Don’t call it a comeback, he’s been here for years
“The day I stop wanting to be No1,” Gareth Batty once said, “is the day I retire.” That was 12 years ago, and even he wasn’t sure whether his ambition would last this long. Back then he was still burning about the fact that he was the man bowling to Brian Lara when he broke Matthew Hayden’s world record for the best Test score in Antigua earlier that same year. “Maybe in 10 to 15 years’ time, certainly when I’m no longer playing, I might look back and think maybe that was not so bad,” Batty said. But at that particular moment, he felt like he wanted to “get up and bop Lara on the chin”. It was, he explained, just “not what I want to be remembered for”. Over a decade later, he is still spinning, still toiling, still hurting and still wanting.
Batty first made England’s Test squad in 2003. Only two of the men alongside him then are still playing first class cricket, Jimmy Anderson, and the Methuselah of the Quantocks, Marcus Trescothick. The rest are long gone, most of them now working as commentators or coaches. Batty was picked alongside Alec Stewart, Nasser Hussain, Mark Butcher, players from another era of English cricket altogether. He played seven Tests, all before the 2005 watershed, four as a second spinner in Dhaka, Galle, Kandy and Colombo, three more on his own, when Ashley Giles was unavailable. Giles would have played that game against Lara in Antigua if he hadn’t fallen off a jetski. It must have felt like a lucky break at the time.
Ten spinners have played Test cricket for England since Batty last did. Monty Panesar and Graeme Swann managed to fit their entire Test careers into the time that has lapsed since. James Tredwell served a spell. Ian Blackwell and Shaun Udal took turns in 2006. Samit Patel and Scott Borthwick appeared as all-rounders. Simon Kerrigan was given a single game at the Oval. Then Moeen Ali and Adil Rashid. Batty was serving on the county circuit, first for Worcestershire, then for Surrey, waiting all the while for another chance. After he took eight wickets against Essex in May 2014, he spoke again about how he still wanted to win a recall. “I think I’m good enough to do it. I’d say it’s the first time in my career that I would actually say that to people – that I can do the job.”
Two years later, it’s finally arrived. Batty is 38 now, soon to turn 39. Leave aside, for a moment, the question of what his selection means for the state of English spin bowling. That he’s back is a testament to his bloody-minded persistence, the fact that, after 19 years in first class cricket, he’s still busy being there, when so many other players have gone, given in to age, or injury, or the futility of this profession into their 30s. Batty grew up in Yorkshire, of course, in Cullingworth, a quarry at one end of the village and a football and cricket pitch at the other. He played the first few years of his career for the county, and even after all this time away, his cricket retains something of its flinty character.
“In the Yorkshire philosophy of sport it is impossible to be too keen on winning a competitive engagement,” wrote Jim Kilburn, who spent 40 years as the correspondent of the Yorkshire Post, and whose words were, according to Geoffrey Boycott, “read like scripture throughout the county.” That Yorkshire hardness, Kilburn wrote, “is a defensive quality expressed in the form of aggressiveness. It is the resistance to challenge, unwillingness to bend the knee or doff the cap.” It is the desire to knock Lara’s block off when he’s just swept for you for four to break the world record score.
“The desire to win,” Kilburn added, “is a virtue unalloyed, but some practices arising from that virtue can tarnish it.” Batty is often guilty of what Kilburn politely described as the “instigation and cultivation of a disagreeable atmosphere”. He likes to pick fights, and sometimes acts like a prat. Which has made him unpopular with the opposition and their fans. His team-mates, on the other hand, only have good things to say about him. And his strength of character has been instrumental in steering Surrey through their turbulence of recent seasons. He will be a good man to have along on what promises to be a difficult tour of Bangladesh this winter.
There was a time when Batty spoke about how he was developing a doosra. That was back in the 2000s, when the delivery was in the off-spinner’s must-have accessory, and the whisper of it enough to earn Alex Loudon an England call-up. Batty spent time working on it in the nets and insisted that he was able to “bowl it reasonably well from 18 yards”. If it was unconvincing then, it sounds ridiculous now, at the other end of 12 seasons of steadfastly parsimonious off-spin. Like all players who make this far into their 30s, Batty is entirely comfortable with the limitations of his own game, his action as familiar to him as the grooves in his favourite armchair.
And in this era, when spinners must be so easily confused by the conflicting demands of bowling four-over spells against rampant batsmen and 40-over stints in a four-day game, that self-knowledge is a valuable. The likelihood has to be that this winter will be his last tour, and as one of four spinners, he may not play at all. Most likely he’s a short-term fix, a stop-gap. Fred Titmus and John Emburey both played similar roles towards the ends of their own careers. But bet on this – Batty won’t be thinking that way himself. If he has a role-model in mind, it’s more likely to be Wilfred Rhodes, who was still tweaking the ball, still taking wickets for England, at the fine old age of 52. Batty may reckon he has another 12 years in him yet.
• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
