The Summer Field

127 Chapter Fifteen Batting and Bowling ‘Bouncers as a weapon of intimidation do bring results for no-one likes being hit by a cricket ball.’ Colin Cowdrey, Country Life, May 1979 ‘Verily the way of the bowler is hard.’ Cecil Parkin, Cricket Triumphs and Troubles (1936) It is trite, yet true like all trite things, to say that you cannot have batting or bowling without the other. One by itself looks unsatisfying, even narcissistic, as when a fast bowler warms up in 21 st century fashion on the field by bowling at a single stump and a coach with a baseball glove. In The Field in June 1936, Cardus recalled the finest batsmanship was with an imaginary bat, or an umbrella, against an imaginary bowler; or, as when he was a coach at Shrewsbury School, with a real bat making perfect strokes against a pretend ball. While Cardus had a point, too much unreality could give you bad habits. In Arthur Miller’s play The Man Who Had All the Luck , a scout saw fault in the hero’s brother, a talented baseball pitcher, because winter-long practice in a barn did not prepare him for the noise of a real match. A bowler or pitcher is not merely sending the ball as best he can towards a plate or stumps; he has the man in between to reckon with. In her 1948 memoir A Wiltshire Home: A Study of Little Durnford , Dorothy Devenish recalled matches between country estate workers: How the bowler chooses to bowl – even something odd or unintended – becomes part of the repartee, the conversation (spoken and unspoken) between batsman and bowler. Will Jefferson laughed at the title of his imaginary memoir The Day Shane Warne Bounced Me : ‘Having hit him around the park a bit he bowled me two bouncers, because his frustration had built up so much.’ One bouncer went over Jefferson’s head (‘if you can believe that’, he said; he is six foot ten). Jefferson understood that Warne’s bouncer had a purpose, even though not physically dangerous. We can speculate besides that Warne sought to surprise the tall Jefferson, and at least halt the runs. However, a slow bouncer was unlikely to get Jefferson out. Bouncers all the time would have done Warne no good, and the public (and his fielders) would have soon tired of it. Likewise, rolling the ball underarm along the ground would work, by preventing runs, but would be unwatchable. Least watchable of all – because play only took ten minutes – was the Benson and Hedges Cup match in May 1979 when Somerset captain Brian Rose declared after one over and left Worcestershire two runs to win. Somerset worked within the laws of the competition, to keep their scoring