Boycott mourns lost art of sensible English batting (31 July 1999)

31 July 1999

Boycott mourns lost art of sensible English batting

Simon Hughes

Jack Nicklaus once said: "You can't win the Open Championship on the first day - but you can certainly lose it."

It is a message England's batsmen might well adapt. Their dismissal for 186 just after tea on the opening day of the Lord's Test was the prime cause of defeat and the players knew it.

If this were an isolated incident it would be partially excusable. Unfortunately it wasn't. The 2.5 years since January 1997 have contained a depressing sequence of 27 Tests during which England have conceded a first-innings lead 22 times and never once managed a total in excess of 500.

They do not lack talent. The England XI possess fine natural stroke-players - Stewart, Butcher, Thorpe, Ramprakash and Hussain. Collectively, their major flaw is a lack of nous.

They faced disciplined, but hardly devastating New Zealand bowling - let's face it Dion Nash and Chris Cairns are not exactly Lillee and Thomson. It was bare, naked impatience that got England out.

Geoff Boycott followed this debacle from his memento-stuffed sitting room in Woolley, West Yorkshire. Love him or loathe him, Boycs is the best batting judge in England. Sitting in his back garden beside a purpose-built bunker and elevated green, he expressed his dismay at what he had seen. "I don't know what was in their 'eads. Most of 'em played nicely for a few minutes, then suddenly tried to hit one over midwicket or dab a wide one to third man. We seem to have lost the art of batting for a whole day. Not blocking but sensible batting.

"It's not good enough just to argue: 'It's the way I play.' They're not tough enough mentally, don't play smart cricket. I think that's the case with most of our young players from 17 upwards."

He lapsed into the observation that once past the new ball he could have "made runs against that attack with my sweeping brush", but the point was well made. With the odd exception, English batsmen either do not identify their options clearly enough, or fail to stick to them.

Contrast that with the performance of New Zealand's centurion at Lord's, Matthew Horne. He learnt to bat on a cabbage patch beside a tumbledown pavilion in Auckland, a piece of ground more suitable for growing the marijuana that his club colleagues often smoked in the lunch interval rather than consume a meat pie. I know, I played in the same team. The pitches were generally poor and because the two-day league games were played over two weekends, as in Australia, batsmen only got a knock twice a month. It is a good grounding in selling your wicket dearly.

At Lord's, Horne looked at the pitch, watched the England batting collapse and worked out his percentage game. "The bounce was a little unreliable, so I thought I'd only play at anything between wicket and wicket, and leave everything else alone. I haven't got many shots anyway." (Neither had Mark Taylor - pull, off-drive, cut; nor Allan Border - ditto; nor Michael Atherton, and they've done OK.)

Around 70 per cent of Horne's runs came between midwicket and long leg. Because of his excellent judgment outside off stump, he made the bowlers 'come to him'. The Lord's Test was his 50th first-class match during which he recorded his 13th hundred. This excellent conversion rate is the product of discipline, patience and straightforward thinking.

These are the hallmarks of New Zealand cricket and not qualities to be underestimated in Test matches. So it was a touch misguided of the England players to greet each arriving New Zealand batsman at Lord's with a sly "here comes another tailender".

Boycott advocates all-round application. "At Old Trafford I'd go into the dressing room and say to the batsmen: 'Go out there and bat all day. If you get out to a stupid shot, you are not playing the next Test or going to South Africa.' If they think that's unfair pressure I'd say: 'Hey, my dad went down the pit 10 hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year and every day he didn't know if the roof were gonna fall in on 'is 'ead. Now that's pressure."

This is not a time for knee-jerk reactions or wholesale changes. The best players are being recruited. They just need to keep it simple. Or, as J J Warr once put it when Middlesex were obliged to follow on one day: "Right lads, same order, different batting."

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)