Chris Martin, the jack of jacks, and other rabbits you always wanted to watch bat
Andrew Miller12-May-2020Chris Martin
Look in the scorebook, as the eternal refrain goes. So much of the game is filtered through its numbers, the glorious half-century that was a litany of dropped catches and inside-edges, the first-ball wicket that bounced twice before clipping the off stump, the 71-Test career that featured as much resistance with the bat as a soap bubble in a light breeze. Aesthetically, Chris Martin was a cipher. Can you recall the slightest bit of substance to that diffident stance, puny backlift and footwork set in concrete? To judge by his stats alone, however, he was the king of kings, the jack of jacks, the roadkill par excellence. He faced 615 deliveries in 13 years, fewer than Gary Kirsten managed in a single innings against England in 1999-2000. He was dismissed by 52 of them, or once every 11 balls, a ratio that would have been even more impressive but for him being left high and dry on the same number of occasions, his arrival in the middle a cue for his team-mates to flee for the life-rafts. He hit 15 fours in his entire career – 15 in 13 years! – a total that most incompetents might pick off via slashes through the slips in a matter of months. His average of 2.36 includes a solitary double-figure score (12), 36 ducks, and a full 40-month stretch, from 2000 to 2004, in which he didn’t manage a single run. Truly, we have been blessed to witness such ineptitude. It cannot, will not, be rivalled for as long as the game is played.Stuart Broad
Broad’s batting was once good enough for him to be considered a genuine allrounder – his back-foot cover-drive was once likened to that of Sir Garry Sobers, while his 169 against Pakistan in 2010 is a higher score than either Alastair Cook or Andrew Strauss ever made to earn a place on the Lord’s honours board. But then, in 2014, his nose was smashed by a gruesome bouncer from Varun Aaron, and his batting average nosedived like the price of oil. And yet, somewhere beneath his new-found prerogative for self-preservation, Broad has retained the poise and street smarts of the batsman he used to be – the winks, the nudges, the muscle-memory of competence, all repackaged in a miserable bundle of failings. And that makes him one of the most compelling sights imaginable on a cricket field. Whether he’s getting his bat caught in his pad while being bowled by Kagiso Rabada, or faux-innocently walking to the non-striker’s end after Jofra Archer’s dismissal in the Headingley run-chase, or simply reprising his former glories in a boundary-laden fusillade against South Africa in Johannesburg last winter – utterly feckless one ball, utterly imperious the next – you simply can’t afford to miss a moment of it. Not least because it will be over all too soon.Getty ImagesDevon Malcolm
Malcolm was incompetence with muscles. A brutally quick fast bowler with milk-bottle glasses and shoulders hewn from granite, his batting average of 6.05 – more than twice that of Martin’s – owed everything to the violence in his swings through the line. He could barely see beyond his nose for most of his career, which rather hampered his pretensions as a batsman. But my word, he could smoke it on the rare occasions that his bat made solid contact with the ball – as Shane Warne in particular discovered on being dumped into the concessions at Sydney in 1994-95. And unlike Phil Tufnell, an utterly craven tailender (and the only man capable of pushing his team-mate up to No. 10 in the England batting order), Malcolm stood firm in the line of fire, not least because he had the means to exact retribution when he was wronged. The exact words “you guys are history” may be apocryphal, but his response to being clanged on the helmet at The Oval in 1994 most certainly is not. South Africans scattered left, right and centre for the immortal figures of 9 for 57. The ultimate revenge of the killer rabbit.Courtney Walsh
Being a keeper of the Caribbean flame was a deadly serious business, especially in the mid-to-late 1990s, when the standards that had sustained cricket’s greatest dynasty were beginning to ebb from the region, and all the more expectation was heaped on those few proven matchwinners that remained. And few were more proven that Courtney Walsh, who would finish his career with a world-record 519 wickets … and a world-record 43 Test ducks. For the same gangly frame that translated into that venomously long-levered bowling action proved less easy to tame when it came to the art of batting. The upshot was a homespun technique in which elbows and knees would pop out at geometry-defying angles, and at inopportune moments, like an interpretative dance performed by Stiletto, the evil crow from Dangermouse. And yet, Walsh’s bravery was in many ways enhanced by his incompetence, and never more so than in his crowning glory as a No. 11 – in Barbados in 1999, when he came out to support the mighty Brian Lara with West Indies still needing six runs to pull off a sensational chase against Australia, and put body and soul on the line to seize the day.Getty ImagesDarren Gough
To be clear, there’s a very specific incarnation of Darren Gough the tailender that I’d wish to preserve for future generations. It existed for barely six months, from the moment of his Test debut, in June 1994, to the moment he suffered a broken foot on the Ashes tour the following January. But in that time, he was an utter riot of gleeful thwacking and pigeon-chested posturing, with a followthrough so violent that the seat of his pants needed reinforcement, and a disregard for reputation that put the cowed attitudes of England’s genuine batsmen to shame. In essence, he batted as he bowled: up and at ’em, hang the consequences, grinning at his own self-fulfilling lunacy as yet another outrageous piece of bravado came good. In an era of miserably slim pickings for England, his tail-end rampages offered a cartoonish form of retribution, as some of the most feared bowlers of the era were briefly recast in the roles of Wil E Coyote or Tom Cat and spanged with a range of frying pans and ACME anvils. After seven Tests, Gough was averaging 34.85 and was being talked up as the new Ian Botham. But then England tried to teach him to bat properly, and the effect was as if Road Runner had finally looked down after running off a cliff.
