STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU

Gideon Haigh on bats and their middles

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via X - Marnus Labuschagne

‘Think it’s finally time to retire the World Cup final bat.’  Thus Marnus Labuschagne on X yesterday beneath these images.  Any cricketer worth the name would nod ruefully.  The bat has done well to last this long.  Witness the evidence of its nursing, the layers of bandaging, the fading of the logo, the perseverance in the face of that chip on the outside edge.  From a good bat, you always feel you can extract a little more, from some sanding, some oil, some glue in the toe; FWIW, mine has just come back with a new handle.  But from such explosive delamination as Marnus has incurred, there is no coming back.

Still, I like Marnus’s choice of words here.  There is no talk of discarding or disposal - instead, the bat is set to enjoy an honourable ‘retirement’, like a thoroughbred put out to stud.  You might relegate a bat to the backyard.  You might, at a pinch, hand a bat on.  But who can throw a bat out?  In fifty years as a cricketer, I’ve only ever junked one bat, a Gray-Nicolls which a succession of yorkers in the nets one day reduced to matchwood.  Otherwise, visitors know, my home is a veritable belfry of bats - albeit none with middles like Marnus’s, pounded to a crater.

‘Hitting it in the middle’; ’getting it out of the middle’; ‘middling’ it. Everyone understands that idea, even if some are in the vicinity more reliably than others.  The only equivalent expression, ‘sweet spot’, isn’t fifty years old.  For as long as there has been cricket, we have grasped that the centre works best.  Challenged about the width of his bat, W. G Grace dismissed it as a quibble: ‘What does it matter about the edges? I always hit them in the middle.’ 

The Don’s bat seemed almost magnetised.  ‘Bowling to Bradman?’ said the Surrey fast bowler Alf Gover.  ‘Easy.  You hit the middle of the bat every time.’   And in Vaibav Purandare’s biography of Sachin Tendulkar, he describes his subject as hitting from ‘the middle-of-the-middle’. Mind you, this may have been accentuated by Tendulkar’s custom of sanding the cherries from his edges, to reinforce the perfection of his perfection. Ed Cowan, meanwhile, tells a nice story of his Test debut, how in their mid-pitch conferences Ricky Ponting would say simply: ‘OK, keep hitting them in the middle.’  How simple the greats make it sound; how much we lesser mortals complicate the game.  In the last decade, perhaps, the efficacy of the middle has been a little neglected: Every part of the modern bat and quality of contact holds six potential.  But Marnus reminds us of the precision of the best batting.

Marnus’s bat also reminds me of a favourite brush with the past while researching Stroke of Genius (2017).  There had long been a legend, dating from 1899, of Grace, then just retired from Test cricket aged fifty-one, presenting a bat to Victor Trumper, then just starting out and almost thirty years his junior.  It was almost too good to be true - even Trumper’s worshipful biographer Jack Fingleton had dismissed it as apocryphal: ‘It is a pretty story, but on checking the scores in Irving Rosenwater and Ralph Barker’s splendid book, England v Australia, I find that Grace had been dropped for the Lord’s Test match in an English home Test series for the first time, so the alleged facts must be dubious.’ In fact, Fingleton had looked only cursorily: Grace played four further first-class matches against the Australians in and around that summer’s Ashes, including for an eponymous XI at Crystal Palace.  And I was alerted to Canberra’s National Museum having in storage an old, oil-darkened Stuart Surridge Patent Rapid Driver bearing the legend: ‘To V. Trumper from W. G. Grace.’  In its personal association with two of the game's giants, I suspect it is a unique cricket artefact.

Yet that was not the most delightful feature.  Rather were my eyes drawn to the middle, concaved around a chunky splinter, testifying to the force of its users: maybe Grace, maybe Trumper, maybe both. I was reminded of Grace’s advice in Cricket (1891): ‘The great thing in hitting is not to be half-hearted about it; but when you make up your mind to hit, to do it as if the whole match depended upon that particular stroke.’ 

Good enough for Grace; good enough for Marnus; find the middle and you’re on your way. 

Let me know in the comments section where your favourite bats have ended up.