By Derek Pringle
It only takes ten balls to dismiss a cricket team yet we still profess shock and bewilderment when wickets tumble in quick succession, as they did in England’s recent T20 match against South Africa, where capitulation was too anodyne a description.
Batting collapses have long fascinated psychologists but from my experience in cricket, the one that afflicted England in Johannesburg the other day was unusual and did not fit the standard patterns.
For one thing, Eoin Morgan’s team were going well at 157 for three in the 17th over. What happened next was nothing short of meltdown, the remaining seven wickets falling for 14 runs in 20 balls to a combination of bad luck, poor shot selection and brilliant catching.
You could argue that something like that is always likely to happen in T20, where risk is barely managed at all by batsmen compared to other formats. Gung-ho rules and the fact that England’s batsmen kept swinging, and perishing, should not have surprised us that much. Maybe, but there are those who believe collapses like that can betray underlying problems, such as team disunity and a coach who is slow to spot the danger.
One collapse I saw, but was not involved in, was when Essex bowled Surrey out for 14 at Chelmsford in 1983. There is the famous Henry Blofeld story about how, with a dinner engagement in Norfolk, Blofeld filed his piece early based on Keith Fletcher’s doughty 110, which had taken up most of the first day.
Given the pitch was slow and required graft from the batsmen, Blowers sent in his copy confident not many wickets would fall before stumps, the final line reading: “At the close Surrey were — for —”. He signed off with a note to the sub to fill in the relevant runs and wickets, and set off for Norfolk. When he phoned later for queries, and no doubt feeling mellow following a bottle or two of Mazis-Chambertin, the sub ruined his evening by telling him the relevant figures were 14 and 10. Digestion was, shall we say, disturbed.
Surrey’s demise did have a freakish element to it – the ball swung prodigiously. Norbert Phillip and Neil Foster were the bowlers with six and four wickets respectively, and some reckon Phillip aimed his outswinger at the square leg umpire so much was the ball moving.
John Lever and I were both injured and in for treatment, so we saw it all from the players’ balcony. Once the first few wickets had fallen, Surrey’s batsmen went to the crease looking for monsters that were simply not there, a perception not helped by the returning batsmen telling those waiting to go in that it was swinging round corners. “How am I supposed to play that,” being the typical refrain. The speed of the collapse (it took 14.3 overs) meant that many were rushing to get ready and therefore flustered before they reached the crease.
Surrey were also hindered by the schism that still exists between batsmen and bowlers, with the bowlers adamant that it is not their job to dig the team out of a hole when the batsmen mess up.
To that end, Sylvester Clarke, Surrey’s fearsome fast bowler, had to be lifted from his hot bath and shown the scoreboard before he would pad up. As it was, he went to the middle without a thigh pad.
It was chaos and seven Surrey batsmen made ducks. Their way of coping was to have ties made bearing the words ‘The Magnificent Seven’ while those who had got off the mark had ones inscribed with ‘The Famous Four’.
Needless to say, Surrey’s coach, in a classic case of delayed psychology, banned them because of their negative connotations.
The other collapse I recall, other than Australia’s craven surrender at Trent Bridge last year, when Stuart Broad routed them on a seaming pitch, was when Curtly Ambrose destroyed England in Port-of-Spain 22 years ago.
West Indies’ dominance over England had been almost absolute for 20 years but this represented a rare opportunity to beat them as England began their second innings on the fourth evening needing 194 to win.
What happened next is still talked about in the region’s rum shacks as Ambrose uprooted six of England’s top eight with a devastating spell of accurate fast bowling. There was a bit of variable bounce in the pitch but Ambrose, who’d cleaned Australia up a few years earlier, with a spell of seven for one at the WACA, was unstoppable once his giant frame locked into that killer rhythm. Instead of celebrating a rare win over West Indies, England were dismissed for 46 and left to lick their wounds.
A day after the carnage I asked a taxi driver how local lad, Brian Lara, might have gone against the 6ft 7in Ambrose in that mood. “Man, Lara would have run home bruised and crying.”
Experts are divided on why panic like that infiltrates a team. One theory reckons that instead of fight or flight, humans, being social animals, seek the proximity of familiar persons or places in a crisis.
On a cricket field, dressing-rooms are places of haven, especially abroad, and they contain familiar faces. When you are batting in the middle there is one familiar face, but they are 22 yards away and unable to offer much succour. Getting away from the middle and your foe and making for the dressing-room would therefore make sense, if only to a psychologist.
My own theory is that when panic afflicts a team, it ceases to rely on instinct. Instead of a player’s brain reacting to the ball as it is bowled, it is filled with thoughts of dread, most of them illogical, upon which it then concentrates. All of which takes up vital processing space usually reserved for batting. When batsmen and coaches talk about “getting in,” they are really on about reaching that point in an innings where nerves subside and instinct takes over. One of Mark Ramprakash’s biggest problems when he played for England is that he rarely batted on instinct, at least not like he did when playing county cricket.
I remember him falling lbw, playing all round a full toss, against New Zealand at Lord’s in 1999. Dion Nash was the bowler and had he served that gift up to Ramprakash in Middlesex colours, a fielder would have been picking it up from the boundary boards beneath Father Time. But Ramprakash came into that Test, not, of course, for the first time, under pressure for his place and those thoughts suppressed his instincts.
Project that process onto the rest of the team, limit the escape routes, and you get a batting collapse. It’s just surprising it doesn’t happen more often.
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, Friday February 26 2016
