At a recent gathering of cricketers, the question was asked: how many batsmen today know where their off stump is? Students of the game can hold court for hours on what appears to the uninitiated as an inconsequential query. The first thing a batsman does is to take guard, and thus establish where his off stump is. And that, one would imagine, is that.
Yet, as the current Ashes series keeps emphasising, that is decidedly not that. Batsmen from both England and Australia have perished playing deliveries they need not have. Steve Smith, hero of the Lord’s Test with a double century, was made to look like a novice at Edgbaston as he felt for the ball outside off stump and edged it to slip. He had moved too far across, almost overshot the off stump.
Even experienced batsmen occasionally show how uncertain they are of the off stump’s location.
Losing the connectionSometimes successful opening batsmen — Shikhar Dhawan being a recent example — give the impression they have lost the connection with their off stump. Even great technicians like Sunil Gavaskar and Greg Chappell have suffered through the odd series when they didn’t know where the off stump was. More recently, Virat Kohli struggled in England against James Anderson who found the outside edge repeatedly. In Australia soon after, Kohli made four centuries; his guard was now biased towards the off stump.
Struggling batsmen tend to adapt unorthodox methods. The off stump guard, for instance, is not favoured except by batsmen with an agenda. The pitfalls are many. There is the tendency to reach out for deliveries well outside as well as the nagging thought that the leg stump might be exposed.
When England opener Sam Robson tried the off stump guard against India, Bhuvaneshwar Kumar made him pay for it. Still, even the perfectionist Geoff Boycott used that guard against West Indies fast bowler Colin Croft as did Ricky Ponting to counter Muttiah Muralitharan.
Impact of TVTelevision can educate as easily as it can obfuscate. Often schoolboys copy their heroes without quite understanding why they do certain things. Like taking guard. Even at some hurriedly organised games on streets or vacant plots of land, there is always someone taking guard. This, even when the ‘wicket’ is a chair from nearby or a pile of bricks borrowed from a construction site.
Television takes basic knowledge for granted. The fact is, knowing where you stand helps to judge the direction of the ball relative to the wicket. It is as simple as that.
The master batsman Martin Crowe advises that you ensure your right eye is over the off stump. That calls for a middle-stump guard, the safest in the game. Often batsmen prefer a leg stump guard especially against the spinning ball.
Gundappa Viswanath who began his career with a leg stump guard switched to middle towards the end. Ian Chappell went in the opposite direction, starting with middle and then changing to leg on the advice of Garry Sobers.
Gavaskar, who moved back-and-across as the fast bowler approached, ended up on the off stump. With his backfoot now in line with the off stump, it meant that he could leave alone the delivery outside the line. No corridor of uncertainty for him.
Great openers have to be great leavers of the ball (Virender Sehwag was a startling exception). A snick by Gavaskar — to borrow what Neville Cardus said of Jack Hobbs — was a sort of disturbance of cosmic orderliness.
In a short piece of fiction Martin Crowe wrote, he laid out the batsman’s creed: “Knowing where my off stump (is), and protecting it, (is) my life.”
The game’s evolutionOver the years, cricket has evolved from a game where the means mattered, to one where the end justifies the means. Not knowing where your off stump is does not matter now if the ball is struck for four. Leaning into the drive is no longer emphasised if the batsman lofts into untenanted areas even if by mistake.
This might be the legacy of T20 cricket, allied to the unsubtle striking power of the modern bat. The off stump is merely the stump next to the one that contains the mike. The membrane that separates T20 from Test cricket allows techniques from the former to seep into the latter but does not look kindly upon traffic in the reverse direction if run-making is not guaranteed. To know where the off stump is might be an indulgence when ignorance is bliss.
