It was Chris, and his commendably patient and delightful wife Julie, who stuck with it and saved Robin. They cleared out the guest cottage at the back of their own property and moved him into the sanctuary of a home. They found common ground on the issue of drink. Robin was not allowed any. Chris gave his younger brother a full-time position at the embroidery factory and took on the Masuri franchise. Indeed, there were olive branches for Robin at every turn. Chris was worried but Chris was kind. On occasion, tough love replaced brotherly love, but blood was proving thicker than water. The plan began to work.
I remember a dinner there one night, only a few years ago. Just the four of us—the Smiths, Paul and me—at Kippy’s Australian home, where the Judge lodged. We bounced off each other much as we used to do—old jokes, in-jokes and bad jokes. Kips told the Cardiff passport story again—imagine how many times!—and we doubled up as one brother took unmerciful piss out of the other. We recalled good and not-so-good innings and matches, and rejoiced in our luck to have had such a life.
Robin drank Coca-Cola and we knocked back the wine. He did some of those old impressions and we laughed some more. We slagged off the players of our era we didn’t rate and drifted into misty-eyed memory of the great Malcolm Marshall, and of Cardigan Connor and Tim Tremlett. Over a decade, give or take, we were the very core of Hampshire cricket. Chris said there were more than 100,000 runs for Hampshire between us (101,746 to be precise), so the club should be bloody grateful!
Marshall was greatly fond of the Smith boys. He liked their appetite for both life and runs and found fun in their dry humour, occasional madness and strange idiosyncrasies. One night in Leicester before a Sunday League game at Grace Road, Robin and Malcolm were sharing a drink at the hotel bar. Three fellows interrupted them, ostensibly for an autograph, but were soon taunting Maco for the colour of his skin. In search of peace, Robin and Malcolm left the hotel for some food, only to find these same blokes following them to the restaurant. Same story: racial taunting. Robin threatened to put an end to this nonsense with a blow to the snout but they sneered at his bravado. Maco urged Robin to leave it and for them to head back to their hotel rooms. The lads followed them back, goading and abusing, and by the time they returned to the hotel lobby, Robin had had enough. He warned the main culprit one more time, but to no avail, before letting fly with his right fist. The man hit the deck like a sack of shit. The other two recoiled in shock and pulled their mate from the fray before hurrying from the hotel.
The rest of us knew nothing of this. Even Maco wasn’t fully aware of the collateral damage. During fielding practice, I noticed Robin drop a couple of skiers. Most unusual. Kippy said I should talk to him away from the others. Robin showed me his right thumb, which was badly swollen and bruised—I could see immediately that it was broken. He told me the story of the night before and we agreed he could not play in the match. By a strange twist of fate, Kips was 12th man after a poor run of form. He replaced his brother in the side and made a crucial unbeaten 54. We won the match by 5 runs.
There was a price to pay on two counts. Robin was out of cricket for a month and the Hampshire committee wanted to know why. Upon hearing the story, they urged disciplinary action, which I forcefully resisted. Of course, we didn’t want punch-ups in hotels. Equally, I admired Robin for the way he stuck close to his mate and took action on his behalf. His nature was gentle and not remotely confrontational, therefore I was sure such a reaction had been severely provoked. Maco, the sole witness, agreed with me. I backed his judgement unconditionally and told the committee that if action were taken against Robin it would be without my support. Thankfully, we heard nothing more of it.
Judge remembered the night well and, in particular, his excruciating sense of embarrassment. Over dinner, he told us that he knew he should have a) woken me up with the news and b) gone to hospital for an X-ray. But he’d had the stomach for neither. He thought the rest of us would be angry with him but I was more taken aback than anything. I’d have been more pissed off if he had woken me up. On the morning of the game I felt I had to be careful not to lose my own focus, so I made a quick decision about selection and moved on. Privately, I was proud of him.
In many more ways than were obviously apparent, the four of us, and Maco, set the tone and standard of a good club that fulfilled some, though certainly not all, of the promise that was evident from the day we met. Now we sat over dinner, 30 years and some 12,000 miles away from Southampton, crystallising our past in a happy few hours together.
After almost a year, Robin moved out of his brother’s place and in with his folks. He sleeps there on a sofa bed to this day. He looks after his mum and has become closer than ever to his dad. He has fallen in love with Karen, a gorgeous and spiritual girl who lives in the flat above. She has three children in a small two-bed space. They live a simple life and are devoted to one another.
There was a hiccup in September 2015, when Robin drifted back towards an uglier self, but he has ridden out the storm. Chris was furious and cut back his brother’s responsibility at work. Karen said simply, ‘I can live with a drunk but not a drunk and three kids. The choice is yours.’ For him, there was no choice. For a year now he has looked well and fit, if a tad too thin and greyer on top than most men his age. He is off the turps and the old smile still sparkles. My affection for him burns as brightly now as it did 30 years ago.
He called recently to say he had some coaching work and was planning to become less dependent on Kippy. He called again to say the coaching work had doubled in the last few months and that his old club, Claremont-Nedlands, had hired him to work with the juniors. Lucky them. He added that he had bought an apartment for the children in the same block as him and the folks. I could have cried.
He sounds alive. A good mind is ticking over in a way it may never have done previously. No one gave him much credit for his mind, just for his cricket and sense of fun. Maybe there is another man in there that we missed. He even did some television analyst work in Pakistan and it went down well.
I think Robin Arnold Smith has turned the corner. For the moment, we can say that a tragedy has been avoided. But there is something Shakespearean in the narrative. I both admire and love this family. I shall never desert Robin, whatever the provocation. He is a good man and I care for him in a way that is hard to explain adequately. I care for them all. Perhaps, it is simply how a captain cares for those who follow him over many long summers. Cricket both shaped and determined the first part of Robin’s life, during which he was at once fearless and fragile. Now he faces the challenge of the second part. Cricket changed the life of all of his family. I wonder if they still see it as a beautiful game. I think so.
PART 2
Thinking about the game
In the dressing room at Hampshire—on the verge of retirement and looking to the future.
CHAPTER 6
The art of batting
Batting is frequently difficult and frustrating but even the most prosaic of batsmen can give pleasure with a moment of brilliance. It is mainly an instinctive skill and yet relies on method for its excellence.
Nothing, not even ballet, could be more graceful than a cover drive by David Gower or an on drive by V.V.S. Laxman. Batting pleases the eye because it is a thing of straight lines that are subject to angles and dimensions. Each innings is an interpretation.
Above all, batting is fragile. One minute you have it, the next it is gone. A single ball will undo hours, days, weeks of preparation. For sure, batting—cricket, indeed—is not to be trusted. It is played out on the edge of nerves. It examines character, explores personality and exposes vulnerabilities. A batsman scores a hundred one day and nought the next. This is wicked, it is unkind, but it is tempting and it is exhilarating. Raise your bat once and you will ache to do so again.
The art of batting is a beautiful journey with a beautiful result. This beauty holds its place in our heart even at a time when all roads point to change. It is why there is an immense responsibility
as we search to modernise a game that has its roots in the past. After all, it is those roots that define cricket.
TECHNIQUE
I once asked Barry Richards how it was that he unfailingly played forward when the ball was pitched up and back when it was short. Most of us see a blur a couple of yards away and do our best. He looked at me almost sympathetically. ‘It’s all about watching the ball in the hand and then from the hand. If it’s released here [marginally behind the bowler’s head, he demonstrated], it will be pitched up, so you can start thinking of transferring your weight forward. If it’s released here [marginally in front of the bowler’s head], you can reckon on playing back. Somewhere in the middle is a good length.’ Blimey.
Finding this hard to comprehend, I approached Sir Garry Sobers at a cocktail party in Barbados. I told him of the conversation but did not mention with whom. ‘Yes, exactly right,’ said Sobers. ‘How else do you pick up length?’ How else indeed. Then he asked who it was I had spoken to. When I answered Barry, his face lit up. ‘That man could really bat,’ he said. The great journalist and broadcaster Tony Cozier was with us and we whiled away the evening with rum and talk of great players and teams. It was hard to imagine anyone beating the best of Barbados: Greenidge, Desmond Haynes or Conrad Hunte, the three Ws—Clyde Walcott, Everton Weekes and Frank Worrell—Sobers, Seymour Nurse perhaps, Marshall, Joel Garner, Wes Hall and one of Charlie Griffith, Wayne Daniel or Sylvester Clarke. The Transvaal side of the early 1980s would have given them a good game, along with a New South Wales team or two. Sir Garry wanted a punt on his own blokes.
When Gower came to Hampshire, I told him about my question to Richards and Sobers. He said that after a rough time against Dennis Lillee, he approached Greg Chappell for some advice. Chappell told him he was playing the wrong half of the ball. ‘Dennis is running it across you, so you have to play the outside half of the ball. You’re committed to the inside half.’ Good grief. Gower said he understood it and responded with some better returns.
Justin Langer told Ian Chappell he was sick of getting hit by the short ball. Chappell told him to focus on the hand that had the ball in it and nothing else—in other words, not a general area but specifically the ball in the hand. ‘You pretty much can’t get hit if you do that: your eye and brain will work faster than the ball.’ Langer was staggered at the improvement. I wish I’d asked Chappell the same question 40 years ago.
Most average batsmen watch an area and predict an outcome. Few actually follow the ball from hand to bat. It is such a common fault in batting that I am surprised it is a not a feature of coaching and subject to intense training of eye and mind.
The usual instruction is to move your feet but to do this you must pick up the length of the ball quickly. After a difficult season against fast bowling in 1987, I sought the advice of Jimmy Gray, who had played in Ingleby-Mackenzie’s 1961 championship-winning side and had been recommended to me by Mike Gatting. He suggested I worry less about my feet than my head. To exaggerate this point, he tied my feet together and attached the rope to the side netting in the indoor school at Southampton. Two things happened: a) I stayed still—obviously—and timed the ball consistently well; and b) my head and eyes stayed level, which made it easier to hit the ball back from whence it came. It occurred to me that I was watching the ball more closely because I was less concerned about where my feet should go and more concerned about the ball. I backed eye and instinct and reacted accordingly. Gray noticed improved footwork, which I imagine came from my head being in the right place. The only difficult shot in this practice routine was the cover drive, so I ignored it for a while and soon found that I was leaving the ball alone outside off stump with more confidence. I spent the back end of a winter with Gray, working on these two aspects of batting, and played pretty well the following summer. I noticed that bowlers were forced to bowl straighter and that I could pick them off more easily. The law, I suppose, of unintended consequences.
Batting is a subjective skill and has changed considerably in the time I have been involved with the game. On uncovered pitches and before the introduction of helmets, the tendency was to play back. This allowed more time to judge the speed of the ball’s arrival, especially if the pitch was wet, and more space to cope with uneven bounce. The clarion call on uncovered pitches was for ‘soft hands’, meaning a loose grip and a gentle method of letting the ball come to you before dropping it safely at your feet. If you study footage of Denis Compton against Keith Miller, for example, or of the Australians being bowled out by Jim Laker at Old Trafford in 1956, you will see back play almost exclusively. Just occasionally, a player emerged to buck the trend. Foremost among them was Tom Graveney, who was best known for his cover drive and much admired for his ability to hook and pull off the front foot.
We were taught a sideways-on game, both in stance and execution of strokes, but it always struck me as odd not to line up the ball with both eyes. Thus, I believe the ideal stance has the right eye (for right-handers and vice versa for left-handers) less closed off than in some coaching manuals and level with the left. This means that the head and shoulders will be a little more open than in a perceived classical stance. The hips should be on the same plane as the shoulders, approximately pointing at the non-striker. Then the knees should be flexed and the weight of the body on the balls of the feet. In the modern era, no one has proved the value of this set-up better than Sachin Tendulkar, though it looks as though Virat Kohli has taken a lot from him.
Tendulkar’s longevity is testament to such detail in batting. Rarely, for example, did he fall over to the off side and play around his front pad. Occasionally, he was lbw playing across the line of the ball but that error came from judgement not technique. The set-up that allows the right eye to help pick up the ball clearly also gives the batsman a better feel for his off stump and the option to leave deliveries that target Geoffrey Boycott’s famed ‘corridor of uncertainty’. Importantly, this stance creates freedom for the straight drive, which is the best of all strokes because there is no fielder behind the stumps at the bowler’s end.
Bradman set up this way and nobody picked length quicker than Bradman. Alec Bedser told me that he consciously over-pitched to The Don, because the speed of his footwork turned good-length balls into short balls that he pulled through mid wicket. This was the hardest stroke to defend against, added Bedser, because Bradman never seemed to miss his spot.
Greg Chappell, Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge and Martin Crowe are further examples of such a set-up. Ian Chappell and Javed Miandad were a touch more open; Ted Dexter and Barry Richards a touch more closed. Sobers made sure his eyes were level and wasn’t bothered about being opened up on the back foot. In fact, he came to advocate it but, then, Garry was a one-off. Sobers simplified the issue of footwork by going back to fast bowling and forward to spin. There is a fabulous picture of him facing Dennis Lillee during his brilliant 254 for the World XI at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1971–72. Lillee has let go of the ball and not a muscle in Sobers’ body has moved. I guess you don’t need a trigger movement if you already know where you are heading.
In his book The Art of Cricket, Bradman advocates a small movement back and across to trigger the muscles and mind. This was the accepted norm among players in the era before the covering of pitches because it bought time to watch for and counter awkward bounce and allowed for more options against the short ball. Loading up on the back foot allows a natural move forward to drive, but the player must be careful not to have his weight stuck only on the back foot. The key is keep the body weight evenly spread, as it would be in the stance.
Many a fine batsman has used the forward press as his trigger, Greenidge among them. He preferred loading up on the front foot and then springing back to cut, pull and hook. He was also flexible enough to adapt his technique for pitches and opponents. Once, on a dangerously uneven surface at the Oval, he took on Sylvester Clarke almost exclusively from his back foot. This was the innings during which he swapped his he
lmet for a sun hat. ‘To sharpen up,’ he said.
Generally, batting requires a few non-negotiables and offers plenty of variables. Among the non-negotiables are a still head; high left elbow (we are still using a right-hander as the model); gun-barrel straight bat; body shape maintained throughout the hitting area; dominant left side of the body; and the left hand—the top hand—as the guiding force in both defence and attack.
The backlift is definitely a variable. Bradman, Boycott and Viv Richards all picked it up towards second slip and looped in back down the line. A surprising majority pick it up straight and swing it back down the same line. Ted Dexter and Barry Richards led the call for an open face with the wrist-cock opening the blade of the bat during pick-up. Others prefer the face closed.
Tony Greig stood with his bat aloft at about stump height. Graham Gooch and Clive Rice, too. Greig, being so tall, did so purely for comfort. Gooch wanted to ensure his eyes were level and found that holding the bat low and tapping it in the crease led to his head falling over to the off side, which, in turn, led to a tendency to play around his front pad. Rice didn’t feel any great need for the trigger, choosing instead to be in position as early as possible and drop the bat on his drives rather than hit through them.
Experimentally, I tried most of these and found the greatest comfort with the bat held up—like Gooch, for whom I had the greatest admiration. I was looking to counter fast bowling by being as ready as possible as early as possible. This, though, became a trade-off against getting properly forward to pitched-up deliveries and I found myself constantly tinkering and modifying this part of my set-up, much to the amusement and sometimes frustration of my teammates. Boycott says I played with my feet ‘in a piss pot’, so I wouldn’t say I found the answer. In the little cricket I played after retiring from the first-class game, I went back to a more orthodox stance and found it easier. We do tend to over-complicate.
A Beautiful Game Page 14
