Alastair Cook was dismissed by Ravindra Jadeja six times in 10 innings on England’s recent tour of India, an incident rate statisticians would refer to as a significant cluster.
Cook is unlikely to face Jadeja again in conditions so helpful to the bowler but did the left-arm spinner spot a flaw and exploit it, or was it just a case of one man getting inside the head of another over a five-match series?
Cricket is a team game comprised of individual performances, so it should be no surprise when certain bowlers and batsmen begin to dominate the other. These days, with hours of TV footage available at the click of a mouse, players are scrutinised as never before. There is nowhere to hide, which is why batsmen and bowlers must forever come up with solutions, often at short notice.
In Chennai, Cook did this, though his counter to being dismissed by Jadeja in the first innings, when he was caught at slip playing inside the line of a ball that did not turn, brought about a different downfall in the second when he was caught at leg-slip.
The psychology of dominance makes finding solutions a complicated business. Cook’s first innings dismissal in Chennai came about for two reasons – firstly, because he felt the ball might turn in to him out of the bowlers’ foot holes (it didn’t); and secondly, because Jadeja had already got him lbw several times in the series, falling across his off-stump, he was doubly determined to stand firm and not overbalance again.
Of course having nicked off to slip, he was also mindful of not doing that again, which saw him revert back to his old ways of getting across the stumps, head tilting beyond the perpendicular. That led to him not being able to control the leg-glance Jadeja deliberately induced by firing the ball outside leg-stump or the catch KL Rahul was on hand to take at leg-slip.
The head falling over is a common glitch among tall batsmen like Cook. I always remember Don Bradman’s advice to tall players when batting, to get their arses lower, something Virat Kohli certainly did when subjugating England’s spinners. When the head goes, the feet, for some reason, don’t tend to follow, which makes it a bad habit to have because it makes balls which most pros deal with easily, the straight ones, more dangerous than they should be.
Graham Gooch, Cook’s mentor at Essex, had a similar problem against Terry Alderman, Australia’s swing and seam bowler. In 1989, Alderman exploited Gooch’s weakness, dismissing him four times in five Tests, three of them lbw. In fact, Alderman dismissed him less than 50 per cent of the time but it was the nature of the dismissals, lbw, as well as the fact they were early on in his innings, that led Gooch and others to surmise that he had a problem with Alderman.
At one point, he even suggested that the selectors drop him as no amount of nets and practice with the coach, Mickey Stewart, could stop him instinctively planting his front foot on off-stump and his head falling, a combination that meant he ended up playing across Alderman’s well pitched-up outswingers. Ever the humourist, Gooch even changed the number plate on his car to LBW 001, though he eventually solved the problem by delaying his foot movement that extra fraction of a second to ensure he played the actual line of the ball, after it had begun to swing, rather than the perceived line.
It isn’t only batsmen who have problems with bowlers. On England’s tour to India in 1992/3, John Emburey kept meeting Navjot Singh Sidhu in the warm-up games and Sidhu kept launching him for six. In the end it became a matter of confidence rather than a technical issue, but one whose loss was powerful enough for Emburey to talk himself out of selection for the Tests once Sidhu was picked for India.
My own tussles with Viv Richards were pathetically one-sided to begin with as well, with him nonchalantly dismissing my best efforts one bounce over square leg to the boundary. But that changed when I learnt to swing the ball away from the right-hander, and while I would never claim to have dominion over Sir Viv, I was able to persuade him to treat me with a bit more respect. I even got him out a few times, the outswinger being anathema to the general swing plane of his bat, which was designed to destroy and humiliate bowlers unable to move the ball sideways.
There is often a fascinating psychology at play in such encounters and one the great batsmen and bowlers play on. Even more complex, though, is the relationship between the top-order batsman and the part-time bowler who gets him out unexpectedly and thereby inveigles his way into their mind every time they meet.
It doesn’t happen often, but one example was Kevin Pietersen’s dismissal by Yuvraj Singh in the Chepauk stadium in Chennai, seven years ago. When Pietersen was asked about it, he described it as an aberration against “a pie-chucker,” something Yuvraj countered in a press conference of his own. What was interesting is that MS Dhoni called Pietersen’s bluff on almost every occasion the pair met thereafter, bringing Yuvraj on the moment Pietersen walked to the crease.
Dhoni was clearly playing on Pietersen’s ego, as well as his perceived weakness against left-arm spin, but mostly the former. It made for some fine theatre, watching two alpha males posturing and giving each other the eye. It did not, however, amount in any more success for Yuvraj in the five further Tests in which the pair met, so KP could never be described as Yuvraj’s “bunny.”
Batsmen and bowlers sniffing out each other’s frailties is as old as the game itself. Like a medieval joust, cricket is a game of thrust and counter between bat and ball. Sometimes solutions prove elusive, in which case time is called on a player, such as Eoin Morgan’s Test career. But mostly a cure is found and the arms race between batsman and bowler continues – better, faster, cannier.
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, December 30 2016
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