The Art of Centuries by Steve James

Author:Steve James
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448170906
Publisher: Transworld

7

For Openers

IT WAS ALWAYS the same at the old Sophia Gardens ground in Cardiff. I would be inside the dressing room, preparing myself, fidgeting and jumping around. My opening partner, Hugh Morris, would be outside on the balcony, sitting calmly and adjusting his eyes to the light.

My rituals had been done, my equipment put on. My batting shoes (half spiked, half rubber) had been tied with the laces pulled so tightly that the blood was barely able to reach my toes. Then my box, thigh pad and inner thigh pad had been put on.

That last piece of protective equipment was important. If I can offer any young opening batsman one piece of advice it would be to wear an inner thigh pad. I took so many fearfully painful blows on my right thigh before beginning to wear one well into my professional career, and they all could so easily have been avoided. The new ball moves around. It does not have to nip back too much to avoid the bat, or catch its inside edge, and thud into that fleshy region at the top of your back leg.

One must not be wary of wearing protective equipment. As long as you feel comfortable with it, wear it. It is with a shake of the head that I recall that I did not wear a helmet regularly until I played county second-eleven cricket. Today’s Health and Safety would certainly not have approved.

I did not wear a forearm guard until Yorkshire’s Darren Gough nearly broke my arm at Cardiff. I always wore one after that. It seems to be out of fashion these days, though. Maybe that is evidence of the lack of fast bowlers, but that is another argument.

The one thing I did not wear was a chest guard, although I did borrow one in the second innings of my Test debut against South Africa in 1998. Having been caught down the leg side in the first innings off Allan Donald, captain Alec Stewart urged me to wear one in the second innings. I took his advice, but wished I hadn’t. I was out for a duck and felt uncomfortable. You need to become accustomed to such things in practice, not try them out in a Test match!

It is remarkable how the use of equipment has evolved, and how much better protected the modern batsman is. There were obviously no helmets until relatively recently, and even the gloves used offered little protection, with either some sausage padding or rubber spikes stitched onto the fingers.

Donald Bradman did not even wear a thigh pad. ‘It is not essential,’ he said. ‘And, in fact, I only wore one when facing certain types of bowlers such as the left-handed Bill Voce, whose pacey in-dippers could give you a nasty rap on the thigh.’

The West Indian Carl Hooper never wore one either, just a handkerchief in his pocket. It helped that he has thighs like tree trunks, mind. Often batsmen would just fold a towel and use that as a thigh pad.

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