Should CSA receive a bill from Centurion in the coming weeks, it could be for repairs that needed to be carried out to the ceiling of the indoor nets in the wake of Keshav Maharaj’s assault on the infrastructure on Tuesday.
Maharaj hammered ball after ball upward in down-the-ground fashion. The net that covered the ceiling stood no chance, and ball after ball hit metal with a dystopian clang. “Just working on my swing, it’s coming right,” Maharaj said. He’s always played a more emphatic game than he has talked.
And, to be fair, his swing has needed work. Before he scored 5 in the first match of South Africa’s T20I series against India, at Kingsmead on Friday, Maharaj suffered ducks in his previous four international innings – in Tests in Port-of-Spain, Providence, Mirpur and Chattogram.
Not that he has been a chronic liability with the bat. Maharaj has scored five Test half-centuries, featuring a best effort of 84 and three in the 70s. He and Tabraiz Shamsi were unlikely last-wicket heroes in South Africa’s tense win over Pakistan at Chepauk during last year’s World Cup, when they got their team home with a run-a-ball stand of 11.
That was a prime example of a trend that will only grow. Another instance was seen at St George’s Park on Sunday, when South Africa levelled the T20I series with two games to play. Without Gerald Coetzee’s unbeaten 19 off nine balls, in a matchwinning unbroken stand of 42 off 20 with Tristan Stubbs, India would likely have taken an unassailable 2-0 lead.
Behold the modern swing towards bowlers who are expected to show batting ability, especially in white-ball matches. That’s different from what’s required of allrounders, as Hardik Pandya showed on Sunday with his 45-ball 39 not out – India’s top score in a difficult innings of 124/6. That’s what allrounders are for. But bowlers who must also score runs or at least occupy an end sturdily? What’s that about?
A generation ago, cricket was agog about wicketkeepers being selected primarily because they could bat. That phenomenon has since been reversed: frontline batters are routinely turned into keepers. So much so that when Ben Foakes dazzled all with his superb glovework but it was clear that was his strong suit, he aroused the converse of the disbelief that greeted Major League Baseball’s Shohei Ohtani. He pitches! He bats! How could this possibly be?!
Foakes has scored two centuries and four 50s in his 46 Test innings, and in his only ODI he made 61. But, from his Test debut in November 2018, he has played in only 25 of England’s 76 matches in the format. Jonny Bairstow and Jos Buttler have been behind the stumps in 35 of the others. Foakes is a better keeper than either of them, but they are better batters than him.
This is now settled logic in cricket, but only because it is viewed through a narrow, shallow lens. There would be shocked silence in the third T20I in Centurion on Wednesday should Heinrich Klaasen get rid of his gloves to bowl the off-spin that has earned him a dozen wickets, two of them at first-class level. But no-one would blink were Klaasen to appear without the tools of his trade, and Ryan Rickelton or Stubbs was gloved and padded up instead.
Part of this comes down to the shape of cricket itself. If a team deploys 11 bowlers, something has gone drastically wrong. Or the game has become drastically boring. In the 9,340 innings in men’s Tests yet played, it’s happened only four times. That’s 0.043%. All of those matches were drawn.
In the first of them, at the Oval in August 1884, England’s Alfred Lyttelton emerged from behind the stumps to take 4/19 against Australia. In the most recent instance, at St John’s in Antigua in March 2005, Mark Boucher discarded his gloves and pads to bowl eight deliveries – the last removing Dwayne Bravo for 107 to end an innings of 747.
Of course, it’s far more common that teams are bowled out. Of those 9,340 Test innings, sides have been dismissed in 6,369. That’s 68.19%. Hence the additional responsibility lumped on bowlers to know more about batting than which end of the implement to hold.
How did that make Arshdeep Singh feel? “As long as the wicket is flat and the bowlers are medium paced, I love it,” he said, not entirely seriously, during a press conference on Tuesday.
“And I love a half volley from a spinner. But, yes, I’m trying my best to contribute with the bat as well whenever I get a chance. Even in the nets, I try to challenge myself and see how I can improve in all three aspects of the game; batting, bowling or fielding. So it’s always been the idea – how well we can do in all three aspects as a team.”
Did this mean when bowlers gather to plot their approach in a particular match, they talk about their batting at least some of the time? Not quite, Marco Jansen told a press conference: “There’s batters’ meetings and there’s bowlers’ meetings, so we always try and be in the batters’ meetings. And then, on occasion, we have our allrounders’ chat because we’re going to be there at the end most of the time.
“We’ve had a lot of good chats in terms of how we want to go about it, because we know if we’re in a good position, we can just go [aggressively]. And then we have guys like [Klaasen, Stubbs and David Miller] to guide us and help us. If it’s us [bowlers] who have to make the play, then that’s the whole discussion – how we’re going to go about it, how we’re going to get ourselves through if we’re in a difficult situation, how we’re going to get into an average or potentially winning position.
“The chat is always about keeping our intent up. If I’m in next, it’s my job to gauge the intent from the opposition’s point of view. My goal is to either match them or to take my intent higher than theirs. If my mindset is clear I can make good, clear decisions.”
Shaun Pollock, a bowling allrounder, remembers walking into the Wanderers dressing room between innings on March 12, 2006, to hear Jacques Kallis, a batting allrounder, say, “Right, the bowlers have done their job. Australia are 15 runs short.”
No doubt that was a joke: the Aussies had scored 434/4, then the world record total in ODIs. But only until South Africa replied with 438/9 with a ball to spare. Everyone remembers Boucher muscling Brett Lee to the long-on boundary for four to seal victory. Fewer remember what happened the ball before. Makhaya Ntini, who averaged 9.84 in Test cricket, who made nine ducks in his 47 ODI innings, nudged the first delivery he faced deftly to deep third and took a single. The stroke was the epitome of coolth under pressure. Importantly, it put Boucher back on strike. Without Ntini’s singular intervention, Australia would probably have won.
Not for the first time, and not the last, a bowler had done their bit with the bat.

By IPL Agent

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