You Can Avoid The Plank By Scoring A Hundred!

I used to think that Ted Dexter’s 70 off 75 balls at Lord’s in 1963, against a West Indies’ fast bowling attack including Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith in their pomp, was one of the finest Test innings ever played by an Englishman. But how wrong can you be? I now realise that it was as shameful a performance as has ever been witnessed at the Home of Cricket, and if it had happened today, Lord Ted would have had to have been smuggled out of the ground in the boot of Colin Cowdrey’s car to avoid being lynched.

- Martin Johnson

It’s very much a modern thing, but the biggest crime a batsman can commit nowadays – or so it seems – is not to get out for a duck, but to get out when he’s ‘in’, as they say. “Dear oh dear,” the commentator will cry, shaking his head at the wastefulness of it all. “He’d done the hard part.” And the batsman himself will appear at the end of play, like a captured wartime pilot being paraded as a propaganda exhibit, parroting the party line about how criminal it was to get out after he’d played himself in.

“Batsmen scoring 60s is not enough,” said the England coach Trevor Bayliss in Australia last week. “We need 160s.” It made me wonder whether, down in the snug bar of the Slug and Lettuce, the traditional subject of bringing back the death penalty was still being aired, albeit in a slightly different context. As in: “Did you see that Mark Stoneman got out for 61 in Adelaide? Hanging’s too good for him if you ask me.”

I’ve often wondered whether a modern batsman starts sweating when they get to 30, knowing that if they get out shortly after that, and fail to go on to score a century, the coach will be giving them a public dressing down in the Daily Bugle, or in front of the television cameras.