Cricket: Atherton shows 'off' technique

Henry Blofeld applauds the textbook batting skills of the former England captain

WHILE South Africa's bowlers got it badly wrong in the helpful conditions during the first two days of the First Test at Edgbaston, England's batsmen, led by Mike Atherton, gave an excellent demonstration of how to bat when the ball is swinging and seaming all over the place. Cricket can never be an exact science but, in any set of circumstances, there are cast-iron rules which should not be broken.

The first of these must be not to play a stroke when the ball can be safely left alone and Atherton's innings was an object lesson here. The two most essential basic requirements for a batsman are for him to know the precise location of his off stump and to be able to keep his concentration.

Until he was out, playing a rash stroke at a short one outside the off- stump in the second over on the second morning, Atherton scarcely played a stroke at a ball which would have missed his off-stump. His judgement was impeccable.

Allied to this was his ability, admirably demonstrated by most of the other England batsmen, to commit himself as late as possible to the stroke and still to have quick enough footwork to put himself into the right position to play the ball.

This calls for great synchronisation which has to be the product of experience. What makes it so complicated is that while the batsman has to move his feet at the last possible moment, he will not be in the best position to decide whether or not to leave the ball alone until he has moved into the line of the ball. Everything therefore has to happen very quickly at the last moment.

Of course, this was made much easier than it might have been by the inability of the South African bowlers to put the ball in the right place. The bowlers need, in these circumstances, to keep the batsman on the front foot and to make him play at six balls an over. The South Africans, and most notably Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock, significantly failed to do this.

Then, it is important that in these conditions the batsmen do not forget the importance of scoring runs. If batsmen are content simply to sit on the splice and defend, the bowler is allowed to retain all the initiative. The opportunities for hitting fours may be extremely rare and if so the batsmen must organise their game so that they are always looking to push for the all-important singles. This gives the bowler and the fielding captain a problem and helps, therefore, to break up the bowler's ascendancy.

For all this, one can see that for a batsman brought up in a country which does not have conditions like these, it would take a long time to get the hang of it. This is the size of the problem that will confront the South African batsmen when the rain stops. Of course, some of them have played plenty of cricket in England and their coach, Bob Woolmer, will be a most valuable guide. For all that, it will be difficult for batsmen reared on pitches which do not have this sort of movement off the ground and in the air to adapt their natural instincts so that that they can cope.

Of course, batsmen such as Barry Richards, who learned about it all when playing for Hampshire, and Graeme Pollock, a genius if ever there was one, managed well enough. But South Africa's present side contains no batsmen of such exceptional calibre.