Herding Cats Read online

  Over the next few overs we got to watch an exhibition of incredible shot-making. Tom came on to bowl and went off after three overs that cost 50 runs. Iain O’Brien kept the batsmen in check at the other end but we were staring at defeat as Ramprakash and Marsh quickly put on a hundred together. I stood at mid-off wondering what on earth I was going to do. It was tempting to ask Alex to take off the gloves and bowl himself. He’d lit the fire and should really step into the flames himself and let them consume him. I had few options and no one looking at me to say that they fancied a go. I reluctantly brought myself back on, as Ramprakash was nearing his hundred.

  After his brilliant first-innings century, instead of pushing on Sam had started to take risks, going aerial at every opportunity and was eventually caught in the deep. He surrendered his wicket in the most sporting way – the more astute on the field might have worked this out but the rest celebrated happily. Now one of their batsmen was approaching three figures; what would he do? Ramprakash reached his hundred by hitting me over my head for an astonishing six. I can still remember the shot perfectly, more than any other that day. It was an extraordinary transfer of energy – up until then, he had relied on timing for his boundaries but this was something else, a blur of movement as the ball soared over long-off. We congratulated him and Alex had the good sense to stay quiet.

  When you’ve been hit for a shot like that you don’t bowl the same ball again. I didn’t want to be hit for successive sixes by anyone, even if they had made 114 first-class hundreds. My next ball was full and well outside off. Surely he couldn’t get under that one. He went for the same shot but the ball took the inside edge and clattered onto the stumps. I can still picture the disbelief on my team-mates’ faces. Happiness, too. Steve Marsh and Devon Malcolm soon followed and suddenly we had won a game that no one had possibly imagined could end with an Authors’ victory. It was an astonishing moment, among the best of my life.

  Alex wasn’t the only muppet that day. Among the reasons the likes of Boycott never picked up a bat after retirement must be that they couldn’t face being dismissed by club players. Club players who go on and on about how they once bowled out a legend of the game. Like I’m doing now. Nick, too, has been known to remind first slip of that dropped catch. In two games against us, Ramprakash averaged over 230. The next year he did not give his wicket away after getting to three figures – he kept going. I once saw him at a PCA dinner where he was about to present an award and he smiled, saying, “everywhere I go, there’s someone who’s got me out”. My encounters with him taught me a few things – firstly that he’s a very gracious man, and secondly that a situation like that is never quite as bad as it seems. You are always just one delivery from seeing the back of a particular batsman. Lastly, after reaching a hundred, your batsmen should only push on if the match situation truly demands it. Sam sensibly looked at the opposition, the pitch and match situation and knew to bat on no further.

  Are they round? Are they red?

  In the international game, home sides are often accused of producing conditions that will favour their own team. At our amateur level, the captain is unlikely to be able to ask the groundsman to prepare a pitch especially for a game. You’d have to pay the local council a lot more than £100 if you want them to produce a raging turner for Sunday’s match in the park. You’ll be lucky if they’ve cut the grass in the last fortnight and if the pavilion is actually open. But there is one crucial aspect of the game that you can influence very easily.

  Amateur cricketers obsess about the kit they use. They’ll spend hundreds of pounds on a bat with a perfect straight grain, pads that can withstand 100mph when the average trundler bowls at just over half that speed and a kitbag big enough for an MI6 agent. What few of them worry about is the ball with which they’ll play. That it is round and red is enough. The debate between a Dukes or a Kookaburra they leave for the international game. But you don’t need to be Wasim Akram or Jimmy Anderson to realise that a cricket ball costing a fiver from Sports Direct is going to let you down. Any captain worth his salt knows that a good-quality ball is crucial, along with a supply of part-used ones, should another be needed during the match. That day at the HAC we were using Dukes balls that I’d provided.

  Everything in a charity game is tilted in the batsman’s favour. The crowd wants to see runs, not batsmen sloping back to the pavilion having been dismissed for nought. So the pitch is even and flat, the outfield billiard-table smooth and the balls of the poorest quality money can buy. Their lacquer will crack within the first few overs and gradually flake off after that. The all-important seam is almost nonexistent. The balls won’t even be round after a few lusty blows. They might damage the bat but they won’t be hitting the stumps. The bowler knows there is no chance of lateral movement.

  Swing bowling is one of the great mysteries and joys of cricket. I have played against bowlers in their seventies who can still move it late in the air. Once you have that gift, you never lose it. It’s one of the most wonderful sights in cricket, watching a batsman struggle against the moving ball. Remember that perfect inswinger Simon Jones bowled to Michael Clarke at Old Trafford in 2005, having set him first with several balls that moved away? But no one can do anything without a decent ball. Too often a perfectly poised game has been ruined by the loss of a ball, which the batsman has deposited in a neighbouring field. He sensibly decides that it is only a matter of time before he is undone by the movement and so counter-attacks. He’s hoping the ball will be lost and have to be replaced – at the very least it will swing less after repeated contact with hard objects. The replacement has been taken from the mouth of the dog belonging to the batting side’s captain, where it has been for the last 45 minutes. It doesn’t deviate a fraction and the batsmen proceed serenely on their way to victory. To counter this tactic, my bag is stocked with a number of well-aged balls and I even encourage my team-mates to practise in the nets with the old match balls.

  Batsmen always point out the fragility of their position – one mistake and their game is over. But it doesn’t take much to ruin a bowler’s day either. A few drops of rain can fall and suddenly the ball won’t swing. A few more drops and it becomes impossible to grip it, let alone impart sufficient revs for an off- or leg-break. No one enjoys cricket in bad weather, the bowler least of all. The Sunday cricketer cannot call upon 90mph yorkers or reverse swing. Without a hint of deviation, he is done. The skipper may not be able to call on Jimmy Anderson, nor to roll up a pitch and take it with him each weekend, but he can pack a selection of good-quality balls. There is no part of the game in which it is better to invest a few pounds more.

  Shouldn’t we, and he in particular, bowl faster and straighter?

  Many bowlers have had a moment like the one Ben Stokes suffered in the 2016 World Cup final. If he could bowl an over that went for fewer than 18 runs, England would be T20 world champions. At the other end was Carlos Brathwaite, a young West Indian all-rounder who had yet to announce himself to the world. When he hit Stokes’s first four balls for six he ensured a place for himself in cricket’s pantheon. The Englishman experienced what many an amateur has before him, as perfectly decent deliveries disappear to the boundary, sometimes without bouncing, one after another. Try as you might, every ball you bowl meets the middle of the bat and flies over your head for another six. It’s not that your brain freezes. Instead your blood has started pumping and you’re in fight mode. You want to blast this batsman out, with a significantly quicker delivery that squeezes under his bat and plucks out middle stump. But that just isn’t going to happen. After conferring with Brearley, Bob Willis bowled faster and straighter at Headingley in 1981, but few of us can find that extra yard of pace to hurry a class batsman. You’re just giving him what he wants – more of the same. Practice.

  It is always a shock as a bowler when your first ball is hit for six. Maybe it shouldn’t be. It’s happened enough. But what do you do next? You’d quite like to go home, but you can’t. This is cricket after all a
nd you have to finish your over. Many bowlers begin with their stock length delivery and the temptation is often to repeat it. In poker, they say that if the first bullet doesn’t work, fire another. In other words, raise again. The length ball will work this time. It was luck that the batsman read the ball’s movement perfectly and swung it high over the rope. But once he’s done it a second time, it really is time to rethink. The problem is that he’s destroyed your best delivery. What will he do to the other ones? As a decent amateur bowler you hope that your stock ball will come out OK five times out of six. Six if you’re bowling well. But you haven’t practised your variations anything like as much and so the off- or leg-cutter can easily go wrong. There, you’re looking at three or four out of six doing what they’re meant to. You have your slower ball, which is far too readable. It hasn’t even deceived anyone in the nets, not even your tailenders. And you’re not quick enough to try a bouncer, not on this pitch. Maybe it’s best to keep it simple. Suddenly you’re back where you started, planning to bowl length.

  For an international player, it’s slightly different, of course. These contests are like an elite game of rock, paper, scissors with both players trying to predict what the other will do and acting accordingly. Yorker, bouncer, slower ball? It’s hard to outwit a player who is much, much better than you. You don’t have the skill to follow him as he steps to leg, cramping him for room. You’d probably dislocate your shoulder bowling that variation out of the back of your hand. Nor can you be sure that your yorkers won’t all be low full tosses. The temptation is to change everything around. There are players who can do it – I’ve seen my team-mate Andy bowl right- and left-arm both over and round the wicket in a single over, all perfectly respectable deliveries. But no matter how badly it’s going, you mustn’t switch to spin. That, after all, is what Malcolm Nash was doing that day in Glamorgan when Gary Sobers hit him for six sixes in an over. Up until then he’d been a left-arm seamer but that day he span his way into the history books.

  So what can the captain do when his bowler is under assault? By this stage your best fielders should be at cow corner, long-on and long-off. I’ve set fields with five men on the leg-side boundary. But sometimes it doesn’t matter where you put them, since the batsman is clearing them each time. The Sunday cricketer has yet to master the athletic leap we see in the IPL, when they parry the ball down to a team-mate waiting just inside the rope. It’s hard enough to get one fielder to run to the boundary, let alone two. All too often, they collide in their attempts to stop the ball and a third fielder has to retrieve the ball and help them to their feet.

  What the bowler needs to do is add variety of a different type. Bowling round the wicket, from wider in the crease, or from a yard further back than usual. Or just pray the batsman doesn’t quite time one and takes a single. I have been in this situation perhaps more times than anyone else in my team. This is the lot of the second- or third-best bowler in the side. As captain of an amateur team, your strike bowler is too good to suffer this fate and the others you consider – perhaps wrongly – not good enough to throw in against the former professional. Of my most disastrous overs (and I classify anything over 20 as disastrous), only two of them contained wides or no-balls. The rest were all scored off six deliveries. But when you’re really outclassed, you have one last option – your very worst bowler. It’s time to bring out the gimp.

  What happened?

  As captain, there are games that stay with you for years and not for the right reasons. The worst tend to be those when there is conflict within your team. But there are others when the conflict is within you. You keep asking yourself afterwards if you did the right thing, if you were on the right side even. It was one of those weeks when I had far too much on and yet here I was playing cricket against a team of actors that we face each year. It can complicate things if you like the opposition. You don’t want to crush them. Really you want them to enjoy the afternoon, just not quite as much as you do. We batted first and I went out to open – this was one of those days when the order was done by time of arrival. The opposition had a good young left-arm quick, who’d played not too long ago at county junior level. So I put a helmet on. I needed it for his third delivery, a bouncer which hurtled through my attempted pull and onto the metal encasing my head. The next two balls were also short, sending me rocking back in my crease, before the last, full and fast, plucked out my off stump. I could only dream of dismissing a batsman in this way, with this four-card trick.

  I walked back to the pavilion, thinking that my afternoon could only improve. The other batsmen all coped better and by tea we had 255 on the board, off 40 overs. Illness and injury had deprived us of two of our more incisive bowlers but I was confident that our attack could defend this imposing total. We had two reliable seamers (Tom and me), a brace of expensive change bowlers (both called Jonathan) and Steve, a visiting Australian who had played grade cricket and who was feeling his way back after a decade out of the game. I opened with Tom and the second Jonathan, a swing bowler whose practice run-up was faster than anything he’d manage the rest of the afternoon. One batsman hit a flurry of boundaries before edging behind. After 20 overs, the actors were 70 for one. They needed 186 off the next 20 overs. I had barely gone for a run and Steve was bowling well at the other end. It was time to loosen the belt a notch or two.

  The change bowlers made things happen, as they invariably do. The run-rate shot up appreciably but wickets also fell. Getting players out is not always a good thing in Sunday games, since the left-arm quick was in next. You have to know an opposition very well before deciding to keep batsmen in. It’s a very risky strategy and I very rarely do it. The new batsman set about our attack intelligently, never quite hitting anyone out of the attack. A couple of my side cast nervous glances at me. Surely I should be bringing myself back on and squeezing the life out of this game. But with the required run-rate up at ten an over, I thought we were safe. For the time being at least. Then with five overs left and 60 runs needed, I came back for my second spell. But I was bowling at a very different batsman to the previous, more defensive ones. And I was knackered. By cricket, by the demands of my job, by running a team, by a terrible night’s sleep, by everything.

  Despite all these excuses, I would expect to defend 12 an over at the death against most batsmen. But this was not the time to get the yips. I’ve had a few yippy moments over the years, usually when my muscles were screaming for me to stop, after 15 overs on the trot. Bowling is a very unnatural action for the human body and it puts incredible stress on it. Even an amateur seam bowler will be managing a number of minor injuries during the season. With me it’s shin splints and my right rotator cuff that are first to flare up. Others have more recondite muscles that you’re not even sure you possess when they mention their latest strain.

  What would usually happen with me is that a couple of stock deliveries would come out wrong and I would know that I was spent and should come off. This time as I ran in everything felt askew. I knew the ball wasn’t going to come out right before it left my hand. Having conceded just three runs in my previous five overs, I now went for 28 in nine balls. I bowled a sequence of full tosses and long-hops to a good batsman who was nearing a century. The required rate was not quite halved but after that the chase was a formality. Neither Tom nor Steve could defend 32 in four – nor should they have had to. The exultant actors cheered what must have been one of their more unexpected victories. My team trooped off the field, into the shower, car and then back home. Richard and I accompanied the beaming opposition to the pub. A couple of them were kind enough to acknowledge that I’d “made a game of it”. But the truth of it is that we had desperately wanted to win but I’d been undone by the thrill of gambling with the outcome.

  A match like this provides endless food for thought. Would I have been more ruthless with a different opposition? Answer – yes. I like this team and have played for them in the past. In fact, I play much better for them than I do against them. Would we have
won with the original team selected? Probably, since we would have had four good bowlers with a lot of cricket under their belt this summer. Would we have won if I’d had an earlier night and hadn’t played the day before? That I don’t know. It’s always tempting to reduce cricket and the result to being just about you. This was as clear a case as you get of one person losing the match for his team. I will always be asking is “will this happen to me again?” I have no idea but I do know that the more I think about it, the more likely it is that it shall. There are always other factors in a defeat. It’s rarely just about one player. Jonathan is equally convinced that it was all his fault. But I was captain that day, as well as the bowler who went to pieces. It was my plan that I executed so badly.

  Should you give your fastest bowler one or at most two overs before the interval?

  The most valuable piece of advice I was ever given as a captain went as follows: the moment you ask yourself if you should take a bowler off, you should do it right then. Don’t give them another over or two. It’ll be too late. Take them off there and then. You can guarantee your team-mates have had the same idea. The batsman is settling more comfortably into his stance. The bowler’s threat is diminished. The fielders already look less alert. Really you should be thinking constantly about changing the bowling. What would the batsman least like to face? I remember once watching a T20 match where M. S. Dhoni made 18 bowling changes. No one bowled more than one over in a row. The batsmen weren’t able to settle.