Why did Australia’s best batsmen suffer a calamitous failure of concentration and technique?
The Australians’ score in the recent test against South Africa. Photo Lee Warren/Getty Images
Those who see athletes as machines and fail to understand why they can’t do today what they did without breaking sweat last week must be flummoxed by batting collapses.
How can it happen? How can a batting line-up with dozens of test centuries to its credit get skittled for the kiddie cricket score of 47, as Australia did in Cape Town recently?
Why did Australia’s best batsmen suffer a calamitous failure of concentration and technique? Why did an experienced team renowned for its fighting spirit succumb to a panic attack?
New Zealand had a stake in this since we hold the ignominious record for the lowest total in test cricket history: 26 against England at Eden Park in 1955. When Australia was nine wickets down for 21, it looked as if we’d have the immense pleasure of handing cricket’s booby prize to our patronising neighbours. Sadly, a pair of bowlers proved more productive than all the specialist batsmen put together.
To put the events of 1955 in perspective, New Zealand were rolled by one of the great English teams, fresh from a resounding series win in Australia during which they twice dismissed the home side for 111. (Ironically, 111 is English cricket’s bogey number – it resembles the stumps with the bails removed; the Aussie equivalent is 87, 13 short of 100.)
Back then, New Zealand was the weakest of the test-playing nations. In fact, Australia refused to play us during the 1950s and 60s on the grounds we couldn’t scrape together a team capable of making a game of it. Now and again they’d send over a bunch of has-beens and wannabes under the Australia A banner.
The English captain, Len Hutton, supposedly told his tailenders that if they could eke out a 50-odd run first innings lead, England wouldn’t have to bat again. The story may be apocryphal, but Hutton – England’s first professional captain; his predecessors were amateurs, or “gentlemen” as opposed to “players” – had an acute feel for the game and would have known a rout was always on the cards given the mismatch between the New Zealand batting and his superb and superbly balanced bowling attack spearheaded by the express pace of Frank “Typhoon” Tyson.
In any event New Zealand went into bat a second time 46 runs behind and lost by an innings and 20 runs.
I can speak with some authority on the subject of batting collapses, having been in a school first eleven that was bowled out for 19. (I was the not out batsman; not out nought since you ask.)
To make matters worse, like Australia we had had the better of the game to that point and needed only to occupy the crease for a couple of hours to secure a first innings win against the only team ahead of us on the table. On top of this, the debacle took place on the last Saturday of the school year and was witnessed by a large, disbelieving and increasingly sullen gathering of parents and siblings.
Most batting collapses are perfect storms, rare events that occur when a host of factors coincide. On other days batsmen will play and miss till bowlers are blue in the face; this is the day when every airy flirt results in a catchable snick, every catchable snick is in fact caught, and every marginal umpiring decision goes the fielding team’s way.
Once the wickets start to tumble, panic sets in and routines go out the window. The dressing room descends into chaos, with oaths and bats flying every which way. Middle- and lower-order batsmen used to relaxing in the sun observing proceedings and absorbing the rhythm of the game must pad up in a mad rush.
Thus batsmen find themselves taking guard with scrambled thought processes and two left-handed batting gloves, or realising, as a fired-up fast bowler charges in, they have forgotten to install that essential piece of equipment euphemistically known as an abdominal protector.
This is the opposite of being dressed for success.