Speedometers need to be removed from cricket grounds and television coverage, so that the current global obsession with bowling at speed can be replaced by a rounded view of a bowler’s talents.
During the first day of the Boxing Day Test, I was amazed by some of the Channel Nine commentators’ opinions about the performance of Zaheer Khan.
He’s flat they said, he’s bowling terribly. How did they measure that, you may wonder? Bowling figures? The number of balls the batsman has had to play at?
If you thought these were the ways to judge a bowler’s performance, apparently you’d be wrong.
So why did Tony Greig and Mark Taylor think Zaheer was no good? It was his speed. Greig explained with a mixture of amazement and sympathy that Khan was sometimes even dropping into the dreaded 120s! Taylor said he looked ‘short of a gallop.’
Now there is little doubt Zaheer Khan is below full fitness in this test match, and he is not bowling as quickly as he can. However to use that as proof that he was bowling poorly is so simplistic as to make one question the amount of money these commentators are paid.
When they turned to his figures, he had bowled 14 overs, no wicket for 30. They seemed genuinely surprised! A bowler below 140kph not getting slogged, impossible!
As it happened, Zaheer continued to bowl with that tidy consistency, and in return for his patience took the game changing wickets of Michael Clarke and Mike Hussey.
While Umesh Yadav took one more wicket he did so at more than twice the expense, and so it was hard to go past Zaheer as the day’s best bowler. All this at less than blinding speed.
Unfortunately it seems this focus on speed as an indicator of ability is a growing craze. We are only about ten years into the life of the cricket speedometer.
It was introduced as Brett Lee and Shoaib Akhtar vowed for world’s fastest bowler honours, back at the start of the millennia.
However now the speedometer has grown tentacles, and instead of being a novelty device to help promote a prize fight within a cricket match, it is now a measure of weather a bowler deserves to take part at all.
Look at Channel Nine’s now tea break challenge, whereby during each test half a dozen young bowlers from the host city attempt to bowl the fastest ball of the summer.
What is the subtext of such a contest? It suggests to young bowlers, both participants and the audience, that it does not matter where the ball goes, as long as it gets there quickly.
It is as if Glenn McGrath never existed, as if his miserly line and length of only moderate pace has evaporated from the memory, replaced only by images of Brett Lee firing bouncers ten feet over the batsmen’s head and stalking down the wicket pouting his lips.
I suspect if Glenn McGrath were new to the game now he would struggle to get a look in. He would either be shunned by representative teams, or coached to pick up his pace in exchange for his deadly consistency.
Trent Copeland has been shunned by the selectors after three tests because he is less than rapid. In the 25 First Class games he has had to hone his game his average (24.72) is far superior to Ben Hilfenhaus (30.20), Peter Siddle (28.19), or Mitchell Starc (34.18).
That’s not to say he is a superior bowler to all of them, but it suggests he deserves a greater chance than he has been given. Now they are all ahead of him in the queue in spite of these statistics, because they are ahead of him on the speed list.
This obsession with speed must end, or we will be left with far more Mitchell Johnsons and far less Glenn McGraths. Speed is one trait which can make a bowler dangerous, but is neither the only nor the most important one.
The prevailing logic in the world cricket community seems to be that it is everything. Instead, speedometers should be removed from the analysis of cricket, so that alleged experts may have to actually watch the game to comment on a bowler’s performance.
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