else has managed to last more than the 89 balls Chris Rogers faced on the opening morning. If it were not for him, most likely this match would be over already. The last two-day Test in England was at Headingley in 2000, when West Indies were skittled for 172 and 61. Otherwise you have to go back the best part of 100 years, to the first Test of the 1921 Ashes.
That time England were bowled out for 112 and 147. But at least they could blame the weather. This time, neither side had a good excuse. The game is being played on “a typical English pitch”, as Jimmy Anderson called it after the first day. There has been a little seam movement off the turf, a little swing in the air, a handful of brilliant deliveries. But there has not been a typical English innings, just a lot of bad shots.
Five men have reached fifty, but none has gone on to make a hundred. Or even an 80. Four of those five did it Aaron’s way. Keep swinging. Whether they are bowling well, or your batting badly, just hit the thing. Ian Bell made fifty off of 51 balls. Joe Root fifty off of 49. Moeen Ali fifty off of 66. And David Warner topped the lot, with fifty off 35, which meant he equalled the Ashes record set by Graham Yallop at Old Trafford in 1981. The odd man out was Rogers, who spent two and a half hours grinding out 52 runs from 89 balls on the first morning.
At the age of 37, Rogers is one of only two batsmen in this Test who was old enough to have played professional cricket before the invention of T20 in 2003. The other is Michael Clarke, who is in such poor form he has been unable to settle at the crease in each innings, let alone start to worry about staying there for any length of time.
With the younger bunch, it’s not a question of technique, so much as it is a question of temperament. In this match, batsmen have always been looking to counterattack, egged on, perhaps, by all the talk about “brands of cricket” and their coaches’ instructions to “express themselves”.
Under pressure, batsmen are not digging in but are hitting out. Bell knows better. Or should do. But, promoted to No3 in the order, he rattled along in fours till he got out trying to cart Nathan Lyon down the ground for six. Similar story with Root. Overnight, he was 30 not out. In the morning he watched from the non-striker’s end as Mitchell Johnson, bowling nasty, brutish, and short, tore out both Jonny Bairstow and Ben Stokes. Brilliant balls, both. So what does Root do? Start swinging. He hit the first ball he faced from Johnson through mid-wicket for four, then clipped two more through third man off Josh Hazlewood in the very next over. Get hit, hit back. He was out not long after, trying to drive a rank delivery from Mitchell Starc. Loose, full and wide, he edged it behind.
Likewise Ali. His partnership of 87 with Stuart Broad lasted just under 20 overs, but is, bizarrely, the longest of the match. After lunch, Ali decided that rather than try to see off Johnson – who only bowls in four-over spells – it would be better to fight him. He hit six fours in the next 14 balls Johnson bowled to him. Glorious to watch it was, too. An edge past gully, two pulls, played while swivelling on his heels, two drives through long-on, and another walloped over the top of mid-off. In between, a series of wild swings, swishes, and misses, with barely a block among them. Johnson’s three overs went for 27 and he was yanked from the attack. And then Hazlewood came back on, Broad got out, and Ali was caught at, of all places, third man. By then he was batting with the tail but it still felt just a little injudicious.
Then Warner. He may not have invented this see ball-hit ball style of Test-match batting – that would have been Virender Sehwag – but he has certainly helped perfect it. And so he too took to lashing the attack as his colleagues collapsed at the other end. He slowed up just a little after reaching his fifty, and finished up with 77 off of 62 balls. Almost pedestrian, by his standards.
And they say cricket is baseball on prozac. Hank Aaron would have been impressed. Not sure about Geoffrey Boycott, though.
