ISSUE 003: WHO'S THE GOAT?

As Joe Root takes over as permanent England captain, he has twin ambitions. One he will admit. The other he won’t. The first is to try and lift England from the depths of the World Test championship table (they are currently 7^th quite a distance below Sri Lanka and India in 5^th and 6^th.) Clearly playing winning cricket is the way, although England have been penalised 12 points for slow overrates in the previous series, so a good start would be to get the bowlers back to their mark quicker and have the field set promptly. (Not playing a frontline spinner at Headingley won’t help the cause.)

The second is to overtake Sachin Tendulkar’s record-breaking Test tally. He is 1,807 runs behind (see table below.) Since he averages 50.58 per innings (although only 46.7 as captain) it should take him roughly 36 innings, or say 20 Tests. By the end of next year’s Ashes he will have played another 15, fitness permitting, so he won’t be far away. Of course he is far too selfless to say that he is thinking about that achievement, but any batsman of his level of productivity and insatiability always has one eye on their stats.

It’s 100 years today since the great Jack Hobbs registered his 137^th hundred in the course of an Ashes-winning opening partnership of 172 with his great sidekick Herbert Sutcliffe – read and watch more here. Added to that, the esteemed cricket writer David Frith actually claimed in that podcast that Hobbs was a better all-round player than Don Bradman (clip below).

It set us on the Analyst podcast thinking who was the greatest batsman we have seen. Matt Prior argued for Brian Lara. With good reason, as he twice broke the world record Test score, and also holds the record for highest first-class score. Where his great rival Tendulkar dissected attacks like a surgeon, Lara destroyed them. He was unforgiving. I watched his amazing 375 in Antigua in 1994, every ball of it, and there was an inevitability about it from almost the first boundary. I remember driving to the ground each day with the late England keeper Godfrey Evans, there hosting a supporters group, and we said on both the second and third mornings, ‘he’s going to do it.’

It was an innings of the most fantastic artistry and dexterity, virtually every shot struck along the ground – he didn’t strike a single six - captured beautifully by Bill Frindall’s hand drawn wagonwheel which looked for all the world like a plate of spaghetti. It was an extraordinary performance.

Simon Mann and I chose Viv Richards as our GOAT (of anyone that we had seen). It was a marginal choice. What swung it for Simon was Richards range and power – he played shots that no one had even thought of let alone attempted. He was years, maybe decades, ahead of his time. For me, bowling to Richards, as I did on a number of occasions, was the most stressful experience of my life. It was worse than facing Malcolm Marshall or Michael Holding (which I also did) or doing 60mph face down on a sledge on the Cresta Run in St Moritz (I flew out and broke my collar bone) or questioning anything that either Geoff Boycott or Ian Botham said.

When Richards swaggered to the wicket, cap slightly askew (no helmet of course) my legs immediately turned to jelly. And I wasn’t even bowling. When I was, it became merely a matter of self-preservation, since not only could he destroy any semblance of control you may have had, but also he hit the ball back at you so hard it could take your shin or wrist with it. It was fraught with danger. He seemed to have aeons of time to play the ball. Your fastest effort that had earlier broken a Somerset player’s finger causing him to retire hurt, was flipped away nonchalantly over square leg like swatting a fly, after which he’d slap to the top of his bat handle in sadistic satisfaction. He made you feel frail and impotent, powerless to intervene.

And after all that the only question is what were his Test match stats. 8540 runs, average 50.23, 24 hundreds (should have been more) highest score 291 made this very week, fifty years ago. And….a strike rate of 69.77. Only one man averaging over 50 has ever scored faster - and that man is Harry Brook (SR 86.) So you can see what all the fuss is about. But the Master Blaster is still the King for me.

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