The ball that changed cricket
Unblessed with much pace, staying agile lest they get left behind, the game’s seam bowlers are a resourceful bunch. The popularisation of the wobble-seam delivery has been transformative for a new breed of trundler – we’re talking Vern Philander, Mohammad Abbas, Scott Boland, Sam Cook – whose innocuous pace is offset by an uncanny ability to land the ball on the edge of the seam so it jags away off its initial path. The delivery – first perfected by Stuart Clark, then adopted by Stuart Broad and described memorably by the great bowling coach Troy Cooley as a “dirty seam” – has helped to usher in an era of nosediving batting averages, where bowlers now hold sway.
No-look sixes
Cricket’s equivalent of the rabona. Is it necessary? Not really. Is it cool? Unquestionably. Dewald Brevis is now the showboater-in-chief, though with Harry Brook hot on his heels, it’s all set up beautifully for HB to skew one in a Test and get savaged by the masses. That he’ll be on 140-odd at the time will be entirely beside the point.
Neck guards
In late November 2014, 48 hours after the Australian left-hander Phillip Hughes was struck on his neck while attempting a pull shot to a Sean Abbott bouncer at the SCG, the catastrophic news came through. The impact had crushed the vertebral artery, causing it to split and provoking a massive brain haemorrhage. Hughes had not regained consciousness and died three days before his 26th birthday. His doctor explained that fewer than 100 such cases had been recorded in medical literature.
The outpouring of grief was overwhelming, spreading far beyond cricket’s usual confines. An IT worker and former Sydney grade cricketer put his bat outside his house, his club cap on the handle, and posted a photograph on Twitter. Within hours, thousands across the world had done the same. In New York, Hugh Jackman propped up a cricket bat on an empty stage before a Broadway performance. In Munich, Elton John dedicated Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me to Hughes.
Within weeks, helmet manufacturers had designed a neck guard – a bulky piece of high-impact plastic attached to the bottom rim of the helmet – to protect the fateful region, and soon enough most players were wearing them. The neck guard is now compulsory in Australian cricket – an unshakeable visual reminder of that terrible day, when the game changed for ever.
Round-the-wicket to lefties
Stuart Broad might not have started it, but he’s damn well patented it. Now standard fare for a right-armer to “stand it up” against the angle, it’s become a genuinely transformative move that reduces the advantages that have been enjoyed by southpaws since Frank Woolley first stayed leg-side to cuff one away.
Mystery spinners
The game today is awash with leggies, left-arm wristies, carrom-ball merchants, ambidextrous twirlers and round-arm specialists. Every white-ball team worth their salt has at least one bowler who does magical, mysterious things with a cricket ball. Thanks to Rashid Khan, Mujeeb Ur Rahman, Noor Ahmad and other such players, Afghanistan have built an entire cricketing culture on the back of it. The carrom – a delivery squeezed out from between the thumb and the middle finger, with the effect of sending the ball breaking in the opposite way to a standard off-break – is perhaps the most audacious of the lot, and a further reminder that whatever short-form cricket takes from the game it gives back tenfold.
The Indian Premier League
It’s the second most lucrative sports league in the world, the final destination, the grandest theatre, the biggest kahuna, the perpetual content-generating supercasino from which all else flows, and no more than a few hundred souls alive can remember who won yesterday.
Congratulating fielders for doing their job
When, say, a barista successfully pours you a coffee, or a delivery guy skulks up to your door with another oversized cardboard envelope (are there any other jobs these days?), you don’t round up the neighbours for a burst of pan-smashing applause like we’re back in the weird days, and you certainly don’t give them a hearty slap on the bum for their troubles. So why, when a cover fielder flops on a plinked drive to save a couple, does it prompt this gush of overweening public emotion? I know they’re all lovely caring sorts in touch with their inner child and look it’s nice to be nice, but really … do we have to? They’re meant to stop the bleeding thing. Mercifully, this is one professional affectation which has yet to bleed into the recreational game, a sanctity where cricket is to be endured, grudgingly; and never, at any stage, no matter what, enjoyed.
Smartphones
Players today have to hand their phones to the match referee, lest they get a suspect phone call in the middle of a match from a chap called John asking about pitch conditions and who’s the most hungover in the dressing room. Oh, and on that, while we’re here, our poor harassed heroes can’t just let their hair down and go around town smashing stuff up any more before some craven onlooker with a cameraphone has stuck it up on Instagram. Social media really has ruined everything.
Pads
In the old days, wicketkeeping pads were, well, batting pads. Think Farokh Engineer, Deryck Murray etc, stump under one arm, surfboards attached to their legs, flapping about to dodge the onrushing pitch invasion. These days, pads are a very different story, so dainty that they occasionally sit inside the trouser leg. Sarah Taylor once went the whole hog, dispensing with them altogether. An epic flex on her part – but when you’ve got hands like hers, who needs protection?
Tattoos
Obviously Darren Gough got one – and Michael Slater famously got the digits 356 as his Baggy Green cap number, only to discover that Brendon Julian was actually 356 – but overall the 1990s was a tattoo-free zone. Then Kevin Pietersen came along, beyond-parodying himself with a three lions, Andrew Flintoff got busy, and now every other journeyman trundler has their bowling arm inked up with a mix of Chinese proverbs, serpents, floral blondes and self-help bilge.
Podcasts
In 2004, the Guardian writer Ben Hammersley was trying to describe the rise of lo-fi amateur recording programmes delivered on RSS feeds, of a kind that would tend to be played on early versions of the iPod. He came up with a portmanteau and settled on the term “podcast”. Today, the media landscape is awash with them, and cricket is no different. Some are good, some are great and some are awful, but everyone’s got one and inevitably players have now got involved, using the medium to control their own narratives, promote energy supplements, and pretend to interview their mates.
Four-day Tests
The conversations are getting louder around four-day Test cricket. If the game itself is being squeezed – even those uninspiring two-Test series are now being halved – we have to work around the new reality. The case as it stands: four-day Tests with a non-negotiable minimum number of overs to be bowled per day offer cricket boards greater flexibility – and incentives – to include more matches in a series. They can ease player workloads. They give the smaller nations a leg-up into Test cricket: for sides such as Ireland and Zimbabwe, who have both played Test cricket in England in recent years, playing those games over four days gives them more of a chance of at least avoiding defeat.
There is, too, a recognition that matches are on average being completed in fewer overs than ever before: a Cricinfo study in 2024 showed that Test durations are getting shorter with each passing decade, with an average match span for the decade from January 2020 to March 2024 standing at 295 overs, which equates to roughly three days and a session. And there is also the tactical element – with modern teams now more attack-minded, the four-day Test opens up options for strategic ingenuity. The marquee series, meanwhile, would remain unaffected at five days. But, while an air of change and renewal swirls around the long game, some things – by which, let’s be honest, we mean the finest things – really are best left alone.
Covid tests and Covid Tests
When the world locked down, English cricket was faced with a bleak dilemma: fulfil its fixtures or risk financial ruin. While advocates for the recreational game were lobbying government to allow cricket to be played outdoors – talks weren’t helped by Boris Johnson blustering on the fly about a cricket ball being a “vector of disease” – the England and Wales Cricket Board was persuading the West Indies and Pakistan to make the trip to Covid-ravaged Britain to play three Tests each in two surreally empty, hermetically sealed cricket grounds – Old Trafford and Southampton – chosen because they happened to have hotels onsite. Thus began two mind-bendingly unhinged years that culminated, at least for England’s cricketers, in a collective breakdown in Australia in 2021-22.
Evolving language
The game’s lexicon of weird phrases and absurd terms remains a cherished part of the experience. A random half-hour listening to unfiltered TMS, all heavy lengths, deep points and backward squares, is to remind you of the game’s essential madness. Yet within this, the language is constantly evolving. Not everyone likes the shift to non-gendered terminology. To some, “batter” will always be the stuff with which your fish is coated. But to others, it’s a harmless adjustment – like “deep third” instead of “third man” – that demonstrates a symbolic shift in our thinking. And if folks are still looking to be offended or affronted by something, then save your energies for the new language of cliche: executing plans, anybody?
Angry celebrations
Nasser Hussain’s three-fingered rebuke to the press; Denesh Ramdin’s unbearably sad child’s note invoking Viv Richards to “talk nah”; Virat Kohli erupting at the gods for some imagined slight on his manhood. Cricketers today seem trapped in a sonic dichotomy, simultaneously “blocking out the noise” while at the same time loudly “silencing the doubters”. It’s all good theatre, of course, and at least it shows they care.
And 10 things we’ve lost this century …
The doosra
It came, it went the other way, it cleared off. For a moment there, the doosra (“other one” in Urdu) looked like it would conquer the world, until it became clear that in order to bowl it effectively you needed to be a physical freak or a cheat. Cricket Australia discouraged the coaching of it, the game closed ranks, and Alex Loudon went to work in the City.
Silly-point
In retrospect, Ricky Ponting spitting blood and instructing Matt Prior to fuck off after getting mashed in the mush in 2009 was the moment that cricket’s most nominatively determinist position finally jumped the shark. Silly then, even sillier now.
The follow-on
It used to consume us. Will they or won’t they? What happens if they fail to avoid the thing? Then VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid came along, butchered it to death under the Kolkata sun, and we all came to realise that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It died its final death at Wellington three years ago when Ben Stokes, high on his own supply and targeting a bonus 18 holes, stuck them in again and lost the game by a run.
Six-Test series
Most teams don’t get that in a year these days.
Cigarette sponsorship
Gaspers, snouts, javelins, darts. It seems they have gone right out of fashion. Just as well that county cricketers are unconcerned with trends, or indeed the wider world at all, and thus you will find many of its number persisting with a crafty blast behind the sheds. But sponsorship? Ploughing cash and cartons into cricket’s yellow-fingered palms? Stubbed out. Extinguished. Vale, the John Player. Farewell, the B&H. These days it’s all investment banks, offshore betting and peanut butter. Progress, eh.
Rest days
Back then, most Test matches had a rest day. Until the mid-1990s, at least in England, we were still kicking back on Sundays. (Not everywhere, you understand. Some grounds needed the money of a Sunday crowd. But Lord’s, bless it, persisted until the very last.) Slowly it was phased out, and nowadays it occurs only if a match clashes with, say, a country’s election day, as with Sri Lanka v New Zealand a couple of years ago. Fact of the day: Sanjay Manjrekar has an album called Rest Day. Recorded in his prime. Another time, another time.
Umpires with quirks
With due respect to the great Marais Erasmus, a jolly soul who evidently spends much of his job quietly recalling the best farts he did in school, there is a deep absence of umpires with a bit about them, not least since Rudi “Slow Death” Koertzen and “Big” Steve Bucknor downed their fingers in the late 2000s. Where is Billy’s busted digit when you need it? Dave Shep’s bucolic carry-on? Blame technology.
The Waca
An arid desert of a pitch. Outfields readying for wildfires. Floodlights lurking like Ted Hughes’s Iron Man bearing down on hunks of crumbling concrete stained with the blood of the fallen. This is Perth: where English cricket goes to die. The Waca is still there, but these days resting; now it’s the Optus – superficially similar, but with a sheen of respectability, of corporatist polish. The viewing experience is cleaner, safer; there’s even such a thing as shade. But what is Test cricket in Perth if not a savage scrap with the elements?
Gravy and Mayfield
If you don’t know the legend of Gravy and Mayfield, then you may never understand West Indies cricket. A pair of Antiguan drag queens, literally gyrating off the rafters at the old Rec in downtown St John’s, enacting scenes of pantomime villainy for the masses as Chickie’s Disco takes care of the tunes and the boys in the middle bash the ball to oblivion. This used to be Test cricket in the West Indies.
Rabbits
Wither, dear reader, another cherished delicacy, wolfed down the engorged gullet of dull modernity. Chaps these days are not allowed to be useless batters. They must instead offer “value”, be “rounded”, “multifaceted” cricketers. No longer is there virtue in turning up seven minutes after the start with your flannels in a rucksack, sleeping through the first innings and winning the game in the gloaming with a flash of flight and guile. Modern life is indeed rubbish.
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