Cricket is a batsman’s game. We have heard this before and know that it is a statement made usually to highlight the injustices and injuries visited upon the unmentioned party: the bowler.
So where does that leave the fielder?
On Friday at Headingley, England levelled the ODI series against Australia with a bracing, three-wicket victory. Eoin Morgan won the man-of-the-match award for an innings in which he broke all kinds of records.
Morgan’s 92 not only set up the win, but it broke records that were revealing of his place in England’s ODI history: 13 fifties in his first 26 innings as ODI captain, the most by any captain in the same number of innings. Alastair Cook held the record before him.
Two sixes helped him displace Andrew Flintoff as England’s most prolific six-hitter in ODIs, now with 94. The global record is 351, by the way, which is one way of measuring the gap between modern ODI cricket and that version hitherto played by England.
Morgan has also scored the most runs by an England captain in a bilateral ODI series, which is straining for a record but is nonetheless, indisputably, a record. So to give him the match award is understandable. It is hardly a bad decision, let alone one to get worked up over.
Cricket is unusual among team sports in that it attaches stature to the player-of-the-match award. Nowadays, the number of awards won is trotted out as a kind of value-enhancement in player analyses.
It makes sense, if only because they acknowledge the central idea that cricket is really a game of individuals played under the guise of a team sport.
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But giving the award to Morgan reaffirmed the deeply embedded, conventional thinking within cricket when it comes to the adjudication of such awards.
Because Friday’s most electric and invigorating pieces of cricket, the ones that most people are unlikely to forget and certainly the ones most people talked about, came from Glenn Maxwell. They had nothing to do with his contributions as batsman (a 64-ball 85) and everything to do with those as a fielder.
Maxwell’s two catches did not win Australia the match – although it kept them in it at moments when they were out of it – and player awards are heavily biased towards winners. But there was no better act of cricket that day.
The first, to get rid of Morgan, was fielding for the modern age of sports, as first interpreted by Jonty Rhodes – quick reflexes, athleticism and drawing freely from goalkeeping skills.
Rhodes used to pull off so many such catches, and others have since – Ben Stokes at Trent Bridge this summer, Andrew Strauss also at Trent Bridge 10 summers ago, to recall but two – but this kind of catch does not lose anything through overexposure. Higher-quality replays, in fact, elevate them.
The second catch was post-modern, one whose increasing sightings mark fielding’s evolution beyond Rhodes.
The self-relay boundary catch is astonishing, not only for the physical demands but for the quick wit it requires. Imagine completing a pretzel-like maze while simultaneously turning one’s body into a flying pretzel.
A little more adjudicating chutzpah and a little less convention and Maxwell could have won the award. But fielders do not usually get match awards. Gus Logie got it once, and inevitably Rhodes did. Mark Taylor’s slip-catching won him one.
But it does not happen nearly as often as it should. Viv Richards, for instance, would have been a deserving and pioneering recipient in the 1975 World Cup final for his fielding. He did at least win one for it, 14 years later in a game against India.
This is part of a wider pattern. Fielding has evolved, and is evolving, so much so fast, and yet cricket does little to recognise it. Some sides keep their own records, but publicly available statistics for fielders are limited solely to the number of catches they take. How many runs fielders save and the run-outs they effect go unrecorded publicly.
Cricket’s Oscars, the ICC Awards, have been running for 11 years. Last year, there were 13 categories in which excellence was rewarded. There is even an award for as unrecognisable and vague a concept as the Spirit of Cricket.
There is, however, no award – and never has been – for a fielder or any act of fielding.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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