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    Four more runs to go

    By Emma last year, at the start of May Leave a comment on this post

    For those who haven’t heard, Surrey made a world record 496 in 50 overs at the Oval the other day. Of the six Browncap batsmen who took to the crease, none of them managed a strike rate lower than 100, with James Benning smashing 152 off a gluttonous 134 balls at 113.43, while Rikki Clarke thumped a palindromic 82 from 28. Ali Brown, the real star of the show, made 174 from 97. Whilst I am normally loathe to put so many figures in such little space, words don’t quite adequately describe such feats.

    The world record has now been broken twice in twelve months, after Sri Lanka punished the Netherlands to the tune of 443 last July. All of the top eight one-day scores have been recorded since 2002. In joint tenth, Somerset’s 413 in 1990 took 10 overs longer than India’s equal score against Bermuda just over a month ago. In fact, the closer you look at the list, the more obvious the increase in scores over time seems. This latest World Cup, furnished as it was with slow, unpredictabe wickets, has not really demonstrated the trend. However, it is inescapable that the five hundred barrier, unthinkable as little as ten years ago, is now a mere boundary beyond our reach.

    Is this the result of Twenty20? Maybe the annual encouragement to hit over the top has led to the translation of flamboyance to the other formats. Or maybe it has more to do with television and ECB officials pushing in the ropes to push up the interest in a format of the game that has suddenly started to feel a bit long? Of one thing we can be sure - there aren’t going to be many bowlers in favour of cutting them any shorter.

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    4 Responses to “Four more runs to go”

  • Tom wrote:
    May 1st, 2007 at 10.57 am

    I’d put the larger scores down to the game of cricket being more suited to the batting aspect.

    Pitches with grass and moisture are almost scorned upon, with ‘roads’ being the preference in the contemporary game.

    Grounds are smaller - not physically, but the boundary rope has gradually crept in. You still find anomalies of course (the square boundaries at the MCG are near impossible to clear), but as a general trend is to see the boundary shorter than generations past.

    The ‘traditional image’ of the batsman is also changing. Players such as Bradman, Hobbs, Sobers even Tendulkar and Lara are small players in comparison to today’s standard. Batting used to be a ‘wristy’ art, using the pace of the ball to hit the large scores. Now batsman are preferred in the ‘Matthew Hayden’ mould - domineering ’sloggers’.

    Equipment is another changing aspect. Bats are now carbon reinforced, complete with graphite handles and A-grade English willow. I used my dad’s old bat at the start of the previous season for a few games and found it was a struggle to find the middle of the bat. With my current bat, I tend to go in and start slogging with the knowledge that if I hit the ball, it will probably travel a long way. It’s remarkable how much easier it makes the game of cricket, and the skill of batting. It can be concluded because of this that players of past eras were probably technically superior than today’s players.

  • marmarzet wrote:
    May 1st, 2007 at 5.44 pm

    I was lucky enough to be down at the Oval on Sunday. Brown and Benning were simply superb and the whole crowd (even the Glocestershire supports I think!) were willing them to get 500. A pity they were just 4 runs short.

    Whilst I don’t want to take anything away from the batsmen, one must remeber that the Oval wicket is renowned to favour batsmen and, this year especially, it has done so once more. In the two LV games there, Yorkshire scored 594-9 and Hampshire 481-9. On Saturday, Surrey nearly pinched the match off Hampshire by scoring 467 on a fourth day wicket against the bowling of Warne and Udal. The wicket was very flat and fast and the weather was perfect. Coupled with the quality of the batsmen in the Surrey team, I am less surprised than most at their record breaking total.

    PS. I agree with you, Emma, that figures are often dull but in this instance they do illustrate the point beautifully…

  • Angus wrote:
    May 2nd, 2007 at 3.26 pm

    Why the hell was Ali Brown not opening for England for the WC and the last eight years? Didn’t he score an ODI hundred and then get dropped?

  • Ken wrote:
    May 3rd, 2007 at 12.48 am

    To a certain extent it is down to Twenty20, yes, just as ODIs have helped up the scoring rate in Test matches. People are now far more accustomed to having to find and manufacture runs rather than waiting for the right shots. Certain shots are shown to be less risky when used judicoulsy than had previously been thought.

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