It has ever been thus for Ian Bell. Batting in his 100th Test against Sri Lanka on Saturday, a moment perhaps for some glory to be his alone, the spotlight instead fell to a batsman higher in the order. Maybe that was the only way for it to be, given how that has been the leitmotif of Bell’s career: someone has always seemed more significant.
Is it harsh to suggest that Bell being a hundred Tests old feels like an underwhelming cricket moment? Part of it is simply that 100 Tests is not as big a deal as it once was, though it may once again be 10 years hence.
Bell is one merely of 60 players who have done so. Sachin Tendulkar has played 200 and Shiv Chanderpaul, still going, 155; Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara, both playing in Bell’s 100th, got there long ago, standing on 145 and 124 respectively. One hundred is not that big.
The other, infinitely more curious part of it is Bell himself. Alastair Cook, Michael Clarke and Kevin Pietersen reached the same landmark less than a year ago. Chris Gayle did a week ago. AB de Villiers and James Anderson will get there soon too.
These are men who feel like they have played 100 Tests, who have to show for it the triumphs and tumult of sporting life. These are figures who have impacted their sides, matches, tournaments, series, and their countries.
They all bring with them a completeness of achievement that, should they retire tomorrow, their careers stand mostly defined, for better or worse.
Bell? ESPNcricinfo’s cluster of stories for the retirement of Murali Karthik, the finest India spinner to not actually be a fine India spinner, was exactly as big as for Bell’s 100th Test. That, I cannot help but feel, says something about Bell rather than just that the vast majority of the website’s readership is Indian.
The overwhelming tone for Bell’s appreciation was that some kind of what is beginning to feel like an almost mythical best is still to come. Bell himself said that his success in the home Ashes in 2013 was “just the start”. None of this seems appropriate for a grizzled, wisened 100-Tests-man; this is more like a man 20 Tests into a career, talking about that first real phase of success.
But it makes sense because, in effect, we are still searching for the definitive Bell moment. It is not that he has not played fine innings, or had a wonderful series. But often, to elevate a batsman, a chemistry is required, of the circumstance he is in - or creates - with a bit of his own gristle, blood and soul.
It should have happened already, given the kind of game he possesses, which is to say that he is beautiful to watch.
In equal parts he can look very English and un-English. The high and straight elbow, the pristine driving: these are products of rigorous, prolonged home coaching.
Yet the minimal backlift, the lateness of his bat movements, the wrists and that get-out shot to third man, these are his own, more subcontinent traits.
Usually a big innings played aesthetically stirs cricket like little else. Bell has a few and yet cricket has done little stirring, especially outside England.
It could be that he is at odds with this age of batting genius, in which the best come in a few easily identifiable fonts. There are the super-efficient accumulators, like Jacques Kallis or late-stage Sachin Tendulkar. Ricky Ponting brought more bullishness and Mathew Hayden’s bullying, susceptible as it was, has also been influential.
The doers, like Rahul Dravid, have been accommodated in the same space as the dreamers, like VVS Laxman, as well as genuine pioneers, like Virender Sehwag. A new kind may be emerging now, in AB de Villiers and Virat Kohli, men whose games are so sharp they cut right across all formats.
But all great modern batsmanship has been stitched together by scale. Hundreds must be big, series aggregates massive, averages soaring, periods of golden form prolonged into eternity. Relentlessness, in particular, is a virtue.
No amount of runs is ever enough. At their best, this generation has married an epic thirst with a sense of impregnability that has made them, in all senses, inhuman.
Bell, on the other hand, has been too human and not really operated on this scale. He has only one double hundred and if his lower position in the middle predicates that a little, the following statistic is more revealing of an intrinsic incompleteness.
Of the 29 Test series he has played in, he has averaged less than 35 in 12 and over 50 in 11. Too many periods of great run-scoring, after which he has seemed just about ready to traipse off into greatness, have seen him immediately stumble instead.
That inconsistency, to follow his most prolific periods pretty swiftly with some of his leanest, have conversely made him a bellwether of his country’s fortunes over the last decade. England have been awesome and then England have been abominable; just like Bell.
He may yet end up representing a larger truth about England’s batting over the last couple of decades. That is that the country has produced a succession of very good batsmen but none among the modern greats. Kevin Pietersen may imagine himself to be there, but he is not, strictly speaking, an English product.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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