Ray Jennings sent Andrew Hall out to open the batting in Kanpur in November 2004. South Africans, cricket’s flat earthers, thought Jennings was mad. Hall scored 163. South Africans still think Jennings was, and remains, mad.
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
HOW many players have batted in all 11 positions in men’s Test cricket? Out of the 2 989 who have taken guard in the 2 365 matches yet seen, three.
Syd Gregory, Wilfred Rhodes and Vinoo Mankad are the only members of maybe the most exclusive club in the game. They are the top 0.100368016058883 percentile.
Cricket being the anally obsessive silliness it is, that’s hardly surprising. The bounder! How dare he assume, just because he swats an old ball and tired bowlers about down there at No. 6, he is also capable of opening the batting? Has the man no idea of his station in life?
What is surprising is that as many as nine players have bounced around 10 spots in the order. You could see one of them looming large behind big sunglasses and an even bigger moustache in India’s dressingroom during South Africa’s tour.
Ravi Shastri, now India’s coach, began his career as a No. 10 against New Zealand at the Basin Reserve in February 1981 and ended it as an opener against South Africa at St George’s Park in December 1992. Somehow, over the course of 11 years and 121 Test innings, big Ravi never made it all the way down to No. 11.
None of the nine, as indeed the three, are South African. That, too, is hardly a shock. South Africa could win awards for staidness, for refusing to believe there is a world outside the box. They are the flat earthers of cricket. When plan A doesn’t work, they are all out of plans.
Consequently, South Africans don’t like people who think they’re special. Gregory, born on the site of what is now the Sydney Cricket Ground, and with his father, uncle, brother, brother-in-law and cousin all either first-class or Test players, would have been far too tall a poppy for us to take seriously.
Rhodes was, most famously, an ace left-arm spinner. So that’s him done for in the South African way of looking at these things, even though he had a streak of fast bowler’s mongrel. A proper Yorkshireman, Rhodes refused to crack a smile when the Marylebone Cricket Club awarded him honorary membership in 1949. Instead he raised a suspicious eyebrow and said, “I don’t rightly know what it means yet.”
Mankad added his name to cricket’s lexicon by pulling up in his delivery stride while bowling for India in Sydney in December 1947 to run out non-striker Bill Brown, who was stealing ground by advancing up the pitch before the ball had been delivered. Mankading, the practice was instantly named. Too bloody special by half, this fella.
Remember when Ray Jennings sent Andrew Hall out to open the batting in Kanpur in November 2004? South Africans thought Jennings was mad. Hall scored 163. South Africans still think Jennings was, and remains, mad.
So what happened in Ranchi in the third Test against India represented a spark of revolutionary thinking. On the Saffer scale, at least. Quinton de Kock was in South Africa’s XI, as usual. But he wasn’t keeping wicket! Or batting at No. 7! Or even at No. 6!
He was opening!
Stru’s bob. There was Dean Elgar. And there, with him, daring to believe he was an opening batter, was De Kock. If you blinked you would have missed him: he lasted six balls in each innings. That’ll teach him. Know your place.
De Kock had opened before — at Centurion in August 2017 — and scored 82 and 50. But that was an emergency measure taken after Elgar stood on the boundary and twisted an ankle.
This, too, was a desperate move, prompted by what became South Africa’s worst performance in a series in 83 years. Before their routing in Ranchi, not since March 1936 had they lost consecutive Tests by an innings.
But De Kock’s elevation could serve to start a conversation about whether the batting order, as we have come to accept it, remains fit for purpose. Consider what happened across the dressingroom divide: neither Rohit Sharma nor Mayank Agarwal had opened the batting in India before they walked out to do so together in the first Test in Visakhapatnam. Four innings each later they had scored five centuries between them, including a double ton apiece.
So much for specialisation, which unlike specialness South Africans take too seriously for their own good. That’s why they tied themselves into knots about which of Temba Bavuma or Faf du Plessis should bat at No. 4. Opinions on this non-issue flew as frequently as the sixes Sharma kept hitting off the South Africans’ flaccid bowling, and came mostly from blowhards who offered little except their unsubstantiated views.
Cricket is beset with know-it-alls who confuse the rest of us with people who care what they think. Social media has only encouraged them. You could avoid them in the pub, but refusing to let them catch your attention on Facebook is more difficult.
Rather than put up with bores droning on about why whoever should bat wherever, we could shut them up by knowing how whoever has fared at every stage of every innings in terms of the number of balls that had been bowled when they arrived — taking into account the match situation, the conditions, and the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses.
So if Du Plessis has scored four centuries in six innings when he has taken guard with three wickets down and South Africa 200 runs behind on a turning pitch against attacks that feature more than one spinner, he should bat ahead of anyone who has been less successful in that situation. Bar nothing and no-one.
And if Elgar hasn’t had much success against left-arm quicks on greentops, and the opposition unleash two southpaws with the new ball, he shouldn’t come in before the ball is 45 overs old.
Batting orders should be fluid enough to be chopped and changed at a moment’s notice, not stuck in a linear logjam based not on hard data but on some swami’s say-so.
We’ll need a cricket crazy 12-year-old to design the algorithm, but the world isn’t short of them. Then we’ll need to convince the fogeys. Or get Jennings’ buy-in, which probably wouldn’t be difficult.
Syd Gregory, Wilfred Rhodes and Vinoo Mankad would, you hope, see the sense of this, even if others won’t.
Maybe that’s why they’re the top 0.100368016058883 percentile.
First published by Times SELECT.
Bulletproof Truth 