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ShareMumbai: Purists have been quick to bemoan the 'deleterious' effects of the Twenty20 format on cricket, such as the the switch-hit and the scoop shot a batsman plays over his own shoulder. This will kill technique and destroy the great game, goes their refrain. I am as concerned as any traditionalist about the survival of Test matches, but believe that the threat to these is not so much from the demise of technique as other factors: like the paucity of time for modern-day spectators, or the lack (yet) of razzmatazz driven hard-sell.
Pushing the envelope
In any case technique, in cricket as in any other human endeavour, cannot be static. It is exploratory and ever-changing. Competition necessitates not just reviewing and sharpening of tactics consistently, but also consistent improvisation in skills. This can be at the subtle or gross levels, and is more graphically manifest in sport than most other activities.
The story goes that one summer day in the early '70s, Viv Richards, freshly flown in to England from Antigua to play for Somerset, was being put through his paces in the nets by Alf Gover. The celebrated English coach was a stickler for orthodox technique and after watching the young West Indian intently for a while, walked up to him with some serious advice.
Richards's penchant for hitting across the line and playing deliveries from middle and sometimes even off stump to mid-wicket had Gover worried. "You are extremely talented," Gover is reported have told the batsman, "but your bat should follow the direction of your elbow. In this way, you will learn to play in the V and not lose your wicket."
Richards nodded in acknowledgement of Gover's concern, but had a query of his own. "If I do all that, where do I score my runs from?" he asked the coach. Clearly, the player regarded as the greatest batsman of the post-War era was a man of few words and myriad strokes -- many of them which only he could execute.
Even if partly apocryphal, this anecdote highlights the tugs and pulls between conservatism and the experimentation. On the face of it, cricket is a simple contest between bat and ball, but as the game evolved, it collated practices and processes of play by masters seen as crucial to success in the middle. With passage of time, these practices then acquired nuances and finesse, and were regimented and canonised. This gained legitimacy as 'technique'.
The impact of 'technique' on cricket cannot be undermined. It has helped the game develop from its rudimentary stage into its current and fascinatingly complex profile, and in the process, also sparked off more theories than anything else in any sport. Batting, particularly, has been the subject of furious debate where technique -- or the breach of it -- is concerned.
Radical today, conservative tomorrow
Cricket history suggests that batting technique, as the purists describe it, evolved through the 19th century and reached its zenith under Sir Jack Hobbs in the first quarter of the 20th.That is, of course, the English view of orthodox technique. In actual fact the game has consistently experienced -- and been enriched -- by improvisations by players from the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and the antipodes.
Several great players have been agents of major change in the game. Australia's opener Victor Trumper, who was renowned for the 'step-out' drive when copybook technique decreed playing from the crease, was considered a very high-risk player. He was, but who could argue about his audacity or genius if he scored more than 2,500 runs in a wet English summer in 1902: including a century before lunch on the first day of a Test match!
"From start to finish of the season, on every sort of wicket, against every sort of bowling, Trumper entranced the eye, inspired his side, demoralised his enemies, and made run-getting appear the easiest thing in the world," was the verdict on the Aussie. Change the name in that quote, and it would fit Viru Sehwag, who today would rank as not only an iconoclast but also a genius.
It is not only mad hatters who compel such attention and bring about such dramatic changes. Ranjitsinhji, whose sublime batting contributed a great deal to the Golden Age of cricket, introduced the leg glance which made strokes behind square on the onside productive. Critics were first aghast, then awe-struck by Ranji's wristiness and derring-do.
"He (Ranji) never played a Christian stroke in all his life," a contemporary county colleague of his once said. What he meant, of course, was that Ranji had broken the shackles of orthodox technique and come up with something unique. In due course of time, the leg glance became not only part of the lexicon of cricket, but a strong constituent of batting technique.
That's how life moves anyway. Today's radicals are tomorrow's conservative. Hundred, two hundred years from now, the reverse sweep, switch hit, scoop may all be part of cricketing orthodoxy and the forward defensive shot the New, New Thing.
