Cricket people pride themselves on the equanimity that their infamously fair game implies about their souls; and this adoration of evenhandedness is never more explicit than in the sport’s idiom. A cross-cultural lingua franca thick with yin and yang, cricket’s discourse is so accepting and stoic that it can seem to verge on some sort of Victorian Buddhism: swings and roundabouts, they say, ups and downs. It will all come out in the wash. I got a roughy today but tomorrow no-one will hear the nick.
Follow the game for a decade or more, and the reason for this shrug-and-smile mindset becomes clear. Seasons may be emotionally jagged and individuals may plummet suddenly from sight, but cricket is ultimately cyclical. What goes around does indeed come around. Bat dominates ball in February in sun-washed Perth, but come grey July in grey Manchester, and the same batsmen are groping.
So it has been, in almost all the game’s facets, and so, it seems, it shall always be. But amid all the wave-graphs spanning the decades, one trend-line has been headed inexorably upwards: the speed of run-scoring in one-day internationals.
Test batsmen whose averages have ballooned thanks to pointless pitches and the dearth of dangerous fast-bowling attacks will get their come-uppance eventually, when money and luck conspire to produce seven or eight Michael Holdings simultaneously.
Persecuted spinners may get more respect when chucking is inevitably unbanned and rehabilitated as an art. But for now at least it seems that a curious upward inflation has gripped one-day cricket.
The wild blue yonder that lies beyond 400 runs in an innings was once the stuff of schoolboy fantasy; South Africa alone have entered that particularly thin air twice in the past year. Even those schoolboys would have dismissed as loopy the prospect of 800 runs in a match; again, the Proteas were there when it happened. 300 is the new 250, just as 400 is the new 300. It’s not too big a leap to suggest that in five years 350 will leave captains anxious, with most of the interesting dogfights happening between 450 and 550.
The technical and technological foundations for these extreme scoring rates are already in place; but this week’s action at the Champions’ Trophy in India demonstrated that the psychological groundwork is also well advanced. Graeme Smith’s barely suppressed outrage after South Africa’s thrashing by New Zealand seemed less to do with the pitch not allowing his batsmen to win than it did with being denied the easy, copious runs that playing on flat Indian tracks no doubt promised.
Yes, the Proteas wanted to win; but more importantly, they wanted to chase 280 and win. Smith admitted as much, if unwittingly, when he acknowledged that he will have to start reading pitches again, implying that he and his batters have just been turning up, having a swing, and cashing in. Today, it seems, an average of over 45 in one-dayers is a birthright, and not something won through tremendous skill and immense fitness, as it was for the then unrivalled Michael Bevan 10 years ago.
Of course, Smith framed his gripe in more sponsor-friendly terms, saying that the fans were being robbed of 100 overs of entertainment by the sorts of pitches that ambushed the Proteas at the Brabourne stadium.
Unfortunately, by deliberately downplaying the magnificent effort of Stephen Fleming earlier in the day, and by trying to blame on Indian groundsmen his own team’s inability to think on its feet, Smith made himself all too transparent.
In a few dozen seconds he managed to imply that fans want hysterical slogging, and are therefore unsophisticated rubes; that enthralling displays of batsmanship like Fleming’s, therefore, have no place in one-day cricket; and that bowlers are working-class masochists who not only lower the tone of but actually ruin cricket matches when they find conditions that favour them.
This is the kind of thinking that is going to propel the shorter game up towards the apparently ludicrous scores mooted above. It feels entitled to the extent that it sees failure not as a healthy stock-taking process but as a personal slight, the product of some conspiracy. It finds absolutely nothing wrong with idea of bowlers turning into bondage gimps, balls in their fingers instead of their mouths. And it is appalled by the sort of magnificent, gut-liquidising throttling and eye-gouging that went on between the West Indies and Australia on Wednesday.
Fortunately, as the tournament is reminding this sort of mind, escalating run-rates and soulless slog-fests are not ordained by God. They escalate because sponsors, and therefore groundsmen, help them to, and when that diabolical pair are separated by common sense (or fortunate incompetence, as might be the case in India), we are left to watch one-day cricket as it was meant to be: hard, fast, and unforgiving of the slightest slip.
It has been splendid to see Fleming and Brian Lara remind the Smiths of this world what real batting is — a union not of eye and hand, but of eye and brain. It was infinitely refreshing to see Chris Gayle bowling with a first slip to the rarely challenged Andrew Symonds. But surely the high point of the tournament so far was witnessing Gayle arising from his perma-coma, as he did on Wednesday, and inserting himself deep up the noses of the Australians. It was rude, uncharacteristic, and no doubt appalling for the sponsors. It was also hard-ball cricket of the highest order; a brand of play long abandoned by top one-day batters lulled into gentlemanly affability by the flow of almost free runs.
By all accounts the laconic, too-cool-for-school Gayle still has plenty to learn about focus, discipline and responsibility. Fleming’s wonderful knock belied his agonising inconsistency. But after this week, one has to suggest that the ever-solid, ever-optimistic Smith could do a lot worse than taking notes at the knee of both men.
Until he does, what goes around will continue to come around. And it will become increasingly difficult to shrug and smile.