Short boundaries and meaty bats

Gideon Haigh

The announcement of the composition of a one-day team is not usually the
subject of much comment.  Someone always seems to be announcing a one-day team somewhere, carefully arbitrating on the quality of one dibbly-dobbly purveyor over another when a game of rock-paper-scissors might be just as definitive.  When Phil Jaques was overlooked for his New South Wales team-mate Simon Katich in Australia’s one-day team for South Africa, however, it was as though Frank Ward had been preferred to Clarrie Grimmett again.

To recap, Jaques got his chance at Docklands last month when Katich was
ruled out by a groin strain; he slathered 94 off 112 balls against South
Africa before giving up his place again.  Then something interesting
happened.  Paul Reiffel once observed that his reputation grew whenever he wasn’t playing; likewise, the long diminuendo of Jaques’ innings seemed to make him a better player each succeeding day.  Incanting Steve Waugh’s soundbite that Jaques could be ‘the new Gilly’ like an election slogan, journalists turned him into Australia’s new one-day saviour and World Cup
secret weapon.  When he did not make the cut for South Africa, it was Mark Waugh’s turn to provide the soundbite for repetition: ‘I think his performances have been outstanding and I think it's a bit of a lame excuse to say his fielding isn't up to scratch’.  Jaques’ reputation will now be further enhanced by Australia’s defeats in the Twenty20 international and the first one-day match in South Africa; at this rate, expect him to be mentioned as a possible CEO of Cricket Australia if the Proteas win the series.

Katich, meanwhile, a thoughtful cricketer who’s known his own selection
misfortunes, is suffering the burden of incumbency, which he’d probably just prefer, although maybe not by much.  His century against Sri Lanka at the Gabba on 15 February was accompanied by one of the most histrionic
celebrations this side of the Oscars.  Sooner or later, I grant you, a
player scoring a century is going to vault the fence and plant a kiss on
every member of his entourage.  But Katich belied the dourness of his
batting by threatening for a moment to become the Mark Latham of Australian cricket; at his emotional press conference afterwards, one half expected him to say: ‘Say anything you like about me.  Just leave my family out of it.’ Except that he brought his family into it, dedicating the innings to them.

This rivalry, however, is more than a selection controversy du jour.  It is a reflection of the direction of the game’s technology and regulation. Jaques is a beneficiary of the era of high-performance bats and ever shorter boundaries. Katich suffers for the same reasons: his métier of finding space
through the field is passing out of fashion because it has become so easy to hit fours and sixes.  The tide of Twenty20, a game set to be populated by clones of Andrew Symonds in which the bowling is reduced to a static mechanism, is set to expedite the trend.  If Jaques is not at the World Cup
next year, he will only have himself to blame; if Katich is not, he probably shouldn’t blame himself too much.

Gideon Haigh is an Australian-based cricket historian and author. He writes for The Age and Cricinfo.com among others