When it comes to batting, style never goes out of style, writes Phil Walker, Wisden Cricket Monthly’s editor-in-chief.
Oscar Wilde didn’t much care for cricket, once remarking that the game required one to assume such “indecent postures”. What a loss to literature that he was otherwise detained in the dying days of the 19th century, and thus unable to revise his position with a few words on Ranji’s leg glance.
Instead it was left to Ranji’s pal, CB Fry, to wax on about the perfect poise of his movements (“peculiar to the athletic Hindu”); and the incorrigible rhapsodiser Neville Cardus to swoon at “the strange light from the East flickering in the English sunshine” whenever he took to the crease. Cricket has always talked like this. It can’t help itself.
And so to one of Ranji’s spirit disciples, the great impressionist Rohit Sharma, forced to pack up his easel last month, retiring with some grace if against his will, having declined the vulgar option of fighting for his place. For the completists, it’s a shame that we won’t see him back in England. Four years ago, under black skies at Lord’s, the ball doing cartwheels, he revealed his extraordinary technical versatility, all those wispy touches grounded in the block colours of measurable output: his 83 that day an essentially intellectual response to the problems posed by Anderson and Wood on a green one at the end of days.
So too Virat Kohli, finally undone by the daily grind, helpless against the ennui that creeps in over time to even the most propulsive top-billers. Australia last winter got to him; the place does that. He simply kept getting out in the same way, the synapses no longer able to keep up with the raging spirit. The reactions dulled; the light went dim. And now he too is gone, willingly leaving the stage that had once seemed made for him and him alone.
Unlike the other really vast ones – mute Messi, glossy Ronaldo, weird Tiger, ineffable Sachin – and that, no doubt, is the air he breathes (in 2019 ESPN put him at No.7 in the list of the most influential sportspeople in the world), Kohli has always been a determinedly human kind of one-off – disarmingly upfront, chaotically big-hearted, a tiny bit mad.
His occasionally ugly on-field behaviour – running his mouth, leaning in with the shoulder – seemed to me to stem from the excessive pressures placed upon him, as day after day, night after night, we demanded and indulged the full-fat unexpurgated version. If he was sometimes out of whack, it was only because our expectations were.
More importantly, with every moment he was on a Test-match field, Kohli made it feel like the most important place in the world. That right there is his legacy.
To Shubman Gill, then, as Rohit’s successor (and, if the noises are right, Kohli’s inheritor at No.4). What a shot in the arm for the Test game. He’s 25, obscenely gifted, irrationally famous and prepared to take the long game on for the next few years. India may run cricket, but much of that power and emotional energy is still divested into Test cricket, which, make no mistake, has enjoyed a stirring couple of years. And now, on cue, it has a new figurehead, one with hands to die for, and a short-arm pull-cum-drive off the front foot to rival Sharma’s swivel-pull for the game’s signature shot. And here’s the thing: he really wants it.
Gill is known to be infatuated with technique, but infatuations can clutter up the mind. He is stood, bat slung over his shoulder, at the crossroads of his Test career. A record of five hundreds at 35 from 32 matches is not bad, but those runs are heavily weighted to home Tests, while his most recent experiences in Australia – three matches, a best of 31 – led Ricky Ponting to suggest that he curb the tinkering and get back to the core basics.
Some will point to those numbers and say he’s a risky appointment. It’s only risky until he strums a hundred on a packed ground in England, which will be happening very soon.
He now has the chance at the epic, to take all the gongs and deals and dollars and yet still invest in those Test Manhattans, to show the world that it is still possible, in our bloated age of perpetual content, to take a run at the lot.
It’s been a fruitful few weeks for the stylists. As Gill eases into the big job, and the disruptor Jacob Bethell continues to shape up like the Lara-Strauss hybrid of your most private dreams, no column such as this can pass without hailing Hayley Matthews, the Barbadian genius who carried the West Indies on her back through the recent series against England.
Her unbeaten hundred at Canterbury, made from 146-7 in an otherwise mismatched T20, was a special thing to witness. Whenever these ‘Bannerman’ moments come around – the next highest score was 17 – it’s natural to overplay it a bit. Yet it’s not against her raw, inexperienced teammates that one seeks to compare her – for that would be unfair – but her wider peers.
The days of female techniques being framed at their development stage around touch and angle-manipulation are fading. Women’s cricket is hurtling towards its power era. The physiology of the game has changed, and with it, attitudes. Thankfully, though women batters are now training to launch it, the touches still remain to colour the spaces in between. The upshot is a game which has never been more watchable.
Of all the great shapemakers who have helped to form the appearance of modern women’s batting – from Sarah Taylor through to Meg Lanning, Harmanpreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana – I would place Hayley Matthews on her own. Smashing ceilings with every pick-up and high-handed lofted drive, she’s compelling for the sense that it’s never been done quite like this before.
And yet every new idea comes from somewhere. For Matthews, the gunslinger in the cap with the killer smile, strolling to the middle like she owns the place? Take a look, you’ll see it for yourself: she’s channelling Viv. The game never stops taking shape.
This article is taken from issue 88 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to pre-order now.
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