Masterly Batting Quotes

“Sometimes life gives you a second chance, or even two! Not always, but sometimes. It’s what you do with those second chances that counts.”
― Dave Wilson, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Would that cricketers had better lines, or at least that their most famous were not also their tritest or most banal. 'This thing can be done,' said Fred Spofforth in 1882. 'We'll get 'em in singles,' George Hirst did not say twenty years later. 'You guys are history,' growled Devon Malcolm in 1994. 'You've just dropped the World Cup,' Steve Waugh may have crowed in 1999. At least two of these could have been put into the mouth of Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
― Rodney Ulyate, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“There was a further, rather crazy reason why Neil was my dream batsman. In the 1950s, pop music was innocent and melodic. Top among the vocalists who escorted me through my youth was little Guy Mitchell. That plaintive, joyous, carefree voice gave us Truly Fair and My Heart Cries for You, crystal-clear melodies that lifted and sustained anxious teenagers, exactly as did Neil Harvey’s dainty batsmanship. Neil was a study in cream: no commercial logos then (least of all affixed to the white boundary pickets or splattered even more intrusively across the sacred turf), just a clean bat wielded by a young chap with shirt-sleeves rolled high, pads gleaming white, dark hair unencumbered by cap or sunhat (let alone helmet), head slightly tilted as he walked.

"Consequently, whenever I watched Harvey play, a Guy Mitchell song would float through my head. And whenever I listened to those 78rpm records at home, they sparked visions of Neil Harvey at the crease. So I’ve now confessed to a modern readership. And if that portrays the young me as a dreamer, anchored securely in a world of innocence and joy, so be it. Despite all the tensions and crises that life has thrown up, little has changed. I owe a lot to Neil Harvey.”
― David Frith, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“As in diamonds so in batting, perfection requires flawlessness and nowhere is a batting imperfection more quickly recognised than in the dropped catch. For this reason any innings worthy of consideration deserves to have all its flaws studied to establish whether or not it is the genuine gem or just masquerading as one under the glitter of big hitting or weight of runs.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“In the first Test of the 1938 Ashes series, Eddie Paynter and Stan McCabe became the first players on opposing sides to score double-centuries in the same match. Bill Brown and Wally Hammond repeated the feat in the very next Test at Lord’s. How quickly the once-unprecedented accumulates its precedents.”
― Rodney Ulyate, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Doesn’t move his feet? Who cares? Neither did Graeme Pollock.”
― James Mettyear, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“The two men gave not a chance, and they were still there at lunch. In two-and-a-half hours, on the stickiest pitch umpire Chester ever saw, they had lifted the total from 49 to 161. Hobbs, the freer of the two, had moved from 28 to 97; Sutcliffe, with his immense self-control, from 20 to just 53. The players and umpires made their way towards the pavilion, but the two batsmen remained for a minute in the middle, meticulously clearing the little divots of earth and patting down the pitch with their bats. “Well played, Jack”, said Sutcliffe. “Well played Herbert”, said Hobbs. Three words each, but in that very English way they acknowledged the ordeal of what they had been through.”
― Stephen Chalke, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Hobbs and Sutcliffe. More than any other players in those years they raised the status of the professional cricketer.”
― Stephen Chalke, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“I don’t like exclamation marks as a rule, but this one’s unavoidable. Playing against Neil Harvey! I’d read Arthur Mailey’s poignant essay about playing against his hero, Vic Trumper. If I’d earlier found Mailey’s near-hysterical countdown a bit over the top, I didn’t think so now. So, God, please don’t let it rain.

"I’ll keep it brief. Harvey back-cut a ball, which I chased. Picking it up near the pickets, I gazed at it. Gosh, this ball had just been stroked by Neil Harvey! Our wicket-keeper was screaming, 'Come on, Frithy! Throw the bloody thing in!' I did, shamefaced at the silly delay. Then our off-spinner annoyingly dismissed Neil for 10.

"On the second Saturday I got in. ABC Radio were experimenting with live broadcasts from grade matches. My old scrapbook shows that I scored 29 in 100 minutes, a dreary effort that may well have been solely responsible for the abandonment of the commentary idea. What must Neil Harvey have thought? What really matters, though, is how my precious innings ended. Harvey bowled a curving off spinner outside leg. I tried to glance it, but that ball was loaded. It swerved, what, two feet? Well, two or three inches anyway. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I left that field slightly elated.”
― David Frith, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“There is perhaps no examination in sport more exacting than opening the batting in Test cricket, certainly none more extensive and probing. The Tour de France might be harder, but is repetitive and principally a suffering competition, most of those involved simply trying to finish. Fighting is more obviously dangerous, but lasts a maximum of 33 minutes, tennis more physically arduous, but without the variety of opponents and frisson of harm. Opening the batting, on the other hand, demands from every faculty, physical and mental, that a sportsman can possibly be forced to employ: speed, skill, strength, bravery, application, instinct, intellect and improvisation.”
― Daniel Harris, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Viv Richards, a man who put the ire into fire, the ow into power and the fucking fury into fucking fury.”
― Daniel Harris, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“The notion that international competition – the battle between one arbitrary, bordered landmass and another – is not political, is a fatuous notion. But even in that context, cricket is different, its fierceness of a different order to that in almost every other sport. The story of the game is the story of civilisation, its old rivalries based on more than simple you and me, us and them dichotomies, its various antipathies rooted not in sport but actual, real things, a narrative with a genuine moral dimension.”
― Daniel Harris, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Dominating and consistent victories are one thing, seemingly impossible victories something else entirely, and the preserve of the very finest; a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating prophecy that endures even when in all apparent terms, the ability that first created it has expired.”
― Daniel Harris, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“The vast majority of sportsmen are left with little choice as regards how to play, serfs to their talent, but the very best are able to do so as they want, impressing personality upon ability.”
― Daniel Harris, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Even genius can miscalculate.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“How different South Africa’s cricketing achievements, and indeed the future of the country itself, might have been if racism had not denied Frank Roro the opportunity of batting with Bruce Mitchell in the Lord’s sunshine.”
― Richard Parry, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Cricket is a team game where individuals inspire each other to achieve performances which surpass what might otherwise be beyond them.”
― Richard Parry, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Though he is decried as lucky, it’s just possible that he realised that he could not only get away with playing the way he did, but could prosper by it. It may just be that all of those shots which just evaded a fielder’s outstretched hands were intentional and that he didn’t move his feet much because he didn’t need to. It’s just possible that nobody else played this way because they couldn’t. If he was just lucky and had poor technique, wouldn’t the world’s greatest bowlers have figured him? Instead, he got better and better and faster and faster; his first four Test hundreds were made at a strike-rate of 62 and averaged 122, the four ending with this 293 were made at a crazy strike-rate of 104 and at an average of 315!”
― David Mutton, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“He played the long game as if he was playing the short game, looking to entertain the crowd and paying absolutely no heed to the calibre of the attack, the state of the pitch or even the situation of the match.”
― David Mutton, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“'Find out where the ball is. Go there. Hit it'

"'If there is a ball there to be hit, just hit it'

"Two remarkably simple and similar philosophies, reflecting an uncomplicated attitude to batting. It will probably come as no surprise that one of these quotes is attributable to the quintessential Crown Prince of Simplicity, Virender Sehwag. What is more surprising is that the other quote belongs to the actual prince of the batting art, KS Ranjitsinhji; very few traditionalists would mention Ranji and Sehwag in the same breath, yet their approach was, in this essential philosophy, the same.”
― David Mutton, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Cricket lovers are an optimistic breed.”
― Martin Chandler, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“There is a splendid story that, during the long sea voyage, Cowdrey was observed by Frank Tyson being addressed with some passion by a well-dressed man whom Tyson didn’t recognize: 'When you reach Australia, just remember one thing,' exclaimed the older gentleman, 'Hate the bastards!' Tyson enquired of scorer and baggage man George Duckworth as to the man’s identity: 'That,” confided the ‘bodyline’ veteran, 'was Douglas Jardine.”
― Dave Wilson, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“We all know the situation; the brilliant quick bowler with his tail up delivers the ball on a perfect length and line. A hint of swing has it pitching just outside off, before seam movement takes it further away from the right hander who would be well advised, if good enough, to leave well alone. But he only has a fraction of a second to respond and make his decision. Yet somehow this astonishing batsman is neither shouldering arms nor nibbling, he’s standing tall and smashing a wicket-taking delivery through the covers, on the up, to the boundary. 'Wow,' enthuses the commentator, 'I’m here to tell you that was some shot.' And it was. Next over, same bowler, same ball, same response but instead of that beautiful meaty sound of ball meeting sweet-spot there is a heavy click as a thick edge flies waste high to a grateful third slip. 'Gone! And you have to say that was a poor shot – no foot movement.'

"The gap between brilliant and brainless was some four centimetres. Or was it? Surely the first shot was every bit as reckless and feckless? Our foolhardy batsman got away with his poor shot selection first time but within minutes he went from hero to zero. So who is our thrilling and exasperating protagonist? Take your pick: Victor Trumper, Stan McCabe, Denis Compton, Barry Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Virender Sehwag. This is how they played, the risks they took made them what they were: the most thrilling, watchable and often frustrating batsmen of their respective generations. If you want the highs then you must take the lows, and for each run-a-ball century there will be a horridly inappropriate early-innings catastrophe signalling disappointment for all neutrals.”
― Andy Baynton-Power, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Perhaps it is the fate of all great sporting performances to be forgotten somewhat if the team eventually loses. Would we care overly about VVS Laxman’s 281 or Ian Botham’s 149 without the efforts of Harbhajan Singh and Bob Willis who turned these great feats from potentially heroic failures to match-winning epics?”
― Keith Stael, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Mark Waugh, the most fluent and aesthetically pleasing batsman of his generation but also one of the most frustrating to watch. Often, when he appeared to be a class above the rest and to have the bowling at his mercy, he would play a lazy shot to what appeared, more often than not, an innocuous delivery. And just like that his innings would be over. To make matters worse, he didn’t seem to care; he would nonchalantly wander off the field. No shaking of the head or staring back at the pitch to apportion blame. His fans had to learn to accept 30s and 40s instead of centuries and 150s. His concentration, some would say his interest, never seemed to be there in the Test arena. Despite playing some match-winning Test innings, Waugh was never quite able to shake the ‘lackadaisical’ tag.”
― Sean Ehlers, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“In 2011 India’s Test team was crowned as world cricket’s leading side for the first time in its history. The foundations for this global domination can be traced to a decade earlier, when a career-defining performance by VVS Laxman helped to turn a whole series on its head as India, in the face of a seemingly unassailable deficit, staged an unbelievable recovery to go on and overpower what many considered to be the finest cricket team ever assembled.”
― Dave Wilson, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Bowling has the problem of wildly differing methods so that placing Wasim Akram against Bishan Bedi is rather like hanging a Rembrandt next to a Picasso and trying to produce a valid comparison.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“If proof were needed that statistics alone are not enough in establishing value, then VT Trumper is that proof.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“In an area so reliant on opinion there is also the matter of received opinion to consider. The old turkey of the innate beauty of left handers is probably a result of the rarer days for ‘cack-handers’ when Frank Woolley bestrode the shires on both sides of World War I. After a long gap, his mantle was languidly accepted in England by David Gower. But for every Woolley there was a Mead and for every Gower a Trescothick as if to balance the equation and bury the turkey.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“It seems perfectly reasonable to give the greatest weight to the longest series. South Africa were only offered a five-Test series in Australia and England when they were considered worthy opponents and when the authorities considered that sufficient crowds would allow such a series to be a viable financial option. This link between the duration of a Test series and the money it is likely to generate is a constant throughout the history of the game and has been made more complex over the last three decades by the introduction of the various one-day formats. The constant also remains that a five-Test series (six being a thing of the past) is the ultimate examination of the relative strength of two teams and the current fashion for a quick two-match ‘shoot-out’ can only harm the standing of Test cricket whatever the short-term financial rewards.”
― Patrick Ferriday, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings