Cricinfo - Blogs - Different Strokes

They do very little else with their lives apart from practicing cricket. The bowlers do increasingly less bowling at training these days, wrapped in cotton wool and constantly having massages, ice baths and visualisation sessions. With an army of support staff around them who need to justify their jobs within the team structure, surely it is not asking too much to spend a few hours each week improving their batting skills.

Glenn McGrath proved that if you are serious enough about it, you can transform yourself from an absolute bunny to someone capable of scoring a Test fifty. Jason Gillespie went even further, starting off with a completely dead bat technique and eventually expanding his repertoire to score a Test double-hundred. Mind you, he never played another Test again so that’ll teach him to score runs instead of taking wickets. Daniel Vettori is in a similar category.

The Indian tail is now learning the value of taking their batting seriously. They might even have lost the Border-Gavaskar Trophy if not for telling contributions from Harbajhan Singh, Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma. You can see that it’s not just a case of swinging blind and hoping for the best. They clearly devote time to improving their skills.

On the other side of the coin, we had someone like Courtney Walsh who actually got worse as his career went on. All that time playing county cricket and Test cricket – if he had devoted even two hours a week facing the bowling machine, it would have shown. Muttiah Muralitharan has a good eye and hits the ball hard but his efforts at the batting crease are almost comical. Almost twenty years of first-class cricket and his improvement is nil.

It can be done. Jimmy Anderson and Matthew Hoggard were pretty poor batsmen when they first started but they’ve both made huge leaps in terms of their technique. Steve Harmison favours the aggressive approach but is now more than nuisance value. Even Monty Panesar is starting to value his wicket, especially against the spinners. The Devon Malcolm/Alan Mullally era seems to be well and truly over for England.

The South Africans have always prided themselves on not giving away cheap wickets. Makhaya Ntini is agricultural but at least he watches the ball and looks disappointed when he gets out. Shoaib Akhtar can hit big sixes. Lasith Malinga has also become a useful ally to a top order batsmen – Kumar Sangakkara played a great innings in Hobart last year with his support.

In the modern game, where coaches are looking for those ‘one percenters’ in every aspect of the game, it’s hard to believe that both coach and cricketer can’t find the time to work on their batting to find at least another 10%. With cricketers now more skilled at hitting big boundaries and scoring quickly, a tail-ender who can stick around with an established batsman can win a game for his team. Just ask Mike Hussey – he owes a few of his Test centuries to partners who refused to throw in the towel. Steve Waugh was also another brilliant tactician when it came to batting with so-called bunnies.

This is my list of some of the worst batsmen in recent memory. Feel free to throw in names of people I may have missed. In no particular order: Chris Martin, Ian O’Brien, Devon Malcolm, Alan Mullally, Courtney Walsh, Stuart MacGill, Muttiah Muralitharan, Amit Mishra, Shane Bond and most of the current West Indian tail. Who have I forgotten?

You are spot on about this one. Just thinking about those famous lines from sidhu....a row of bicycles, loose pants etc. Having said that its also nice to note how some of these players have improved immensely over the years. The likes of chaminda vaas and anil kumble come to mind. The main issue i think is that there are some external entities responsible for some of the woeful batting. Chris Martin comes into the spotlight with every zero. its almost cheered worldwide. Murali is greeted in the same fashion as an opening batsman when he walks in to bat. would these subconsciously be factors as to why they keep doing it? The same could be said about afridi. his fans expect a six off almost every ball that he faces and he tries to deliver. Hence him being one of the biggest wasted talents in world cricket. i think its another case of pointing one finger at these people and pointing 3 at ourselves.

I agree that I'm being too harsh on Amit Mishra. Too early to pass judgement on him. I've only seen him bat once or twice and it just "looked" awful, esp when he was bowled first ball by Krejza. But I concede that I'm being too hasty in putting him in this category. I love the reference to Ajit Agarkar because he was pathetic against Australia but has a Test century at Lords to his name. What a contrast.
Asela, you may have hit on a very valid point. Murali almost just lives up to his own billing now, backing away, swing wildly and grinning nervously. I can only think of one time when he played a matchwinning knock in that famous (controversial) ODI in Adelaide against England when he squirted one past point to win the game. Mahela scored a beautiful century that day and Alex Stewart was seriously annoyed with Ranatunga. Apart from that, I can't recall a Murali effort to win a match. Perhaps he never needed to - Sri Lanka either won comfortably or lost by a big margin.