Player of the Season Haseeb Hameed : The Last of the Blockers?

 

28/11

England need a blocker, but are there any left?

In the ‘see it, hit it’ world of Bazball the defensive, slow accumulator is almost a thing of the past, even though it is what England need

Scyld Berry

England’s cricket supporters, if they keep on waking up in the middle of the night to find that England have lost their top five wickets in the first 25 overs, may need beta blockers.

What the team needs is a batsman who has the defence to survive a new ball, the mindset not to throw his wicket away, ignoring the mantra that a batsman has immediately to “put the pressure back on the bowler” – someone like Sir Geoffrey Boycott, an Alpha blocker.

The whole culture of our age seems set against anything done slowly and patiently. A decade ago Haseeb Hameed appeared for Lancashire and was baptised “Baby Boycott”, so willing was he to leave the ball outside off stump and so resolute was his defence. In Test cricket Hameed had a strike-rate of 32 runs per 100 balls, or just under two runs per over. Last season, captaining Nottinghamshire to the county championship, he was bucketing along almost twice as fast at 58 per 100 balls.

England’s opening batsmen of the past decade have upped their scoring rates to in a bid regain their place, by appealing to the taste of the management, Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes. Rory Burns has accelerated from a strike-rate of 43 in Tests to 54 for Surrey last season, Alex Lees from 43 for England to 56 for Durham, Keaton Jennings from 42 to 53 for Lancashire.

One of the few certainties in life was that one could go to Edgbaston, when he was playing for Warwickshire, or to the Oval having returned to Surrey, and watch Dom Sibley block. His typical cruising speed was one run per over. But professional cricketers go where the money is. Last winter Sibley was recruited by Khulna Tigers in the Bangladesh T20 league, and last summer he made himself a fixture in Surrey’s T20 side, shovelling the ball over, not to, mid-wicket. His strike-rate for England was 34; for Surrey in the championship last season it soared to 45.9.

Who is going to get a Hundred gig if he blocks in the championship?

No part of cricket seems to have changed quite so much as opening the batting – until we can judge the Bazball experiment after this Ashes series, let us say changed rather than “evolved”. When the County Championship began in the 1870s, the pitch was a grassy strip in the middle of the playing area, uncovered, often damp and slow. Simply by surviving, the opening batsman made life easier for those who followed.

Northern openers used to make it a speciality to bat for an hour without scoring, like Dick Barlow of Lancashire and “O my Hornby and my Barlow” fame; and Louis Hall of Yorkshire, who batted as a Methodist lay preacher of the Victorian period would; or William Scotton, a left-hander for Nottinghamshire who was such a notorious blocker that Punch composed the lines:

“Block, block, block

“At the foot of thy wicket, O Scotton!”

As Ben Duckett’s distant predecessor, in the Oval Test of 1886, Scotton ground out 34 in 225 minutes against Australia to prompt the above verse. But his opening partner WG Grace was going like a train, scoring 170 at the other end, and the pair shared an opening partnership of the same value.

Partnership? Did someone say partnership? In the Perth Test England’s highest partnership was 65. Is there any point in making the observation to the current management that partnerships are the bread and butter of a match-winning total, and more easily made if someone is holding down one end?

Given this slow evolutionary start, and conditions normally favourable to new-ball bowling, English cricket has valued the defensive opening batsman more than other countries. Or, to put it another way, the attacking opener has not been trusted. Swashbucklers such as Somerset’s Harold Gimblett, Warwickshire’s John Jameson and Colin Milburn, who was everyone’s favourite, have been rapidly discarded by England’s selectors. More heinous still, England through the 1990s could have had a world-class, complementary, opening pair of Mike Atherton and Alec Stewart, until someone had the bright idea that Stewart should keep wicket and bat down the order.

Like lighthouse keepers, tobacconists or newspaper vendors, defensive opening batsmen have been phased out in England. Tim Curtis won England caps by wearing a hair shirt for Worcestershire: his strike-rate was 27 for England (unfortunately the data was not kept which could tell us what Sir Geoffrey’s was for Yorkshire or England). Tony Middleton was a notorious blocker for Hampshire; his son Fletcha was busy scoring at 48 runs per 100 balls in his father’s footsteps last season, that is almost three runs per over.

If there is such a thing as a cautious county left, it is Essex. They try to bat very long in their first innings so they can expose their opponents to a fourth day in Chelmsford, when the pitch is wearing, for their off-spinner Simon Harmer, who was player of the series as South Africa won in India. Harmer himself, and the England Under-19 all-rounder Noah Thain, were two of a handful of players to average below 40 runs per 100 balls last season. Dean Elgar sets a dogged example, and Tom Westley follows it with a strike-rate of 42, the same as during his brief England career.

The points system in the championship ensures that England will never have any more Barlows or Scottons. To secure all five batting points, a county has to rattle up 450 in 110 overs in their first innings. The coach would be climbing the wall if anyone blocked; the batsman who kept on “leaving” would soon himself be leaving.

The slowest batsmen in Division One are Yorkshire’s Fin Bean, whose strike-rate was 40 in last season’s championship, and Hampshire’s Nick Gubbins and Toby Albert who accumulated at 41. Batting at New Road has been more difficult than almost anywhere, so Worcestershire’s Brett D’Oliveira and Rob Jones can be forgiven for their 42 and 40 respectively.

But life is more complicated now than it was for Scotton. In the second Test at Brisbane, which is a day/night game, there is a case for attacking the bowling early on, for making hay while the sun shines, before batting becomes most difficult when sunlight and floodlights are confused.

“Bash, bash, bash

“Into the stands, O Duckett!”

c/o MAG

How Haseeb Hameed, the boy of the old world, found his place in the new

 

 

Haseeb Hameed's golden summer has fulfilled his destiny as a cricketer for our times, whatever his future holds, writes Ben Gardner (Wisden Cricket Monthly).

 

The promise, the fall and then the rise. That’s the story of Haseeb Hameed, several times over. “One thing I’ve prided myself on from a young age is that my best years were after my worst years,” he said back in 2020, just as he was beginning to remake himself at Trent Bridge, and just as the world was returning to normal, but still reeling from what had just happened. Now he has had, unequivocally, his best year: a new personal record for runs in a County Championship season, captaining Nottinghamshire to their first title in 15 years. Hameed is one of just six captains to lift the trophy in the club’s history. He has dismantled the Surrey dynasty and in doing so confirmed himself as one of the domestic game’s pivotal modern figures, a cricketer for our times and to provide hope for the future. Watching Hameed emerge in 2016 made it feel like everything might always be this simple. The Baby Boycott moniker summed him up, youthful, innocent, and yet a throwback. There was elegance in his low-handed technique and economy in his method. This was the opener’s mantra: if you kept out the good balls and scored off the bad ones, you’d go far. As a teenager, he became the first Lancastrian to hit twin hundreds in the Roses match. Then he notched 82 on Test debut in India. “You can sense it as a captain,” Virat Kohli said. “This guy is intelligent. He’s definitely going to be a star in all forms if he keeps persisting with his skill.”   And yet as all this was going on, the world and the game was changing. The joy of watching Hameed in those early days was to wonder if everything might be easy forever, that if you worked hard and followed the rules, you’d be alright. It couldn’t last. He brought up his first first-class hundred on the day of the Brexit referendum. That Test debut came just as it was becoming clear that Donald Trump had won the 2016 US Presidential election. Here came the chaos age. The social contract was broken, and so too was the batter’s deal, the one that posited that the game was about control, that all you really needed was a sure defence and an even temperament.   Wickets worsened. Seam overtook swing. The ball could move either way or go straight through you, with no way to tell which it would do. There is a sadness that the world as we knew it was gone, and, for a while, Hameed struggled to move with the times. Instead he withdrew, averaging 28.50 in the 2017 County Championship, and just 9.70 the year after, all the while scoring at a subterranean strike rate of under a run every three balls. In 2019 came his first hundred since that breakout summer, but also his release from Lancashire. Paul Allott, the club’s director of cricket, had opted for tough love at the start of that season. “Not only is he a million miles away from England,” he told Wisden Cricket Monthly, “he’s hanging on by his fingertips at Lancashire.”

 

On arrival at Notts, head coach Peter Moores took the opposite approach. “Young players, the ones that are destined for great things, bounce back,” he said. “We believe that's what's going to happen with Haseeb.” In truth, both Notts and Hameed needed rebuilding. Notts had just been relegated for the second time in four seasons, with their only Division One survival in that time coming when level on points with Lancs. Moores, who has described his partnership with Hameed as “like finding a soulmate”, has resurrected both. The first challenge was to get Hameed to live a little, and an early net session proved pivotal, just Moores with a dogstick and Hameed with his worries. He deadbatted his first throwdowns. “I told him I’d given Joe Root the same delivery three days before, and he’d hit it for four,” Moores recounted at the time. “I said: ‘Should you have attacked it?’” Hameed took the bait, threw his bat at the next few, and the fog lifted. “We started to see the true Has then.” His strike rate has nearly doubled since his worst days. This season brought with it a double hundred at not far off a run a ball. To watch him is to see a batter at peace with the worst that could happen, and his revival has been borne out of embracing the flux. There’s no use in mourning what’s been lost. Instead you have to roll with the times. “I have a bank of experience behind me, both in terms of highs and lows,” Hameed told Wisden.com earlier this summer. “They all shape you and develop you as a person and a player. You naturally come to accept everything a bit more. In the game that we play, there are so many ups and downs, so many variables and I think you come to work with that rather than trying to fight it.”

There have still been bad days mixed among the good. 2021 brought two hundreds in a game against Worcestershire, a century against the touring Indians, and then an England recall. In hindsight, and even at the time, it felt too soon, accelerated by the struggles of Joe Root’s side, the paucity of other options, and an overeagerness to capitalise on a special talent finding its way again. Hameed was bowled by the first ball of his comeback, and while he made two fifties in his next two Tests, these gave way to 80 runs combined in four games in Australia, the Covid bubbles taking their toll as Australia’s all-time greats swarmed. This time, however, international disappointment didn’t disrupt his domestic bliss at Notts. “One thing I've always been able to count on, thankfully, is finding a way to get back up from rock bottom,” he told ESPNcricinfo. 2022 was his best summer yet, hitting four centuries to spearhead a Division Two title win, and while his return to the top tier didn’t go as planned, century-less as Notts finished mid-table, he was backed rather than scolded, appointed captain heading into 2024. The job suited him, the fresh-faced boy now a man with a beard, a dressing room ready to follow where he led. And now this, an unblemished triumph, a team effort with Hameed at its centre. He was the cool head in the decisive victory over Surrey, backing Josh Tongue’s tail-slicing talents, exhorting his star quick to go again and again. And he played the key hand to finish the job against Warwickshire, hitting a fourth hundred of the season to get them close to the two batting bonus points needed for mathematical certainty, and then in the middle as Ben Slater hit the winning runs.   Hameed insists the England story isn’t yet done, and why should it be? A decade in, he is still only 28, not that old but certainly wise. He is now established as the county game’s premier player. As he well knows, Ashes tours often bring upheaval. He should be best placed to benefit. But whatever the future holds, Hameed will always have this season and this title. Those great things for which he was destined have been achieved.