I am very much enjoying reading Steve James’s book The Art of Centuries, which may sound like something on sale in the Tate gallery but is a treatise on what it takes, technically and mentally, to reach three figures, and of course what it feels like.
This, to be perfectly frank, is not something I managed to experience at any level, not with the bat anyway, although there was at least one occasion when I know I’d done a lot of the hard work necessary and should have gone on. Rather than carrying on as I had been, I instead pretended I was Viv Richards and tried to hit a spinner inside out over extra cover, which was not the way to go.
It is always fun to read Steve’s work. His previous cricket book (he writes about rugby mainly now) The Plan was a terrific breakdown of how two of his great Zimbabwean friends Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower took England to the top during their time as head coach. Quite rightly, it won awards. This new book has a nice, light, often discursive touch to it, and I like discursive, that delightful pathway into digression where one memory prompts another.
Steve knows a lot about making hundreds (there were 47 of them in his first-class career, with a highest of 309 not out) and doing so the hard way, too, at times when his preferred supply route to third man was cut off. Clearly, the very best players became so not only through a natural ability but the intellect to maximise all the elements.
There is not much to Alastair Cook’s game, for example, but if there has been a more mentally tough England batsman, nor one who knew how to play within limitations, then I haven’t seen it.
I often think the best coaches are not those to whom the game necessarily came easily but those who understand what it is to struggle and can empathise more fully with the travails of others. And, as a contrast, we all have stories of batsmen with seemingly boundless talent, who have never managed to harness it, the “if only” players. What a player “Smith” would have been if only he’d had “Brown’s” application.
As I say though, aside from bowling, where the announcement of what we know as a gallon (100 runs) is almost always greeted with a ribald cheer from the spectators (at Lord’s, poor Tim Southee joined a pretty exclusive club of Test pace bowlers who have conceded a gallon in both innings of a Test), most of this is uncharted territory as far as I am concerned. Not so the chapter called Fear of the Duck, for this is a subject with which I am considerably more acquainted.
I did make one in a Test, a first-baller bowled by Michael Holding, something to be reminded of when it was replayed on the television during the lunch interval at Headingley this week. I avoided another when I was dropped at slip from an Andy Roberts hat-trick ball.
A little research confirms a vague memory of early days at Middlesex but only now can the absurdity be seen. On 25 May 1972, I made one not out against Nottinghamshire in my first innings for the county (it had been a wet spring), something notable only in so far as it was the last first-class run I made until 7 August, when I scored 11 against Surrey. In between times, the sequence went 0, 0*, 0*, 0*, 0*, 0*, 0*, 0*, 0 with another 0*, against DH Robins’ XI, which was not a first-class fixture, in the middle: not even a thin edge through the slips for more than two months.
Steve talks about making a pair too; the failure to score in either innings. The most unfortunate I can recall was when the Surrey batsman Monte Lynch “bagged ’em” before lunch on his debut at Lord’s. I’m pretty sure I made only one pair in my career, and that was a king pair, out first ball in both innings.
This has happened to the very best, at the highest level – Virender Sehwag at Edgbaston a few years ago springs to mind. Mine occurred when Middlesex played the Pakistan tourists in 1974. I never could play leg-spin, an unfathomable mystery, so it was no surprise in the first innings I was lbw to Intikhab Alam. Second time around, it was a different leg-spinner Mushtaq Mohammad bowling from the Pavilion end, so as I passed him I asked him what he would bowl. “I will bowl you a googly,” he said. It is possible to over-intellectualise these things: I played for the leg break, the ball spun back in instead, through a gate the team bus could have got through and I was bowled. Mushie, a wonderful fellow, chortled away. “I told you I would bowl you a googly.” “Yeah, thanks a bunch Mushie,” I muttered as I went back past. “I thought at least I could trust you to be fucking devious.”
The Art of Centuries, by Steve James, Bantam Press, £20
