S Hughes: England Cricket Notes (6 Jun 1998)

6 June 1998

England Cricket Notes

By Simon Hughes

THE THREE most common observations about a cricketer are:

The point about 1 and 2 is that exceptional talent isn't an automatic guarantee of success. It's a selection problem, you see: the more options a player has, the more blurred his focus becomes.

On a dodgy wicket for instance, the batsman with a staple diet of three basic shots - the nudge, the nurdle and the good old-fashioned clump - will be less exciting but more successful than the chap who can drive against the spin, hook bouncers over midwicket and reverse-sweep rapid inswingers with the leg of a chair.

Similarly, on a helpful pitch, the bloke who can make the ball duck round corners will probably be less effective than someone who plops the ball on the same spot time after time. How South Africa could have done with someone like that on the first day at Edgbaston.

For bowlers, alternatives create dilemmas. If the late outswinger isn't working, try the inswinger. Oops, it's gone for four. OK, I'll spear in the yorker . . . oh, sorry skip, it slipped into a full toss. These kind of infuriating protagonists are the main reason captains tend to become hairless after a few years in the job.

Andrew Caddick is such a bowler. Unlikely as it may sound, he has a lot in common with Seve Ballesteros. Both are blessed with an ability to bend balls either way, but arriving on the tee or at the crease, neither can be entirely sure where a particular effort will end up. Caddick's attempted out-swinger will sometimes become a leg-stump half-volley, Seve's draw round the dog-leg turns into a duck hook. Erratic results breed apprehension and the inconsistency worsens. Both consequently spend much of the time extricating themselves from the thickets of sporting life.

Swing is a fragile art and swing bowlers tend to be neurotic individuals. For them, work is not just a matter of chugging to the wicket and perpetually aiming at the same spot as it is, say, for Angus Fraser. They agonise over the wind direction, the cloud cover, their hip rotation, foot positionings, even the shade of red ball they're using.

One year Richard Ellison, whose late swing was too much for Australia on several occasions, couldn't even begin to run up unless he adopted a strange pose facing midwicket with his feet planted in two precise locations. Don't be fooled by Caddick's strut or confident assertion that he knows which way each ball's going. At international level, he's as insecure as the rest of them.

Wound-up players sometimes benefit from time away from the game, but the free-spirited Darren Gough doesn't necessarily believe a winter off is a cure-all. Reflecting on four months looking after his two little boys rather than bowling in the Caribbean, he said: "Bloody 'ell, it's the 'ardest winter I've ever 'ad."

STEVE 'Rebel' Rouse, Warwickshire's bustling opening bowler of the Seventies, never worried about his day job but now suffers acute stress looking after England's most errant Test pitch.

The Edgbaston flier of 1995 became a seamer-friendly meadow in 1996 and though the '97 wicket was blander, the Test still finished in four days. So with much trepidation he went to bed at 11 on Wednesday night, only to be woken up at 2am with the news that it was raining. "I was driving the water hog up and down for the rest of the night, haven't had even a cup of tea since," he said just before the start of the match. Later he confessed he hadn't had the stomach to watch play until England had got safely through the first hour.

A fully paid-up member of the fast bowler's union, Rouse has always prepared pitches that give the batsmen a bit of hurry-up, notably at Moseley Cricket Club from where club teams and second XIs used to return wild-eyed and visibly shaken. Particularly so if a raw Alan Donald was in the Moseley attack. This is the perfect situation for a fast bowler - a sympathetic groundsman who leaves a bit of grass on the pitch, fills in ropey footholds and waters the stump holes (so they explode out of the ground spectacularly when hit).

Donald was notably enthusiastic to resume his Warwwickshire career when Rouse was appointed head groundsman in 1995, took 149 wickets (at 15.9) in his two seasons and sent them his South African opening partner, Shaun Pollock, in 1996 when he wanted a summer off.

And Rouse continues to see the game from the bowlers perspective. "What's England's best plan now?" I asked him when they were 249 for one after the first day. "Aw, get 600 and make sure they get their studs on the wicket," he replied, surely the first instance of a groundsman authorising the wilful vandalism of his painstaking work.

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