In defence of the stylist

It is perhaps one of the most storied first balls of any Test career. June 2, 1978, the second day of the first Test between England and Pakistan at Edgbaston. David Gower walked in at 101 for 2, the captain, Mike Brearley, having just been run out. England were already within sight of Pakistan's meagre first-innings score of 164. Left-arm medium-fast bowler Liaqat Ali came charging in and dug one in just short of a length to welcome the debutant. The lissome 21-year-old swivelled and sent the ball scudding to the midwicket boundary with a dismissive pull. There was a breathtaking nonchalance to the shot, and a star was born.

Over 117 Tests, Gower scored 8000-plus runs, held his own against fearsomely fast West Indian and Australian pace attacks, and averaged 44 in an era when that really meant something. One stunning indicator of his ability to caress the ball to the fence rather than bludgeon it is that he hit 979 boundaries but only ten sixes in all those Tests.

Yet from the outset Gower's talent seemed to be held against him. He made batting look too easy with that languid grace that left-handers often have, and he always seemed to have more time and options to play every ball.

Those golden curls and good looks didn't help matters in this regard. The problem with making it all look so easy was that every time Gower got out, it seemed to be against the natural order of things. Bowlers were rarely credited with having dismissed him - it was always a loose stroke or a careless waft or an irresponsible extravagance that allegedly led to his dismissal. The effortless elegance of his batting until the moment of his dismissal invariably meant he was seen as having thrown it away "yet again". His Test career faded to an end, appropriately enough, under the regime of his supposedly more hard-working and disciplined colleague Graham Gooch, and an establishment that seemed to have finally lost patience with his whimsy.

I meditate here on whether talented touch artists like Gower get an unfair press and public. I suspect that as batters who rely more on timing than power or force, Gower and his ilk have to be totally relaxed and free-flowing while at the crease. That is their method - and it brings them runs. That same waft outside the off stump leading to a catch in the slips probably accounted for a huge percentage of Gower's runs when it went off the middle of the willow and bisected gully and cover-point. When the stylist's innings seems to end early, it's not because they don't care as much as the others.

A number of other elegant batsmen have been faced with a similarly unfair jury over the years. Mark Waugh comes to mind - as if the smoothly purring Bentley that was his batting was somehow less honest and wholesome in comparison with the workmanlike and mud-caked pick-up truck that epitomised his twin Steve's batting.

Richie Richardson, he of the wide-brimmed soft hat in the era of the helmet, also averaged 44 per innings in 86 Tests - and his almost 6000 runs were made with such style, panache and exquisite timing that they earned him the dubious honor of being called an underachiever, and of a premature exit from Test cricket thanks to an unappreciative cricket board. Richardson's fault seemed not that he didn't make enough runs (he holds his own in any comparison with others from his era) - but that he looked so good in making them that he really ought to have made more.

Early in his career, Gundappa Viswanath drove you to despair with beautiful compositions that invariably came to an end when he reached about 37 runs - often trying to square-cut a ball and feathering it to the wicketkeeper. More times than I care to remember, poor Vishy would be unfavourably compared to his insatiable brother-in-law Sunil Gavaskar. The latter excised every risky shot in his repertoire, it sometimes seemed, until he had reached a double-century.

In more recent times, VVS Laxman was a poster boy for profligate talent. A veritable right-handed Gower, Laxman often seemed to be batting on a different pitch (a featherbed) and against different bowlers (mere pretenders) in comparison to his team-mates - until yet another allegedly "soft" dismissal sent him on his way. Like Gower's waft outside off, Laxman's wristy - and frequently uppish - flick through midwicket ended up being caught by a fielder every now and then. Yet few cared to remember the tons of runs it brought him - only that it had brought about his downfall once more.

It's not that the stylist is any less committed to the game or to the team's cause; it's that his method requires more of a free-flowing mien than a sternly furrowed brow. One has to only think of a prodigious talent like Mark Ramprakash, who ended with an average of 27 in 52 Tests (in contrast to a first-class average of 53) to realise that trying too hard may be the problem for the stylist and not the answer. Once Test cricket and the pressure of having to live up to that talent were in the past, he blossomed into one of the best batsmen ever. Looking back, I am sure Ramprakash does not wish that he had tried harder in Tests- quite the opposite, in fact.

So the next time you reach for that keyboard to vent your spleen about Rohit Sharma's checked drive that ended up in mid-on's safe hands instead of in the rafters above the sight screen, remember that he is trying every bit as hard as the next guy - it just looks as if he isn't. There is a method in the laxness of the stylist, at least for those who care to see it.