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Geoff Lemon's Ashes Diary: Boycott and the joy of boring cricket

24th August, 2013
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Ian Bell has been cut loose by Trevor Bayliss. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant).
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24th August, 2013
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There are very few games where, when unlikely to win, one can merely decide to not lose. Even online Scrabble offers a forfeit when someone goes a week without a move.

Yet in cricket, there’s that legitimate third option beside the win and the loss.

It’s often cited as a reason that foreign audiences can’t grasp the game – cricket fans routinely crack the self-deprecating joke about five days played for no result.

But the draw is a result of great variety. Depending on the context, it can effectively act as a win, a loss, or the final arbiter of a shared victory. 1-0 up in the last Test of a series, and a draw’s as good as a win. 2-1 down with one to play and you can’t win back a trophy.

However lopsided the match position when the draw is called, each team gets the same result. One’s miracle escape is the other side’s one that got away.

But the draw can also lead to days like the one to come in the fifth Ashes Test at The Oval. Presuming the rain stays away, we’ll essentially have a day of exhibition cricket.

With four of five days gone, we’re not even halfway through the second of four innings. So we’ll see some batting, some bowling, and generally a pressure-free afternoon seeing who can take the chance to polish up their record.

It was clear after just two days of this Test that England had no intention of winning. Facing a big Australian total of 492, that would have required making 600, ripping through the Aussies, and facing a fifth-day chase.

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Far easier just to bat out a day, wait for the next day’s rain, then return to the arena with the contest already dead and their series clean sheet intact.

I have to admit that, in one deeply hidden way, I kind of like the idea.

Not as a spectator, mind you. The third day’s play was boring to the point of pain, driving us to beat our heads into our desks just to find something to think about.

Retiring to the bar was the only medication, and James Faulkner was not far wrong in suggesting the crowd should get their money back.

But for a player, I can’t help thinking what an incredible luxury it would be, being told you’ve got a full day, maybe two, to just go out there and bat. No need to score, no need to even consider a match situation. Just bat.

It’s not that the object is to avoid scoring. Scoring is great. What you miss is the chance to do it at your own pace. Lower levels of cricket don’t have this latitude. People don’t have time. The longest match you’ll find might be two days over two weekends.

This means that every match you play is by definition a limited-overs game. Most are lucky to be 50 overs, often it’s more like 20. It necessitates a completely different approach to batting.

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Sure, you can let some balls go as you find your range, especially if you’re an important player for your side. But the crap batsmen like myself can’t be afforded much.

A handful of dots, ok, but face out a maiden and that might be five percent of your team’s overs.

As even a few dot balls go by you feel the pressure. You’re wasting your side’s chances. You have to play some shots, at least find a way off strike.

And so you attack, score a few where you can, and even getting out is part of contributing to the team – make a few and make way for the next bloke.

Never is there any call for a barnacle, or the need to show Test match application (notwithstanding the gulf in skill). Playing like that would be selfish, and cricket is a team sport.

Most batsmen love the feeling of smashing runs, the solidity of well-struck shots. But some of us can’t play the big shots. Some can’t play the small ones either.

Some of us are frankly rubbish, and ours is the thrill of even the most modest achievement in a pursuit to which we are intrinsically unsuited.

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To those as bad as me, an innings of eight runs can be an odyssey. We’d scorn it as nothing from a Test player, but I’ll be able to enumerate the eight separate scoring shots, the eight times one by one when I succeeded in my battle with the bowler.

Each ball that doesn’t get me out is a moderate triumph.

So imagine: a mandate to survive, no requirement to score when it doesn’t suit you. Imagine seven hours of batting spread out before you, an ocean to be explored. You against a bowling attack, a struggle of endurance. What new and unusual liberty. The prospect thrills.

In this comes something I’d never have expected: a kinship on one point with Geoffrey Boycott. On Test Match Special, the man who is the byword for slowness offers a limited if genial rotation of rambling complaints and obvious statements. (“If it’s ‘itting leg stoomp, the bails coom off!”)

As England batted on Day 3, though, he spoke about his playing days, and those mornings when he would wake up to see sunshine.

“Batting day!” he would say to himself. “It’s a batting day today.”

On radio all these decades later, you could suddenly hear the naked greed in his voice, a man more than happy for a parade of bowlers to work all day for his own fulfilment of being undismissed.

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Boycott is the only man in the world who is medically incapable of being bored to death by virtue of his own naturally occurring antibodies.

Presumably this was why he seemed to be on the radio that entire painful afternoon, filling shift after shift as his colleagues expired around him.

To Boycott, it was a day’s Test cricket exactly as he would have wished to play it. If I were ever given a challenge like England’s, I would relish the chance to take it up.

The only difference is, I wouldn’t expect 30,000 people to come and watch me.

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