Mike Brearley once told me about his father who had played first class cricket for both Yorkshire and Middlesex. Late in life, damaged by Alzheimer’s, he had no understanding of the state of the game or the players he watched on television. “But,” said Brearley, “he could still be moved by a well-played stroke.” I often think of this.
To be moved by a well-played stroke is a blessing, even when it may be among the last life has to offer. In the shorter formats, where the focus is on a kind of frantic, reckless batsmanship, there is still room for the elegant cover drive or the gentle leg glance.
A shot into the stands in the IPL might provoke a collective scream, but there is too the gasp, the intake of breath that greets the exquisite cover drive. For a fraction of a second, the crowd doesn’t react because beauty requires recognition before appreciation.
Beauty of a cover drive
The cover drive off a fast bowler is particularly special because it is about timing, balance, and the joy of using the bowler’s weapon, pace, against him. It is a civilised response to aggression. Sachin Tendulkar said, “When you middle the cover drive, you don’t feel the ball hit the bat.” The sound of a cover drive is gentle, and comes from somewhere deep. The stroke contains cricket’s essential contradiction: violence disguised as grace.
The great English all rounder Wilfred Rhodes continued to attend matches after he had lost his sight in both eyes. He could recognise a beautifully played cover drive purely from the sound of the bat caressing the ball.
We often make the mistake of assuming that aesthetics is about beauty alone. The IPL reminds us that beauty is only one mode of the aesthetic experience. The sublime, the grotesque, the melancholic, the chaotic, and the uncanny all belong to the aesthetic realm.
There is beauty in a cover drive that is matched by few events on a cricket field. But Urvil Patel in his record-equalling 50 off 13 balls brought to the viewer something chaotic, something desperate as he tried to hit that six or that boundary; perhaps he sacrificed beauty for effectiveness, something his team will be grateful for. Beauty is not something that grows out of cricket; it is in a player’s DNA. It is not about the sport, but about the individual.
It was said of Ranji that he was incapable of an ugly stroke. This has been said of later batters as well.
Every generation has its anointed player of grace. When I was younger, it was Gundappa Viswanath who drove past cover or cut square with elegance and control. He owned the area from extra cover to third man on the off side, often playing late enough to embarrass geometry.
He played the back cut too, a shot that had gone out of cricket. Till now, that is, when batters in the IPL seem to have revived it, admittedly less elegantly and with greater frenzy. Sometimes the ordinary can be made to look extraordinary through sheer will.
Scorecards are indifferent to aesthetics. Cardus wrote that the scoreboard is an ass. The essential difference between red-ball cricket and the formats played in white is in the attitude to the scoreboard. In the former, it is an ass; in the latter, it is everything. A boundary struck with the elegance of a V.V.S. Laxman or a Rohit Sharma fetches the same return as one that takes the edge and trickles past third man.
Long after six-hitting contests blur into one another, the perfect cover drive endures. A bent knee. A high elbow. The whisper of leather meeting willow. The ball threading the outfield while fielders are reduced to statues. We glimpse the very soul of cricket.
It is possible that, as one writer has suggested, today’s batter gets more value for the same effort (in terms of runs) than those from the past, but the spectator gets less value (in terms of beauty). In other words, tell me who your favourite batter is, and I will tell you your age!
Even the journeyman can briefly attain greatness in one stroke before slipping back into ordinariness. The well-played stroke is both possibility and fulfilment.