Babylonian or Greek: what's your pick?

Simon Barnes' beautiful piece in the August issue of The Cricket Monthly on the constant debate surrounding the two kinds of batsmen -- artists and artisans, as he calls them -- reminded me of a similar distinction that Richard Feynman, the great American physicist, often invoked. Of course, Feynman was concerned more with mathematical tradition than with batting styles, but it is not hard to see remarkable parallels between the two debates.

Feynman distinguished between the Babylonian and the Greek ways of mathematical thinking. The Babylonians discovered independent truths, often by relying on observation. The Greeks, on the other hand, looked to build a body of mathematics from a set of fundamental axioms. Babylonians employed instinct and intuition, while the Greeks, as Feynman says, "brought the full force of logical machinery to fit their ideas into a greater logical system". If batting were mathematics, then Kevin Pietersen would be a Babylonian and Alastair Cook probably a Greek.

If you approve of the above analogy, then the minute you ask whether the artist is morally superior to the artisan, you will agree with what Barnes rightly concludes: Morality is irrelevant here. As long as mathematicians discover new insights without stealing ideas, they are morally right, regardless of which school they belong to. In the context of cricket, neither Pietersen nor Cook is morally superior to the other.

However, the analogy goes only so far, coming to a grinding halt when we see that mathematical ideas can possess inherent beauty whereas batting scores are lifeless, which places greater weight on batting styles. If we acknowledge that a fraction of the paying public cares as much about the way of run-making as they do about the final scores, then it is clear that a fraction of players' bank deposits are due to a style of play expected from them. This is not to say that Cook should turn a Babylonian or Pietersen a Greek; perhaps they are physically or mentally incapable of doing that. There is a more subtle moral issue at hand.

The cause of injustice is the bias selectors traditionally have had against the Babylonians and toward the Greeks. The fall guy in any failed campaign tends to be a Babylonian -- ask David Gower, VVS Laxman, or Pietersen -- although some, like Rohit Sharma and Shahid Afridi, have benefited from being one. This means the Greek section of the crowd is more likely to get their money's worth, and the Greek batsman who pockets Babylonian coins is more likely to stay in the team. Add to that the fact that Babylonian fans are far greater in number (going by the number of views Pietersen's innings garner on YouTube) and the balance tilts further away from them.

Of course, none of this applies to the truly great batsmen. Feynman firmly believed that physics must be approached the Babylonian way, but conceded that the Greek method had its role in mathematics. The best kind of mathematician builds theories brick by brick but, at the same time, is intuitive. So it is with the batting masters. By combining the best of the two schools, they elevate batting, or the pursuit of runs, to batsmanship, an art.

In that perfect balance lies the beauty. To me, the closest to come to achieving that in recent years was Sachin Tendulkar, whom Sir Viv Richards once described as "God" where batsmanship is concerned. It feels serendipitous that he sits at the top of run charts. I want Tendulkar's records to stay unblemished for more or less the same reason I want Goldbach's conjecture, a paragon of mathematical beauty, to be proved true. Well, at least until someone more balanced than Tendulkar comes along. Unfortunately, Cook does not seem to fit the bill.

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