Modern batsmen are far too blase about leaving the crease — we were more careful
Never trust anyone, they are all out to get you.
While a feeling of paranoia may not necessarily be the ideal state of mind for a batsman, I have always thought that high levels of suspicion are necessary when out in the middle, because whether it is bowlers with their bags of tricks, captains with their clever plans or grubby wicketkeepers awaiting a moment’s inattention, there is always someone attempting to outwit you.
As a batter, you are in enemy territory. It is the fielders’ field and you are an unwelcome visitor – in their eyes, hopefully one not lingering too long.
It is best to realise that they are in charge. “Leave that, that’s ours,” Jack Russell, the Gloucestershire wicketkeeper, once growled at me when I considered being helpful and picking the ball up.
There is the famous story of Allan Border’s response to Robin Smith in a 1989 Ashes Test, when the batsman Smith asked the Australian captain if he could get a glass of water, to which Border replied: “What do think this is, a f...ing tea-party?”
It is usually held up as an example of Aussie gruffness and toughness – and Border did typify that at times but he is also a wonderful man of cricket, with his recently revealed Parkinson’s diagnosis a real sadness – but for me it is more of a telling throwback to an age of fewer hold-ups in play and batters not constantly being allowed drinks and changes of gloves. That only happened in extreme circumstances, and only then with the permission of the fielding captain. Now, batters just seem to do as they please.
Which, of course, brings us to the Jonny Bairstow stumping at Lord’s on Sunday and a long-held opinion of mine that today’s batters have become far too blase about wandering out of their crease.
For batters of my generation, it was engraved into your very soul that you should only ever leave your crease when permitted to do so. It was absolutely de rigueur to check with the wicketkeeper, captain or umpires that the ball was dead before going off to do some mid-pitch gardening, or to have one of those highly intellectual conversations with your partner at the end of the over ("Runs!” I would always reply to my partner Hugh Morris when he asked what a bowler was bowling, just to make him laugh).
It led to me developing a rather ridiculous superstition that I had to tap my bat in my crease at the end of every over, regardless of what had just happened. So, for instance, if I had hit a boundary off the last ball (rare!) and, having begun to run, had ended up in the middle of the pitch with my batting partner, I would then have to go back to the crease and tap before chatting to my partner.
Weird, yes, but it was borne of that survival instinct, of the fear that just possibly I was somewhere I shouldn’t be. Ben Stokes, who is a little more superstitious than most might assume (he was wearing Jack Leach’s box when making that 135 not out at Headingley in 2019, simply because he had to borrow it in a rush in the previous Test at Lord’s, where he also made a century), has a little habit of making a semi-circle with his bat in his crease at the end of an over.
On Sunday, Bairstow did make a mark with his right boot in his crease after Cameron Green had bowled the bouncer that launched a thousand and more ships from the harbour of indignation, but there was not a glance backwards – did he even realise the ball had bounced in front of the wicketkeeper, Alex Carey, before marching off up the pitch as if he owned it and as if he could declare the ball dead? It was so dozy.
Not that I am sure that I would have continued with the appeal in this instance. As with Mankads, which are usually another example of idle-minded wandering down the pitch - watch the bowler and anticipate in order to leave the crease at the same time as the ball is delivered - most cricketers know what feels right or wrong, without having to invoke some nebulous spirit of cricket. Indeed, had Carey hesitated for a moment with ball in gloves, then thrown the ball in spying Bairstow meandering away, you would hope that the captain, Pat Cummins, might have acted differently.
Amid all this hullabaloo, it is easily forgotten how smart Carey was in the dismissal of Ben Duckett, stationing himself on the batsman’s leg side rather than the customary off side for the inevitable bouncer that Duckett gloved. Had Carey been positioned on the off side he probably would not have taken that catch. It is something New Zealand’s wicketkeepers, BJ Watling and Tom Blundell, have done regularly during Neil Wagner’s bouncer barrages.
Keepers are crafty beggars and Carey had spotted some previous insouciance from Bairstow and then attempted to exploit it with a speculative throw.
Earlier in the Lord’s Test, Bairstow had attempted such a throw because Marnus Labuschagne was standing outside his crease. That is, of course, a very different scenario, but a reminder that the ball is not necessarily dead because it has landed in the wicketkeepers’s gloves.
And it is worth thinking back to a one-day international between England and Ireland in 2019 and Ben Foakes’s stumping of Andy Balbirnie. Foakes waited with ball in hand after an attempted sweep by Balbirnie and then took the bails off as the batsman eventually tried to regain his balance. Russell did exactly the same to me once in a County Championship match in Cardiff. I was not happy.
But most batters will look immediately to some other reason for dismissal than themselves. That is a natural defence mechanism. Poor umpiring decision, some idiot walking behind the arm, done in poor spirit, best ball ever bowled - the list of excuses is endless. We have all exhausted them time and time again.
Bairstow will know that he made a mistake – just as I think Mitchell Starc will do so now, once the dust has settled over his controversial non-catch on Saturday evening.
And Bairstow will not make that mistake again. As Sir Andrew Strauss said later when Stuart Broad exaggeratedly tapped his bat in the crease after ducking under a Cummins bouncer at the end of an over: “That’s exactly what Jonny Bairstow should have done.”
Indeed, it is. Stay in your crease!
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