Bunnies of steel

It is hard to believe that in this era of professionalism, we still have batsmen (I use the term loosely) like Chris Martin and Ian O’Brien of New Zealand. Their recent performances against Australia took us back to a bygone age where bowlers simply felt no compunction whatsoever to contribute with the bat. Up until about 15 years ago, it was perfectly acceptable for some bowlers to make no apologies for being abject with bat in hand. After all, it wasn’t their job.

In recent times, as cricket has now become a full-time job for most professional cricketers, it beggars belief that some cricketers still cannot improve their batting skills to the extent that they can at least have a basic defensive technique. For the less defensive types like Stuart Clark or Zaheer Khan, at least find a few lusty attacking shots that can be honed to some level of competency.

They do very little else with their lives apart from practicing cricket. The bowlers do increasingly less bowling at training these days, wrapped in cotton wool and constantly having massages, ice baths and visualisation sessions. With an army of support staff around them who need to justify their jobs within the team structure, surely it is not asking too much to spend a few hours each week improving their batting skills.

Glenn McGrath proved that if you are serious enough about it, you can transform yourself from an absolute bunny to someone capable of scoring a Test fifty. Jason Gillespie went even further, starting off with a completely dead bat technique and eventually expanding his repertoire to score a Test double-hundred. Mind you, he never played another Test again so that’ll teach him to score runs instead of taking wickets. Daniel Vettori is in a similar category.

The Indian tail is now learning the value of taking their batting seriously. They might even have lost the Border-Gavaskar Trophy if not for telling contributions from Harbajhan Singh, Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma. You can see that it’s not just a case of swinging blind and hoping for the best. They clearly devote time to improving their skills.

On the other side of the coin, we had someone like Courtney Walsh who actually got worse as his career went on. All that time playing county cricket and Test cricket – if he had devoted even two hours a week facing the bowling machine, it would have shown. Muttiah Muralitharan has a good eye and hits the ball hard but his efforts at the batting crease are almost comical. Almost twenty years of first-class cricket and his improvement is nil.

It can be done. Jimmy Anderson and Matthew Hoggard were pretty poor batsmen when they first started but they’ve both made huge leaps in terms of their technique. Steve Harmison favours the aggressive approach but is now more than nuisance value. Even Monty Panesar is starting to value his wicket, especially against the spinners. The Devon Malcolm/Alan Mullally era seems to be well and truly over for England.

The South Africans have always prided themselves on not giving away cheap wickets. Makhaya Ntini is agricultural but at least he watches the ball and looks disappointed when he gets out. Shoaib Akhtar can hit big sixes. Lasith Malinga has also become a useful ally to a top order batsmen – Kumar Sangakkara played a great innings in Hobart last year with his support.

In the modern game, where coaches are looking for those ‘one percenters’ in every aspect of the game, it’s hard to believe that both coach and cricketer can’t find the time to work on their batting to find at least another 10%. With cricketers now more skilled at hitting big boundaries and scoring quickly, a tail-ender who can stick around with an established batsman can win a game for his team. Just ask Mike Hussey – he owes a few of his Test centuries to partners who refused to throw in the towel. Steve Waugh was also another brilliant tactician when it came to batting with so-called bunnies.

This is my list of some of the worst batsmen in recent memory. Feel free to throw in names of people I may have missed. In no particular order: Chris Martin, Ian O’Brien, Devon Malcolm, Alan Mullally, Courtney Walsh, Stuart MacGill, Muttiah Muralitharan, Amit Mishra, Shane Bond and most of the current West Indian tail. Who have I forgotten?