Bat, Ball and Field by Jon Hotten

Author:Jon Hotten [Hotten, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-06-06T12:00:00+00:00

Ball two

Geoffrey Boycott has a standing joke about the best way to play fast bowling. ‘From the other end …’

Get off strike. Lean on your bat and watch the other guy.

At the other end, Graham Gooch leans on his.

Holding takes the long walk back. The crowd realise what they’re seeing. The noise is a loud, low hum. Holding feels something rare. Everything about the first ball was right – run-up, delivery stride, action. That sometimes takes a few overs to happen. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. The ground felt soft beneath his feet.

After the 1976 series in England, Michael Holding enrols at the University of West Indies to study computer science.[fn7] Cricket in the seventies doesn’t pay. He needs something else. He injures a shoulder and misses a tour of Pakistan, and then Clive Lloyd asks him if he wants to play World Series Cricket in a World XI captained by Tony Greig, and he earns enough to buy a car and a house, and when Kerry Packer has won his war with the establishment, he and the rest of the World Series guys re-join the West Indies Test side.

He comes in again, the air parting around him, the ground soft beneath his feet. Jeff Thomson once said, ‘I just run up and go WANG …’ Holding is a different animal, but here is the same uncomplicated process, here is The Zone. Run up and let it go, make it go where you want it to go, like you’re just putting it there …

Bang. Ball two is on the same line as the first, the line that Boycott will later call ‘the corridor of uncertainty’. Play or leave. Stick or twist. Your choice. You have 0.4 seconds to make it. Boycott plays, a reflexive jab of the hands, feet moving not forwards, not back, but up, up onto his toes. He misses it, or maybe it misses him. The ball is in David Murray’s gloves before Boycott’s feet are on the floor again.

Two gone. Four to come.

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