So who would be a bowler?
It’s said that when Sultan Abdulaziz saw his very first game of cricket, between two teams of British officers, he told them that he thought the sport was “wonderful” but wondered why, since bowling seemed so “needlessly exhausting”, the men didn’t get their “servants and concubines” to perform it for them. The Sultan, who was eventually overthrown, imprisoned and murdered, had what you might politely describe as some eccentric ideas about how society should function, but with cricket, at least, he was on to something.
“There is more glamour attached to batting than bowling,” Don Bradman once wrote, since “the majority of people go to cricket hoping to see a scintillating innings”. Bowlers, Bradman reckoned, must “possess a tremendous love” for cricket. “What else would drive them to such exertions?”
The bowler’s lot is a rough one. If the workload is lighter now, the job has seldom seemed so utterly thankless. In the first four days of the Champions Trophy, we had successive totals of 305 for six and 308 for two, 291 and 53 for three, 299 for six and 203, 319 for three and 164. The 45 bowlers in the thick of all this managed exactly eight maidens between them. Altogether, they took just 42 of the 80 wickets on offer, at an average of 46 and an economy rate of 5.92. Before the tournament, we had England’s 328 against Ireland at Lord’s, their 339, and 330 against South Africa, and in the tournament warm-ups, totals of 318 and 319 in Australia’s match against Sri Lanka, 341 and 342 when Bangladesh played Pakistan, 324 by India, and then 356 and 359 between Sri Lanka and New Zealand.
Parse all that as the numerical expression of a whole lot of pain. It seems there are now two ways to keep a team to a total under 300. One is to pray for rain, and the other is to hope they stumble in their own hurry to score quickly and collapse in a heap. Which, if you’ve been paying close attention, won’t come as much of a surprise, because scoring rates have been rising steadily since the start of this decade.
It’s that exact reason, in fact, that makes it easy to forget just how large a leap forward the game has taken in the last 10 years. I watched England’s second ODI against South Africa with an old friend who’s moved to the US. It had been a while since he’d seen a one-day game. “Remind me,” he said at one point, “is 300 still a good total or not?”
Well, no, not really. In 2009, the overall bowling economy rate in ODIs topped five for the first time. In 2014 it grew again, to 5.19, and in 2016 it reached 5.40. So far this year, it’s running at 5.32, which is two runs higher than it was when they started playing ODI cricket back in the early 70s. Then, in 2013, the overall batting strike rate rose up above 80 for the first time. And then it shot forward in another leap in 2014, to 83.30. Since then it’s crept higher still, to 86.9 in 2015. Midway through 2017, it’s running at 85.73 for the year. Ten years ago the figure was 77.43, and 10 years before that it was 72.81. Imagine all this on a graph, and you’ll see the rising line take a sharp upward tick in the last few years.
The evolution of batting is coming on in a rush. For years, it has moved in fits and starts, advanced by the radical acts of individuals whose successful innovations would be widely adopted. Whether that was Fuller Pilch (ask your great, great, great, great grandfathers), who first had the idea of coming out to meet the ball at its pitch, or WG Grace, who taught everyone how to play both forward and back, Ranjitsinhji, who opened up the leg side, or, years later, Doug Marillier with his scoop-shot and Kevin Pietersen with his switch-hit. These days everyone is at it. Constrained for years by the orthodoxies of correct technique, the idea that there is a right and a wrong way to play, batsmen are free now, and have even been forced by necessity to explore all the possibilities. They’ve untapped the latent potential of a sport in which you can hit through 360 degrees.
It’s not just that batsmen have more shots now, or hit more fours and sixes, but that they’re more intent on scoring off every ball. T20, when each ball counts as 0.83% of the total available to the team, has taught the value of every single delivery, each too precious to waste by blocking or waving through. A ball that passes by the bat without being played at now seems like a surprising event in itself. The bowlers, then, are under more pressure than ever before. And their own arsenal is starting to look a little thin. A couple of their key weapons, the bouncer, say, or the doosra, have been legislated against. Others – the wide yorker, or the slow short ball – were solved soon after they were introduced. They’re being outgunned.
The Sisyphean futility of bowling was never more apparent than in the final overs of India’s innings at Edgbaston last Sunday, when Yuvraj Singh, Virat Kohli and Hardik Pandya unleashed a storm of such intensity, such great vengeance, such furious anger, that Pakistan were broken like a ship on the rocks. They hit 117 in the last 10 overs, and 72 in the last four. Mohammad Amir left the field with cramp, moments later Wahab Riaz went off too, with an injured ankle. Amid the tatters of their attack, there were no servants or concubines to call on, only poor left-arm spinner Imad Wasim, who had the unenviable job of bowling the last over of the innings. He was hit for three sixes in a row, and in the end the over cost 23 runs, reasonably cheap at modern prices.
This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
