Brydon Carse and the perfect ratio

How a 16th century mathematician gave the game its magic

Fans of the great Withnail and I will recall Withnail reading aloud, with mounting horror, a newspaper report about a shot putter called Geoff Woad:

“Jesus Christ… Look at him! Look at Geoff Woad! His head must weight fifty pounds on its own. Imagine the size of his balls. Imagine getting into a fight with the fucker!”

Withnail is one of cinema’s great cowards of course, but even so, most of us have encountered a Geoff Woad or two somewhere, a human being whose physical solidity seems to go way beyond the norm. What’s this guy made of, you find yourself wondering, because it sure ain’t the same stuff as me…

Stand next to Ben Stokes and you’ll get the feeling. His shoulders look like they’re set in concrete. Liam Plunkett was another. And it’s pretty obvious Brydon Carse is the same. Even Stokes sounded slightly overcome after the game in Christchurch: “He would keep bowling even if his toe was ripped off. He wouldn't show any pain, he'd just keep going and going.”

Yeah, and imagine getting into a fight with the fucker. His efforts with the ball were fearsome, and Carse gives the impression that there is plenty more to come. And all of the physicality he possesses served to highlight once again something about the innate perfection of the game he is playing.

Joel Garner ran up like a man scaling a ladder and then jumped into his delivery stride to send the ball down from a height of nine feet. Australia’s Starc and Hazelwood appear at the crease from the land of the giants. Malcolm Marshall was slender, nimble. Sylvester Clarke would have given Sonny Liston a run for his money. A few years ago I saw Jeff Thomson give an amusing speech at Wormsley cricket ground, and was struck by how slight he was.

It makes no difference.

At the other end might be Bradman or Tendulkar, Matthew Hayden or Chris Gayle. It didn’t and doesn’t really matter. Because the innate perfection is that of the 22 yards that everyone has to play on. It has never been altered and it has never been overpowered. On the 22 yards, everyone has an equal chance, regardless of their physical size or strength. It’s a kind of golden ratio, a perfect circle, an equivalent of the Vitruvian man. And still its creation seems to be some kind of fluke, or rather, a measure of convenience for players way back in the mists of time.

Edmund Gunter was born in 1581, and became a clergyman, mathmatician, astronomer and geometer, a man who loved measurements and the marvels they contained. In 1620, he introduced Gunter’s Chain, a surveying device that enabled land to be accurately measured and parcelled up, regardless of its terrain. A chain was sixty-six feet long and divided into one hundred links. Ten chains made a furlong, and eighty chains a mile. An acre was ten square chains, or 100,000 links.

Gunter’s Chain: our mighty measure…

The genius of Gunter’s system was that it reconciled traditional land measurements, which used a base of four, with a decimal system. The method was so mathematically pure that the chain and its subdivisions, the link and the rod, were the statutory measure for two centuries, and the chain was not completely removed from British law until 1985.

And a single chain – one hundred links, sixty-six feet, twenty-two yards – became the length of a cricket pitch. After all, a chain is pretty easy to remember and very simple to measure out. It was a chain in 1677 and it is a chain now, a distance with magic in it, somehow right for underarm, round arm and overarm bowling at anything from 30-100mph, the perfect scale to survive across the centuries and across continents, used in Northern Europe and at the Southern tip of New Zealand, on the islands of Sri Lanka and the Caribbean, with all their variations in terrain and surface.

One chain makes all players equal – it would have even somehow constrained Geoff Woad and his 50lb head.

Someone give Edmund Gunter an award.