"Talent is an interesting word in batting. People think about how well you hit a cover drive or how far you hit the ball. For me it was about making good decisions."
Chris Rogers
What does “cover drive” mean to you? To anyone outside the game it’s probably a mystery. To cricket fans it’s obvious. We don’t even have to think about it. Three syllables are enough. We hear them and into our heads pops a figure in motion attacking a wide full ball on the off side. The imaginary figure and the imaginary ball are more or less the same for all of us.
And it's like that with every cricket stroke. The name short circuits to the image. It’s efficient. Our imagination is spared the work of having to invent a picture from scratch.
The names of strokes are so obvious in their meaning that we forget that each one of them is a label for a combination of complex movements. And we forget that those movements are difficult to describe otherwise. If we were cultural historians we’d say that phrases like “cover drive” represent a visual archetype. But we’re not so we just call them textbook strokes.
And textbook strokes are special. A player can bat all day but only the textbook stroke will draw universal praise. When a textbook stroke takes place – and this can be in the middle of a stream of deeply impressive non-textbook batting – it is as if two lenses suddenly snap into focus. Our vision of the game we were taught and our vision of the game as we see it are triumphantly reunited.
This occasional coming together of archetype and reality is one of the many reasons that cricket is so good to watch. But I also think it’s a trap. And I think it’s a trap that starts with short hand labels and ends with young players being taught to limit their options of response.
Until relatively recently in cricket’s history there were more or less twelve textbook strokes and they went like this.
Pull
Hook
Cut
Late cut
Off-drive
On-drive
Straight drive
Cover drive
Square drive
Leg glance
Forward defensive
Backward defensive
For a while that was more or less it. Then, with the renewal of professional one-day cricket, we got a few more:
Sweep
Reverse sweep
Slog sweep
Scoop
Which gives us about sixteen recognised strokes. And those of us who talk about the game use the names of those strokes all the time. In fact we are exceptional at combining them with skill and variation to describe every batting performance we see, from the one ball duck to the marathon double century. Now and again we’ll use a few catch-alls to paper over the cracks (words like ‘nudge’, ‘nurdle’ and ‘hoik’) but by and large we stick to the list of strokes.
But why? How useful are these definitions?
What’s the exact height at which a pull becomes a hook?
How wide does a ball have to be before it ceases to be an off drive and becomes a cover drive?
How much wider before it becomes a cut?
Start asking questions and you start to find grey areas. One stroke blurs into another and most of what a batting player does isn’t textbook at all. To be accurate in how we describe batting either we expand our lexicon of strokes to number in the hundreds (possibly thousands) or we leave the language of strokes altogether.
Just imagine for a moment that we took that second option. Imagine we stopped talking about strokes. What would we talk about then?
Well we might talk about batting in a more fundamental sense. We might talk about balance, footwork, watchfulness and speed of hand. And we might look at each delivery in isolation and ask whether those fundamentals had been applied in a way that was skilful or not. Then we might aggregate those deliveries and describe the player in terms of their fundamental choices. Finally we might talk about how those choices vary and how each player finds different batting solutions according to their temperament and style. How they show us their character in how they bat.
This would be an interesting way to talk about the game and it isn’t impossible. In fact it already happens. You’ll hear it now and again on TV and radio coverage every time the broadcaster makes room for 'specialist analysis'. It tends to the exception rather than the norm however. After all there isn’t much time between balls and frankly talking about fundamentals doesn’t convey meaning half as quickly as saying “he played a pull shot in front of square”.
The language of strokes persists. It has to. We couldn’t talk about the game if it didn’t. Cricket strokes are the way we understand batting – they are the minimum unit of meaning.
So we carry on using the language of strokes. And as we do we tend not to notice the damaging effect it has on the way we think about the game. Because the real problem is not that we use the names of strokes, but that by doing so we let strokes become the means through which we teach the game.
Sixteen shots seems to offer a golden opportunity to anyone learning to bat. Learn sixteen repeatable actions and you can cope with anything. Master them and you won’t just cope you’ll thrive. You’ll have a watertight defence and score runs for fun. Of course good coaches and good players know instinctively that it isn’t true but nevertheless that’s often what we’re taught when we come to batting for the first time. Just take a look at any number of coaching manuals for beginners starting with the MCC’s famous manual.
That’s a problem because the reality of the game is that no two balls ever land in the same place in the same way. No two surfaces are the same. No two atmospheric conditions are identical. Every ball is different. Every delivery a batting player faces is subtly unique.
So why is it that at cricket practice around the world you see children being instructed to play 'cover drives' and 'pulls' as if those categories were anything other than convenient labels?
Keep watching and sooner or later you’ll see a strange sight – young players with bats practising repeatable, mechanical strokes over and over again in order to 'groove' their movements while nearby young players with balls are practising how to avoid ever pitching in a place where they can be driven, pulled or anything else that falls into a neat category.
When the two groups are put together the results can be confusing for the players with bats. They discover (to their surprise) that carbon copy cover drives and steady hip high pull shots are less common than they have been led to believe.
As the bowlers get better so the problem grows. The best players, or those with access to the best coaches, grow out of this problem. But how many skilled, innovative, artistic batsmen do we lose along the way?
As Graeme Fowler has described it, the half-second between the bowler’s release and the ball arriving is the time in which every player makes an artistic choice in how they respond – it is a performance and they make it their own. If we teach players to limit themselves to set responses then those moments of choice, of performance, simply disappear.
And I don’t think one-day cricket brings them back either. The short form of the game brings batting innovation but in a very clear direction. Aggression is the order of the day and responses driven by the imperative of the strike rate too often wind up becoming premeditated.
What luck the truly versatile batsman? The one who responds uniquely to unique variations and who never falls back on categories of stroke or pre-meditated hitting? They exist of course. We talk about them endlessly because their brilliance sticks in our mind. But there are precious few of them around. Perhaps the language of strokes, the very way we describe the game, has something to do with it.
One final illustration of the problem I’ve been describing… five years ago I completed a coaching course. I still have the coaching pamphlet I received in return for paying my fee. It is front of me now as I type. In it there are small laminated cards showing batting exercises for 10-12 year olds. Each one is a drill - repeatable, machine-like and consistent. Next to each exercise is a diagram showing the stroke to be practised. I have just counted up the strokes in that pamphlet. There are six. At the end there is a note suggesting how you can coach the other strokes as the players grow older. At the front of the pamphlet is the name of the organisation that produced it – England and Wales Cricket Board. Six strokes? Sixteen strokes? I certainly hope not.
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