James Vince and the Flash of Ecstacy
As the great JV exits for Dubai, a farewell to the King of the cover drive...
The cover drive is not like other shots. It is dangerous and beautiful. It is decadent and depraved. It is the purest expression of mastery in batsmanship and it is a destroyer of innings, of matches, of careers.
It is addictive, compulsive, indulgent.
It makes crowds go ‘aaaahhh’.
It makes coaches slam their fists into dressing room walls.
Any change in this equation, the exquisite balance between risk and reward, reduces it, diminishes its capacity for pleasure.
The cover drive reveals a batter’s character. First of all, can they play it? And then will they play it? And thirdly, when will they play it? If I think of the cover drive I have an internal list of the batsmen that I associate with it. At the moment it goes: Brian Lara, Damien Martyn, Ian Bell, Moeen Ali, Babar Azam, James Vince.
All of them have a hint of recklessness about their batting apart perhaps from Ian Bell. And of this little random and arbitrary group, Brian Lara is their outlier and true champion. He made loads more runs than the others, and has been both measurably and immeasurably greater. Only seven men in history have made more Test runs than Lara’s 11,953. Of those seven, Kumar Sangakkara, Rahul Dravid, Jacques Kallis, Joe Root and Sachin Tendulkar cover drove with textbook magnificence – and almost always appropriately. They had the rectitude of schoolteachers where the cover drive was concerned. Ricky Ponting preferred to hit straighter, and if Alastair Cook cover drove, it made the papers.
Because batting for that long at that level is about control. Denial. Mitigation of risk. You can’t just cover drive because you feel like it.
But Lara did.
He did it because he could, because it was there. And what a sight he was, bat arcing high to low in a great rush, a fencer’s thrust with the right knee at the ball…
Have that… it said to the bowler. Have some more…
As for the others on my internal list… Was there a more piquant sight than Babar Azam, truly alone in the vast bowl of the Gabba a few tours back, the ball cracking like a shell from his bat while all around him fell and Pakistan were destroyed by Australia. Something Lara-like about that.
And as for Moeen… As for James Vince… My fallen warriors, carried out on their shields. Compulsive cover drivers, those two. Vince in particular is hopelessly addicted, but nobody does it better…
Old pros used to call the off ‘the posh side’. On the bombsite pitches of the golden age, the luxury of the cover drive was the preserve of the gentleman, the amateur. The pro, if committed to retaining his income, knew it wasn’t worth the risk. ‘Never cover drive in April’ ran sage advice for the batsmen of England. And for a century, that orthodoxy prevailed. The cover drive had its place – to a full ball delivered on the sun-baked wickets of August.
In Geoffrey Boycott’s Book For Young Cricketers, the greatest defensive batsmen of them all laid down how it should be played. ‘The most important point about this shot is the movement of the left shoulder, which should turn and point towards extra cover. By keeping your head close to the left shoulder, your eyes look down on the line of the ball. Remember, the wider the ball, the more you turn your back to the bowler. In this way you make sure you stay sideways on and get your left foot to the pitch of the ball.’
Watch the clips of Boycott making his 100th century at Headingley in 1977 against Australia, and you’ll see his credo in action: head pinned over the cherry, the weight forward, the risk all but evaporating under the straightness of his blade, its short and clear direction of travel.
That was how the professional batsman hit through the posh side.
For those decades, the compulsion existed, if hidden, in a few. Perhaps you sense it in the words of Neville Cardus as he puts himself in the mind of a man bowling at Victor Trumper: ‘Victor is moving at top speed. Well I’m bound sooner or later to send along a really good ball. Victor will flash at it in his ecstasy, and I will have him.’
Flash at it in his ecstasy…
There it is.
Compare it with Cardus’ description of Bradman a paragraph later: ‘He sees the dangerous ball with eyes as suspicious as those of a Makepiece.’
Bradman was machine-like, relentless, the anti-Trumper. He felt his echo in Sachin Tendulkar, the batsman he saw as most like himself, whose epic of self-denial in Sydney in 2004 has become the poster innings for pragmatism over instinct.
‘Tendulkar had managed scores of 0, 1, 37, 0 and 44,’ ran the report in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘and had been dismissed on a number of occasion driving at wide balls outside his off stump.’
And so Tendulkar faced 436 deliveries at Sydney, hit 33 boundaries and not a single one of them through the off side. He made 241 not out.
‘I decided not to play the cover drive,’ he said afterwards. ‘They were bowling consistently outside the off stump and I decided to leave all those balls. Then they had to bowl at me and I used the pace of the ball. I would put this innings right at the top of all my hundreds…’
I decided not to play the cover drive…
By way of contrast, here’s a random dip into the James Vince archive, this from a match report of George Dobell’s: ‘He did receive a decent ball that left him a little while inviting the drive. But it was an invitation he could have declined. Or at least an invitation he could have accepted with his foot to the pitch of the ball. As it was, that foot barely moved. It was a dismissal as soft as it was familiar.’
An invitation he could have declined…
The invitation. The dividing line. The flash of ecstasy.
Sachin decided not to play it. For James Vince, there was no decision to make. What would his career look like if he had some of Tendulkar’s appetite for denial? It’s a worthwhile question. But then so is this: what would James Vince’s batting look like if he didn’t play that cover drive.
Aaaahhhh.
I recalled a text message I got from someone watching Vince play live for the first time.
‘Jesus,’ it said. ‘I didn’t realise that he hits it so hard…’
***
A game without the cover drive, its mystique and its aesthetics, its technical accomplishment, would seem an arid place. There are more dominant and domineering shots. There are shots that dent the will of the bowler, chip away at their psyche. There are shots that bring a particular pleasure because you associate them with a certain player. But there is no other shot that exists on such an edge, an edge from which some fall one way and some fall the other.
It is the perfect response to the ball being propelled quickly down the wicket. It adjusts its direction at the right angle. The ball makes a certain sound when struck. Colours coalesce: red on white, white on green, green on red. The field is split. The advantage changes hands. It is perfect in its moment.
If you don’t have this feeling for the cover drive, and for seeing someone do something beautiful in way that only they can do it, then nothing about James Vince will make sense. Vince’s cover drive is extraordinarily dirty, the cricketing equivalent of a louche Victorian gentleman honking on opium and dismissing his butler for the night. Or, viewed another way, it is extraordinarily beautiful, an abstraction that takes the basic principals of the shot and applies them as sparingly and as personally as possible, a piece of pure expressionism worth more words than I could set down here. How you see it on a given day, whether you laugh at the audacity or almost weep at the beauty, often tells you something about where you are, how you’re feeling. It says as much about you as it does about him.
In the early months of 2021, the England Test team went to India for a four-match series. Somewhat against expectations, they won the first game after Joe Root made a double hundred but India won the next three by huge margins - 317 runs, 10 wickets and an innings and 25 runs. Across those games, England were bowled out for 134, 164, 112, 81, 205 and 135, a dire run that meant the batting line up was under some pressure as the new English season began. Those on the fringes of the team could make a case for their inclusion in future squads. James Vince began by scoring 231 for Hampshire against Leicester. ‘Here we go,’ I thought. ‘He’s about to produce a transcendent run of batting that will see him back where he belongs, in the England top order, adding to the miserly number of thirteen Tests the selectors have seen fit to give him…’
Or at least I would have done if my thoughts came out in any sort of grammatical order.
In the next four games he scored 9, 0, 52, 0, 10, 6, 42.
And I realised again that who James Vince was playing cricket for didn’t really matter. Not in the grand scheme of things. What mattered was that he was playing, doing the stuff that only James Vince could do: getting runs, getting out, operating in that hinterland of Vinciness where he was always true to his decadent vision of the game.