SPECTATOR SPORT
THUMP. Mac the postman gently lobs the Jiffybag through the back door. I unwrap it and there is it is, standing all but a full hand at the wither in its daffodil livery: Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2000.
To celebrate these exciting digits, they have elected, from a college of 100 cricket- mg cardinals, the five cricketers of the cen- tury: Bradman, Sobers, Hobbs, Warne, Richards. I won't argue with a single one.
No, I think the point here is to argue with the whole lot of them. The omission here is not of an individual but of an entire caste. And it just happens that it is the caste that wins you cricket matches. It is a fasci- nating Freudian slip, an unconscious wish to vote the entire caste not out of honours, but out of existence.
Bob Willis said that the side that wins any given Test match is the side which has the better fast bowlers. Willis, a fast bowler himself, can be accused of bias, but every batsman knows — if only in seldom-visited corners of his heart —that he is correct.
But it seems that there is a silent conspir- acy to deny this. Instead, the list celebrates the men who succeed in defying fast bowlers: three of the top five are batsmen, one an all-rounder (very good bowler, bats-
Speed first, batsmen second
Simon Barnes
man of genius), the last a spinner. Dennis Lillee, the Australian fast bowler, is edged out into sixth place, Richard Hadlee makes tenth, tying with Imran Khan.
The most menacing fast bowler I have ever seen was Malcolm Marshall, who makes it at 26th, with only three votes. The citation for Warne, the Australian leg- spinner, admits that Warne takes fewer wickets per match than did Lillee, and at a worse average. But it is pointed out in justi- fication that when Warne was first selected for Australia 'cricket was under the tyranny of fast bowling'.
Undeniably true — it always has been and always will be. Certainly spin bowling is part of cricket: watching a great spinner is a joy. But which, as a captain, would you soon- er have in your side: two great spinners, or two great quick bowlers? There is no choice to be made. Spinners bemuse, fast bowlers destroy.
But cricket remains a batsman's game, in the eyes of the beholders and of those who make judgments on the game. It is easy to see why: a batsman stands alone against the enmity of nature and the hostility of man. Fast bowlers are the enemy, combining the personal malice of humanity with the imper- sonal ferocity of life. Fast bowlers may be admired, but it is batsmen that are loved. They win the sympathy vote every time.
There is a suspicion that there is some- thing not fair about fast bowling. There is, as Ann Widdecombe would say, something of the night about a fast bowler. He is there to frighten batsmen from the bright light of day into the little death of a dismissal. He does not seek to be loved; he needs fear to do his job, as a surgeon needs clever hands.
Fast bowlers are there to inspire funk, and the failure to vote them into the com- pany of the great shows an unconscious, as it were, funk of the soul. But you can have all Wisden's five on your side if I can have any five of the rest. Marshall, Lillee, Hadlee, Larwood . . . Then I might think about batsmen. And I'd have Gavaskar: best against pace.
Previous page
