The dying art of Test batting

The craft of batting long in Test matches, now considered unglamorous and arduous, has made way for a ‘hit out or get out’ variation

Last summer, when England were obsessed with jazzing up Test cricket, chances are you would have missed Pakistan opener Abdullah Shafique’s match-winning 160 at Galle. It was a fourth-innings, 408-ball, nearly nine-hour-long, unbeaten epic. Very few bat this long these days. Shafique still had a hundred to show for his toil.

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January 19, 2021, will forever bear testimony to the spine needed to kick down the doors of an unbreachable Gabba as Cheteshwar Pujara stood firm, blunting Australia for 211 balls during India’s fabled pursuit of 328. Rishabh Pant spearheaded that chase with a 138-ball 89 but it couldn’t have been achieved without Pujara’s resilience. He made 56 — the slowest fifty-plus fourth-innings score, spanning at least six hours, in a winning cause since the turn of this century.

It was also Test batting in the purest form — where physically wearing out the bowlers and mentally knocking out the opposition is more important than personal landmarks; where once you get that upper hand, no target seems impossible anymore.

Public memory is selective though. It remembers and lauds the milestones, the more entertaining ones anyway. The thrill of a chase is now in flaunting it. Hit out or get out, go big or go home. We are fed straight lines on how leaving deliveries, leaning forward to defend with a straight bat, concentrating hard, batting out sessions and waiting for the right ball – the true essence of Test batting – is an unglamorous art fast on the wane.

Wars vs battles

Just to jog your memory, that Pujara classic gained the kind of eminence it did only because of what Hanuma Vihari and Ravichandran Ashwin had achieved in the previous Test at the SCG. An improbable win was on the cards as long as Pant was going hammer and tongs. But his dismissal triggered a rearguard rarely witnessed in Test history, as Vihari and Ashwin strapped themselves to a fifth-day Sydney pitch against the best bowling attack in the world to force a draw. Now factor in the physical impediments. Ashwin was battling a bad back, Vihari had torn his right hamstring early into his innings. But they didn’t give in to a relentless Australia.

“It was something you can only dream of, batting on Day Five of a Test match,” Vihari later said. “The series is one-all and if you can do it for the team that satisfaction will slowly sink in and realise how big an effort that was.”

Together, they had faced 256 deliveries. There have only been four instances of more balls played for the sixth wicket in the fourth innings of a win or a draw. Ashwin made 39 in 128 balls; Vihari 23 in 161— the lowest among all 150-ball plus fourth-innings scores in a win or draw since January 1, 2000. But runs didn’t matter. Because in the bigger context of winning an unprecedented back-to-back Test tours of Australia, all India were seeking in Sydney was a shot at winning the war. When the captains finally agreed on a draw, all Ashwin and Vihari were capable of was hugging each other before hobbling off the field.

“In fact, both of us went numb and blank for a while,” said Ashwin. “We didn’t even celebrate towards the end because we didn’t know what to make of it.” Everything about that partnership was just about hanging in at all costs. As Ashwin recollects, “Because we were so channelised in taking on a certain particular bowler and keep blocking, keep dead batting him.”

The joy of batting long

No other innings probably epitomises the art of defensive batting like Sunil Gavaskar’s 96 – in his last Test innings– on a minefield of a Bangalore pitch where Iqbal Qasim and Tauseef Ahmed were spinning yarns around India’s batters. Gavaskar dropped anchor and played almost a chanceless innings. Almost, till Qasim managed to get one to turn and bounce to take an edge off his glove. Gavaskar ended four runs short of what would have been a majestic hundred but to those fortunate enough to witness that classic, it was nothing less than a triple hundred.

Batting for draws, or for that matter just batting long, is being looked down upon these days. especially with the World Test Championship offering maximum points for a win. Today’s England wouldn’t have batted an eyelid in taking a shy at that Sydney target, even if they were down to the last pair of recognised batters. And who would blame them? For two years now, they have been raised on a steady diet of do-or-die. The wins have been scintillating, but the defeats — and there have been a few — have undoubtedly cast aspersions on England’s approach.

Like how batting as long as possible in the first innings would have been prudent in the first Ashes Test. But England declared at 393/8, with Joe Root still batting on 118. That declaration divided more opinion than opinion exists. Nasser Hussain was all for it because it allowed for an initial skirmish between Stuart Broad and David Warner. But Kevin Pietersen, master innovator of the switch hit at a time batting straight was still sacrosanct in Tests, was sceptical. “We were talking about the declaration, we were thinking about the declaration, but two or three years ago there would not have even been a hint of a declaration,” he said on TV. “But with this team, are we surprised? I don’t think we are but I am a little bit surprised only because of how flat this wicket actually is. We saw Australia bat there now and it didn’t miss the middle of the bat. I didn’t like the declaration.” Australia scored 386 in the first innings before chasing down 282 with two wickets in hand, setting up the series with exactly the kind of momentum needed to retain the Ashes. Which they did.

No place for specialists

This mindset largely stems from the shifting attitude towards batting in red-ball cricket. Specialists are slowly being done away with. Pujara has been dropped. Vihari has played just four Tests since Sydney. It’s evident a one-size-fits-all policy is being slowly adopted, white-ball experts being the predominant benefactors. It’s a policy slowly permeating into the domestic system at every level as well. “Today’s generation can figure out very quickly which format he wants to take forward,” said Manoj Tiwary, who led Bengal in this year’s Ranji Trophy final against Saurashtra. “Younger players might nod along in a team meeting but the moment they walk into the ground, they are playing their own game.”

Since all-format players spend barely a third of their time in Tests nowadays, mastering a watertight defence isn’t a necessity anymore. Hitting through the line, hence, is an accepted practice these days. Also getting caught out trying to clear the field was considered a sacrilege even a few years back. But it’s on the rise. Between 2008 and 2012, a phase when the IPL was finding its feet, only 10.5% of all catches in Tests came outside the ring. That has risen to 12.1% since 2018. False shots are to blame for this. England opener Zak Crawley’s hundred in the fourth Ashes Test at Manchester saw 25% false shots, the sixth-highest for any Test hundred since 2006. But England have no problem with that. Not surprising, given one of the five above him was the fastest century of all time – a 54-ball hundred with 33% false shots – by Brendon McCullum, or Baz, England’s current coach.

The game must change with the times. That’s the norm. Ranjitsinhji’s leg glance, Sachin Tendulkar’s upper cut and Mike Gatting’s reverse sweep are noteworthy examples of shots that are as orthodox now as they were uncommon before. Then came Pietersen’s switch hit and AB de Villiers’s 360° batting. And then there is Steve Smith — a freak of nature with a batting style tempered with an unorthodox stance and a heightened sense of game awareness. But should the principles of batting change as well?

Evolution of batting

WG Grace pioneered a technique that allowed him to score fluently on the front foot as well as the back on uncovered pitches at a time when most batters were merely playing to survive. Thanks to his stance, Grace was always primed to attack.

His biographer Richard Tomlinson writes in the 2015 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack: “The sight that confronted the bowler was both disconcerting and deliberately intimidating: in defiance of the coaching manuals, WG’s bat hovered above the blockhole, while his front foot pointed down the wicket, toes cocked. It was a platform for attack, with the clear intent (in another deviation from orthodoxy) to hit off the front foot wherever possible. Like a modern one-day player, Grace looked for runs even in defence.”

Three decades down the line came Bradman who perfected the art of hitting all around the wicket, thanks to a revolutionary “rotary” technique with a unique backlift as its fulcrum. With the advent of one-day cricket in the 1970s emerged Vivian Richards, who fearlessly planted his front foot across the line of the stumps to fast bowlers to either flick or play that audacious inside out lofted drive. At the heart of this aggression is the backlift of the batter.

“Most of the coaching literature suggests that the conventional (straight) backlift should enable the bat to be taken back in a line from wicket to wicket with the top hand taking control,” Dr Habib Noorbhai, senior lecturer and cricket scientist at the University of Johannesburg, wrote to HT over mail.

“I published a study (in 2016) with Prof Tim Noakes (who also co-authored Bob Woolmer’s “Art and Science of Cricket”) where we contested this theory. Our findings demonstrated that the most common element that successful batsmen have is a backlift that is directed towards the gully or point region, otherwise known as the rotary method of batting. A distinctive feature of WG Grace, Sir Donald Bradman, Sir Viv Richards and Virat Kohli is this rotary method. If 77% of the greatest Test batsmen of all time have adopted a rotary method, how is it not regarded as orthodox?”

What you see now though is a jarring override of whatever orthodoxy Test batting constituted for. And the biggest casualty seems to be the leave, and by extension the art of spending time at the crease. Runs always don’t flow, you need to earn them at times. And Kohli seemed perfectly content doing that, waiting 81 balls for his first boundary during the Dominica Test earlier this month. It takes a lot out of one of the greatest batters to shelve the more carefree scoring shots because he is probably not sure about them. All he can do then is to play out time. “I feel the more you stay at the wicket, the more time you spend, things start getting easier. Spending time is something that I aim for in Test cricket,” Kohli had said during the Visakhapatnam Test against England in 2016.

But the numbers are again painting a different picture now. Like the leave percentage of all Test batters from No 1 to 4: 15.9% since 2018, down from 18.3% between 2008 and 2012. An indication of the rapidly changing mindset was evident from the Edgbaston Ashes Test where batters left alone only 6.4% of all Day 1 deliveries. It fetched England a rollicking start, working out into a great match in the end. But it’s also a sign of the changing times, one where Test batting may soon become a lost art.