Jon Hotten

England's problem with attacking batsmanship

It has taken the country ages to get over its obsession with defensive batting and appreciate that the ball is there to be smashed

Jon Hotten
26-Nov-2014
WG Grace's carefree strokeplay drew crowds, but the writers of the time weren't too impressed  •  Getty Images

WG Grace's carefree strokeplay drew crowds, but the writers of the time weren't too impressed  •  Getty Images

Great hilarity greeted the start of England's first innings of their Sri Lanka tour, as Alastair Cook duly played out a maiden over before Moeen Ali hit his first six deliveries for four.
"There it is in a nutshell" was the unavoidable thought: the future confronting the past in an uncertain present. What is it about us English and our suspicion of change? It sent me back to Robert Winder's wonderful and rightly garlanded survey of Wisden, The Little Wonder. In it there is a lovely chapter on how the Almanack reacted to the emergence of the game's great force, William Gilbert Grace, and the unprecedented scale and speed of his scoring. Did they like it? No they did not.
When Grace took 121 off Notts while playing for MCC in 1869, the Wisden editors recorded it briefly before hailing the more modest knock of Richard Daft: "Tuesday was Daft's day," they wrote. "For cool, scientific, cautious and successful defence, the innings was a marvel." And when WG belted 172 of Gloucestershire's total of 276, this time against MCC, they noted sniffily that he had almost been caught with his score on 21, before reflecting at great length on Gordon's score of 53, "an innings of careful, good defence, clean, hard cutting and excellent cricket".
As Winder writes, "This faint applause persisted for many years". In the summer of 1871, when Grace made two double-centuries, four scores of more than 150 and another four centuries, Wisden called him, "the best and luckiest batsman in England". As late as 1905, when the Doctor struck his 126th century, the editors were still whinging about "one or two faulty strokes".
Why? What was it about Grace that provoked such ambiguity, even as he dragged the game into its modern form? Partly it was not personal, but reflective of the struggle between the professionalisation of the game and its Corinthian ideals. Yet it was partly to do with his style too. Grace came rollicking out of his Gloucester orchard with little regard for the defensive method that had been forged by the sheer peril of batsmen trying to preserve their wicket on deadly pitches against erratic bowling. A sound, technical game based on survival and the acquisition of runs was prized. Slogging the ball to deep midwicket, as Grace loved to do, was on the borderline of being ungentlemanly, as fielding captains rarely placed a man there. "It may not be cricket, but it is four runs," WG snorted, and carried on doing exactly as he pleased.
What was it about Grace that provoked such ambiguity, even as he dragged the game into its modern form? Partly it was not personal but reflective of the struggle between the professionalisation of the game and its Corinthian ideals
The most fearsome of all deliveries was the shooter, a ball that hit a stone or a divot and scooted along the ground at the stumps. Grace once kept out four in a row at Lord's and the crowd got to its feet to applaud him. Defence was deep in the psyche of English cricket, and although WG drew unprecedented crowds with his hitting, there it has remained.
When I was a kid, Geoffrey Boycott dominated the landscape of English batting. Boycott represented the peak evolution of a certain kind of player, reared to sell his wicket dearly in a world where the bowler still held sway. The legends of immovable, impregnable men like Ken Barrington and Trevor Bailey fluttered over the game. Every coach and instruction manual began by establishing such foundations.
For me, they are still there, unshakable and irresistible. The statistician at our club, Laura The Scorer, has taken to producing strike rates, and for me it is not pretty. Often I have trooped off with something like 20 from 40 deliveries to my name. "Cut off in my prime," I would think. After one such dig, I worked out that my strike rate would get to a run a ball when I had somewhere in the region of 250 to my name.
So Alastair, I feel for you, buddy, playing out that maiden. Behind it was the weight of history. It won't be there for much longer. The young players I encounter now all score quickly, they all want to belt fours and sixes and they generally do. The major shift is one of attitude, but it's a shift that is arriving at glacial pace.

Jon Hotten blogs here. @theoldbatsman