“I always remember Bobby Simpson’s words. He used to say ‘You move quickly, you move late but you move only once’,” recalled former South African batting mainstay Darryl Cullinan.
What Simpson, an insightful former Australian skipper, meant was decisive footwork. It was a lesson Michael Clarke’s men have forgotten in the ongoing Ashes series.
In a hard-hitting conversation with The Hindu here, the 47-year-old Cullinan said, “The great players, they do not shuffle around much. Their head is still and they move only once. If your head is still, then your eyes will be still. If your head moves around a lot, you lose sight of where your off-stump is.”
Cullinan pointed out a shuffling Steven Smith’s downfall in the disastrous Australian first innings at Trent Bridge. “He [Smith] was so far outside off-stump. If he had stood still, the ball would have missed the off-stump by a foot and a half.”
The South African elaborated, “Footwork impacts batting immensely. By playing late, under your eyes, no big back swing, you give yourself a better chance. Smith, he has such a big back swing. Your hands need to travel quickly into the ball.
“You look at Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar or Jacques Kallis, everything was compact. The hands never got far away from the body. It was all down the line. Good footwork, bat and pad together, you didn’t play the ball if you didn’t have to.”
The quality of batsmanship on pitches assisting the bowlers had dipped alarmingly and Cullinan attributed the slump to cricketers playing in all three formats of the game.
And he had a solution. “Your top stars in Test cricket should not be playing Twenty20 cricket. What can help is categorising, pigeon holing your players.
“You tell the cricketers, ‘You are a Test player, you will not play Twenty20 cricket.’ Even from one-day cricket, I would be very selective about cricketers playing Twenty20. The defensive technique is being eroded. The ability to leave the ball, we do not see it now.”
Cullinan came down heavily on Twenty20 cricket. “Let’s not talk about Twenty20. That’s baseball in my opinion. That’s not real cricket.”
The man from Kimberley added, “A lot of them want to play Twenty20 because it gives them an opportunity for a lucrative IPL contract. The boards make money too. But the authorities need to send the message that it is in Test cricket that the players will earn more respect. Perhaps, they can compensate financially those earmarked for the longer format who will be missing out on Twenty20 cricket.”
Too much batting practice against the bowling machine was adversely impacting batting, Cullinan felt. “They practise for hours against the bowling machine. It is predictable. It’s easy. You can stand and hit through the line. The batsmen are more upright. They push hard at the ball all the time without getting to the pitch.”
Queried whether the heavier modern-day bats undermined batting in seaming, swinging conditions, Cullinan said, “Everyone likes to discuss the thickness of these bats. I think it’s more about their weight. Heavy bats are not good for defence because the ball carries to the slips and you hold on to the willow too much.
“The great players from the past, they never used bats that were heavier than 2.6 ounces. Now you don’t find bats lesser than 2.8, and those are junior bats.”
