This is an issue that’s been sitting latently in the back of my head for a while now. I never realised it had taken a comfortable seat in that last row in my head, until last night when I was watching some cricket show on TV called err… I can’t remember but it showcased old matches interspersed with historians and former players waxing eloquent about some particularly profound moments in the match.
Fairly pedestrian stuff, if I’m to be absolutely honest. Hearing some old bat (no pun intended and none needed) warbling on about how 1996 was a defining year for Indo-Pak cricket (when India was in no way even connected to the match) is not my idea of analysis. And neither is a former cricketer whose one claim to fame is as old as time itself, telling me exactly what I just saw. No kidding. He described the ball bowled and the stroke played. “And it went all the way to the boundary!” That’s great, halfwit… But so what?
The match on show last night was a 1996 Wills World Cup - Group B match between New Zealand and Pakistan. The refreshing lack of reverse pulls, power plays, free hits, “Dilscoops” or whatever the fuck they’re called and reams of advertising running across the screen, gladdened my heart. Also, the game seemed to be played at a less frantic pace, but seemed to be just as intense. As Denzel once said, “The shit’s chess… It ain’t checkers”, cricket is best played as a slow-burning mind game. This new brand of “boom boom” cricket just turns this delightful sport from chess to checkers.
Sure, the game back then had its own problems, with dodgy rain laws, no mechanism as such to replace spoiled white balls and… well, I can’t think of any more. That’s probably why the televised game had me captivated far more back in 1996 than it does today. Nevertheless, we’re not going to discuss which era of cricket was better or whether Twenty20 is the death of real cricket. Instead, we’re going to look at a character that for some reason or the other, has been sidelined from world cricket and for which, the sport is poorer.
We’re talking bowling here. And you have your express pace bowlers, you’ve got your fast medium or medium fast guys, who can once in a while get the ball right up your nose. Then you’ve got the medium pacers, who can’t really be called “fast” at all, but the wicketkeeper still shows them a bit of respect by standing back. Leggies, offies, Chinamen, left arm orthodox etc. etc. make up the spinners.
I was watching Pakistani Salim Malik and Kiwis Gavin Larsen, Roger Twose and Chris Harris display their skills with the ball, when it suddenly hit me. What the hell has happened to the slow medium, dibbly-dobbly (as some commentator used to call them) liquorice allsorts bowlers? Apart from the four I mentioned already, there was Ajay Jadeja for India, Arjuna Ranutanga for Sri Lanka, Akram Khan from Bangladesh and a ton more that aren’t really coming to me right now. These guys could be gamebreakers on their day.
You would think that a bowler capable of using the shine of the ball to extract lateral movement in the air, who can use the seam and bowl with the guile and flight of a spinner would be a lethal commodity in world cricket. You would think that a bowler like this would be a real force in the death overs. You would think that someone who could bowl like that could really make use of flatter tracks where pace, bounce and spin aren’t on your side… only your brains are.
You would think so. I would think so. Sadly, the people running the game these days don’t think so. This Twenty20 mentality actually makes people shake in their little boots when they imagine playing such a bowler in their team, worried that he could be smashed all over the park because he isn’t quick and he doesn’t spin the ball much. What’s wrong with plain simple smarts? Don’t those count for something?
What Messers Harris and Larsen had by the bucketload was smarts. They knew they weren’t quick or particularly big spinners of the ball, but that’s where subtle variations of the same ball earned them scalps. Today it’s hard to imagine anyone other than a frontline quick or frontline spinner bowling the final over of a match, whether to contain the opposition or dismiss them. Back in the early 90s, a couple of matches were won for India by a similar dibbly dobbly bowler who took the ball from his captain and bowled the final over. (NOTE: There will be claims that he is a leg-break bowler and not technically a slow medium bowler, but in 1993, Sachin was a slow medium who could bowl balls that spun square)
In today’s batsman-friendly setup, where bowlers are largely accepted as being mere props, fast bowlers get their pace used against them and spinners who lack pace see mishits go for six. In this system, could you imagine a short stout(ish) slow medium bowler bowling the final over of a game to protect something like 3 runs? ‘Fraid not! Throw it to Sreesanth instead. Oh crap! Four off the first ball. Well played, lads.
It is my honest belief that the re-emergence of the dibbly dobbly bowler will bring bowlers back in a huge way into a game that is slowly turning so batsman-centric, that you may as well set up a bowling machine and play 11 batsmen on your team. That’s it. I’m done. Toldja it was a little technical. Nooch!
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