The beauty of ugly

Ain’t no bout a doubt it, as those fabled funksters Graham Central Station so eloquently put it. On today’s evidence at Edgbaston, Shivnarine Chanderpaul is the closest the art of batsmanship has yet come to a perfect Jekyll-and-Hyde fusion.

In Tests he is as patient as an extremely laid-back saint. In ODIs he is a creative, flamboyant, Vegas-type hustler, always seeking the angles nobody else has thought to cover. Here, surely, is living, breathing proof that mastering the two formats should always be within the compass of those prepared to learn and adapt.

More crucially, for those with an unnatural compulsion to appreciate the less fine things in life, it is my hard-held conviction that Chanderpaul, stylistically speaking – if one can employ such a word in reference to such a profound non-stylist - is quite the ugliest top-class batsman I have ever seen. Peter Willey, John Emburey, John Carr – you guys took a hell of a beating. Crabby, ungainly, pawky, a bit dog-eared, a flagrant betrayal of his Guyanese childhood, his Indian antecedents and the complexion of his skin. Black cricketers, after all, simply don’t do uncool. And don’t get me started on those sponsored eyebags.

Boyhood memories of John Edrich ripple with visions of sumptuous inelegance. The same applies to Allan Border, and Chris Tavare, albeit strictly in Test mode. Steve Waugh seduced me during his latter years, recalling the stiffness of another marvellously aesthetically-displeasing Aussie, Ken Eastwood, the oak-tall Victorian baldy who at Sydney in 1971 opened with such wickedly ill-deserved lack of reward in the game’s only Seventh Test.

There was a welcome gift for the Appreciators of Awkwardness Society at Edgbaston today in the presence of not one but two members of the Ugly Squad. Michael Yardy is the latest and possibly greatest heir to that fine, upstanding English tradition for non-beauty, tucking balls away with wholly unsuspected stealth as he shifts awkwardly across his stumps. None, though, can match the boy Chanders. It’s the nerve of the bloke that gets me: this is what we whiteys do best.

The point, at bottom, is that Chanderpaul seems oblivious to it all, disdainful of such niceties, and, crucially, wholly un-self-conscious. Self-awareness can be the least forgiving of curses: looking in mirrors is only truly helpful if the glass is metaphorical. And the best team players are almost invariably those who subsume the self.

At a time when Caribbean cricket is about as united as Glasgow on Old Firm day, the West Indies need the slim survivor from Unity Village like jam needs butter. His hometown may be Demerara, but he’s the one who counters all that sugary froth with the saltiness of prolonged exposure, to disappointment, to pain, to ridicule. All hail the anti-Lara.