Wicket to Wicket

To discuss this, we've assembled Anand Vasu, Ashok Malik, Dileep Premachandran and Prem Panicker. Over the next few days we'll talk about the various factors that have caused India's resurgance in ODIs and the dangers that lie ahead, as well as the reasons for their dismal Test performances, and what can be done about them. Watch this space.

Many thanks to the participants who agreed to take part in this discussion: Bob Woolmer, Gideon Haigh, John Stern and Sambit Bal were all pretty much agreed that the shift in the balance of the game is worrying, and something needs to be done about it. Some suggestions came forth: Bob recommended (here and here) that the bowlers be allowed to make the ball more conducive to reverse swing by rubbing it in the batsman's footholds; Gideon wanted artifically short boundaries to be restored to their original length as they "advantage a particular kind of mediocre slogger, introducing greater uniformity into the game"; and John mused on the prospect of allowing uncovered pitches.

What Bob and Gideon and John want is irrelevant, one would think, if the majority of cricket lovers like run-filled matches, for the cricket boards, understandably focussing on the bottomline, will cater to the masses. But is this a misconception? Do you want a contest between Bat and Bat or Bat and Ball? What about your friends, and all the cricket lovers you know? Are the default assumptions of the authorities all wrong? If so, how do you -- and I understand that 'you' are not one homogenous mass -- communicate this to them?

Thanks for all the comments so far -- comments on this and the previous posts will remain open until Sunday night. We hope you enjoyed the discussion.

A wicked thought flashed in my mind after two of the first three balls of the one-day match between India and England at Goa passed the off stump about a foot above the ground: what if this turns out be a sub-100 affair? Would the ICC send out inspectors under their new regulations for pitch monitoring? Would Goa become the first venue to be banished?

A pitch that isn¹t fit for cricket ought be banished. But who will decide what is not fit for and how? Physical danger to batsmen is a reasonable criterion. A Test match at Sabina Park was once abandoned because the state of the newly laid pitch was deemed dangerous. The other concern should be about a pitch making it impossible for players to exhibit their skills. A pitch that produces ankle-high bounce hardly gives batsmen a chance?

What do we then make of a pitch that produces 872 runs in 100 overs?

Like Bob Woolmer, I’m grateful for the many interesting commentaries on my remarks. This is clearly a topic that exercises many nimble minds, although some of my contentions many not have been completely grasped. Many respondents, for instance, took my reference to the 1984-85 Worrell Trophy series as being rheumy-eyed nostalgia. In these Panglossian times, it seems, one cannot even describe the past without being accused of trying to bring it back; my only purpose was simply to illustrate how different the game has become in less than a generation.

I think it’s worth contemplating what we would be saying if the issue was the other way around. What if the average one-day score was in sharp decline? What if Test teams were regularly being bowled out for 150? My suspicion is that the comments here would be twice as long, and thrice as anxious. The perception would be that the game was in crisis, and people would be recommending that the cricket ball be replaced by a beach ball, and bowlers be restricted to running in off two paces. As for bowlers getting smashed all over the park – well, we can live with that.

But if high scores were a reliable indicator of the quality of a sport, football would have outlawed goalkeepers, and golf would have drawn every green to within a drive of the tee so that everyone could shoot 60. There has to be a struggle to take the advantage; there has to be resistance to the efforts to wrest it back. Sport is not just about spectacle; it involves challenge, frustration, slings, arrows, outrageous fortune.

Bowlers will tell you, with heavy heart and knackered limbs, that it's always been a batsman's game. Stereotypically, batsmen were the amateurs who ruled the game (and plenty else besides) while the bowlers were the professionals paid to amuse the amateurs by bowling at them.

But we do seem to have reached a strange point in the journey where one doesn't have to look hard for conspiracy theories. This is the age of the batsman yet within the last 10 years or so, there have been huge rows about ball-tampering and chucking. Bowlers accused of either or both have essentially been criminalised, treated with the sort of disdain normally reserved for aging rockers caught doing unspeakable things in south Asia. Yet there is barely a murmur and a stifled yawn when a manufacturer has to withdraw a bat from production because MCC deems it illegal. If Test batsmen the world over couldn't get the ball off the square then the reactionaries might have a point. But imagine where we¹d be without doosras and reverse swing: 200 for none at lunch and bored out of our minds, that's where.

Cricket has to maintain some sort of balance between bat and ball otherwise it ceases to be the game that we love. So much is weighted in the batsman¹s favour now: shorter boundaries, lighter but more powerful bats, bouncer restrictions. What can be done to balance the scales? Did I hear someone say uncovered pitches?

Though this discussion is titled "The age of batting,” inevitably, the starting point has been that match. I caught the last 25 overs on television. I had spent the whole day out, and when I first found out the score on my mobile phone, South Africa were about 100 in 12 overs. And since I thought it was a day-and-night match, it took me a while to figure out that they were chasing, and chasing 434.

I watched every ball after I reached home, and even my little daughter, who, despite my best efforts, has rarely betrayed any affection for cricket, was hooked. And on cricinfo.com, we called it the Greatest Ever Match, and we were perhaps the first ones do so because our headline went up a few seconds after Mark Boucher hit the winning four.

But next morning, I had mixed feelings. It was certainly the most incredible one-day match I had seen. For the sheer improbability of it, it even exceeded India’s World Cup win in 1983. And surely, it was a spectacle. But was it really the greatest ODI match ever? I wasn’t so sure.

I was interested in all of the feedback to my original article: thank you! On reflection I felt it necessary to qualify some of my statements, and indeed to respond to those who mentioned the type of ball involved! The ball story is close to my heart: amazingly the cricket ball over the years has virtually remained the same in manufacture and content, with only minor changes.

Historically it was for many years a cottage industry plied by excellent craftsmen maintaining a very high skill level; this is all but finished now. There were two main ball manufacturers in the UK in the 1970s: Tonbridge Sports Industries, based at Chiddingstone causeway near Penshurst, and Readers of Teston. Both factories operated in the heart of Kent cricket, and the balls were all hand-made. As the demand for cricket balls increased, coupled with spiraling labour costs, both companies started sourcing the subcontinent, where the labour was cheaper and more intensive, vastly reducing the price of the balls. Jalandhar in India and Sialkot in Pakistan today produce 98% of all balls used in club cricket, and even Kookaburra have a factory in the subcontinent. In addition sports shops and mail-order companies have their own balls, and prices to the consumers are much cheaper.

However the first-class ball remains the best ball and, apart from the Kookaburra ball, is still hand-made, at least stitched. The core of the ball is now very different from the cork square; while cork is still used it now forms a rounded shape and in some cases is mixed with a rubber compound. (I wonder if this change has led to the ball behaving differently.) Quite often, after the ball has pitched it swings violently as it passes the stumps towards the keeper. This happens a lot more than it used to!

Amit Varma’s preliminary remarks are unexpectedly poignant, as some of us in Australia have been experiencing Rip Van Winkle moments of late. A month or two ago, the ABC’s barely-watched pay channel replayed at length the 1984-85 Worrell Trophy series. Past masters strutted their stuff anew: Lloyd, Richards, Greenidge, Gomes, Dujon, Marshall, Garner v Border, Wessels, Lawson and, all too briefly and forlornly, Hughes. It seemed both only yesterday but, in the character of the play, also long, long ago. Bowlers enjoyed the ascendant. The ball moved and bounced. In order to reach boundaries set right on the fence, batsmen really had to find the middle. I felt a wave of nostalgia, in fact, at the sight of bats that were obviously favourites of their owners, exhibiting heavily marked middles and signs of repair.

It was actually a better series than I remembered, with a strong sense of contest and commitment. There were letdowns too: the slow bowling was nugatory and the fielding was ordinary. But the contrast with what was on show in Australia last summer, when runs were in plentiful supply and bowlers bore a hunted look, could hardly have been more acute. If you studied modern average tabulations, I dare say you’d not only find a higher proportion of batsmen averaging 50 than at any other time in Test history, but a higher proportion of runs being obtained in fours and sixes. And in one-day cricket, as Bob Woolmer suggests, the ante seems to be upped weekly.

The 872-run extravaganza at Wanderers was if not the greatest of ODIs, surely one of the strangest, at times resembling the children’s game T-ball, that variation of rounders where the ball is belted off a stationary tee. But it was neither the start nor the finish of a long-term process.

When similar shifts in balance took place in baseball, the authorities responded with measures like changing the height of the pitcher's mound or the size of the strikezone. And while there have been such regulations in cricket as well over the decades, such as the changes in the no-ball rule and the lbw rule, recent changes, such as the introduction of powerplays and the supersub, have just made the game more batsman-friendly. How could the rules be changed to tilt this balance back? One suggestion made on a TV show recently by the essayist Mukul Kesavan: remove the limit on overs that a bowler can bowl in an ODI. There is no limit on how much a batsman can bat within the 50 overs, so why should there be limits for bowlers?

It could be argued that changes in regulations will have a limited effect, and that this dominance of batsmen was inevitable. Sportsmen and their methods evolve in every sport, and in cricket there is far more scope for batting to evolve than for bowling. Bowlers have reached the human threshold of how fast one can bowl the ball, at about 100mph. Their equipment isn't changing either, and there are few new tricks one can learn with that round piece of leather - reverse swing was the last significant innovation.

After the second one–day international against Sri Lanka, played on a worse-than-average one-day pitch at the Premadasa stadium, Inzamam-ul-Haq turned to me and said that batting on this wicket to score 130 was like scoring 438 at the Wanderers (only different!).

One of the great strengths of cricket is that pitches around the world offer variety, and therefore you are never sure what you are going to get – as a spectator, coach or TV commentator. Some great predictions have been made as to how the pitch might play, what the score might be, or how many runs this wicket will concede. Some have been spot on and some have been extremely wide of the mark.

I guess if you were at the Wanderers nobody got either innings right!