In an age when two sides manage to score 870+ runs between them in one day and when a player like Scott Styris has a better batting average than Bert Sutcliffe you have to start to wonder if perhaps batting at the top level has become too easy. Better bats and shorter boundaries mean that the game is slowly being dominated by a certain kind of mediocre slogger (like Scott Styris) and bowling has been reduced to making sure your little medium pacers are dobbed in the right place (like Scott Styris does).
Is this a good thing? Are booming sixes and crashing fours what the crowds want to see? Or should some balance be bought back into the game? Cricinfo has begun asking these same questions and have asked cricket experts such as Gideon Haigh, Bob Woolmer and Amit Varma to respond. So far the result has been a series of excellent essays looking at the situation and looking at what can be done to make sure that cricket remains cricket.
Wednesday, 29 March 2006
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2 comments:
Are you bringing this up because you want to open a discussion, or are you just pointing out the articles to us? I feel I need to make a response regardless.
Complaining about modern batsmen being better than older batsmen smacks to me of the complaints of certain English rugby commentators that there are no longer games decided solely on penalties. That modern games are more exciting shouldn't be taken to mean that they not as good.
I think it is drawing quite a long bow to claim that the game is dominated by mediocre sloggers and medium pacers.
In one-day cricket the batting is dominated by class sloggers such as Vincent, Gilchrist and Cairns, and the bowling is dominated by pace and guile, as it always has been. The dobbers rarely bowl more than 10 overs an innings between them. Mediocrity is not rewarded.
In test cricket, it is pace that dominates the bowling, more so than ever perhaps, with the ability to get the ball to move and deceive the batsman also still being useful. If anything, the dobbers have been hit out of the attack. Now, while it may be true that batsmen are thriving on powerful hitting, success still depends on the old skills of timing and placement. Even twenty20 has shown this. And rotating the strike and picking up ones and twos still make up important parts of a batsman's innings; while more runs may be scored in boundaries, the majority of scoring shots are not boundaries.
As you clearly agree, Scott Styris is a great exponent of this modern brand of cricket. He hits the ball hard and gets plenty of boundaries. However, his success is due to the traditional skills - technique at the crease and good shot execution. His reward for this approach is not just a good average, but also an outstanding conversion rate.
In short then, unlike tennis, cricket has not been unduly affected by the increase in powerful play, it has just taken on a different complexion. But that's because cricket has more dimensions than tennis. Even with the ball being belted, there is still so much room for skill and finesse.
(And by the way Mike, Sutcliffe's average is fractionally higher than Styris', so everything is okay in the world. But that conversion rate...)
World class bowlers still win matches. On the day you published this, the results on the front page of Cricinfo highlight that Harbhajan Singh and Shane Warne have won matches for their country (after Brett Lee had taken 5 in the first innings).
Batsmen are undoubtedly better today because they are fulltime professionals, paid a lot of money. If they aren't better than they used to be, then surely we would have cause to complain. Which highlights what a genius Don Bradman was all those years ago.
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