Unplayable! (part i)

Has any delivery been genuinely unplayable? Can you think of a single ball in the history of the game that would have dismissed anyone that faced it? Our two-part odyssey of discovery begins here...

“…as if he’d seen the devil himself” Geoffrey Boycott is bowled by Michael Holding

Kensington Oval, Barbados. Saturday 14 March 1981, West England versus England, Third Test. A pitch so green and out of the local character that when Ian Botham wins the toss, he puts West Indies into bat. Viv Richards is out for nought, but Clive Lloyd makes exactly 100 and West Indies reach 265, dismissed before lunch on the second day.

England to bat. For the first time in his twenty-six Test matches, Michael Holding is offered the choice of ends by Clive Lloyd. Holding declines. Andy Roberts is the senior bowler, and to Michael’s mind always will be. They decide together that Andy will come from the Southern End. Michael will bowl at the Pavilion End, into the wind, as quickly as he can for three or four overs, and then replace Andy at the Southern End when Andy’s spell is done.

Graham Gooch faces Andy’s first over and thick-edges a four then a two through the gully.

Now it’s Holding to Boycott.

Geoffrey Boycott is almost 41 years old and has faced all of the world’s quickest bowlers, but this is something else, something different. Holding takes no time to warm up, sends down no looseners. Instead he is at full pace right away, running in very quickly with his head moving from side to side, the ball a red dot full of screaming energy. Boycott will say later that the truly terrifying thing is that it feels as though Holding is not really trying, that if he wanted to he could bowl even faster than he does.

With supreme skill and some luck, Boycott survives the first five deliveries. Walking back to his mark, Michael Holding thinks, “I’ve bowled five of the best balls I can bowl and he is still there.”

Holding guesses that Boycott will be expecting a short one, and ordinarily he would be bowling that too, but as he runs in he decides to go full and straight. Maybe Boycott’s movement forward is slightly delayed because of it, but everything happens so quickly it is impossible to tell. Holding sees the ball go down but what happens next is obscured by Boycott’s front pad.  

There is however a photograph by Patrick Eager that captures the immediate aftermath. Boycott is half turned back towards the stumps, two of which remain in the ground, the third having been catapulted out of shot. The bail has gone even further. They find it almost by the sightscreen. In Frank Keating’s vivid phrase, Boycott’s “mouth gaped and he tottered as if he’d seen the devil himself.” Boycott would later write that it was the only time in his career that he did not feel “a profound sense of failure” after being dismissed for a low score.

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Had Geoffrey Boycott faced that rare thing, the unplayable delivery? Maybe so.

When we came to work together on Being Geoffrey Boycott, I knew that Holding’s over would be one of the sections that people would turn to first. The book began as a diary written by Geoffrey, with one entry for each of his 108 Test matches, and when I got the original document from him, that Test was one of the first I read, too.

The truth about it was, perhaps inevitably, more complicated. For a start, the morning after Boycott’s dismissal he was awoken at 7.30am to be told the dreadful news that Ken Barrington, on the tour as an assistant manager, had died of a heart attack during the night. The Test match continued with some of the players in tears on the field before play.

The game was not televised and the only footage that exists was shot by a BBC TV crew making a highlights package for the news. Whether or not he was afflicted by a “profound sense of failure,” Boycott replayed the delivery over and over in his head in the days that followed and had to find out if his memory of it was correct. He tracked the BBC film crew down to the Holiday Inn in Bridgetown and asked them to show him the footage. He watched it over and over again until he was satisfied he properly understood what had happened.

“Four of the first five balls had reared up from just short of a length into my throat,” he wrote. “I had missed one and gloved three just in front of slip and gully. The bounce was alarming and at that pace the law of averages says sooner or later I am not going to be able to keep the ball down… All of this was going through my mind. I was trying to think on my feet and not get gloved out.”

He remembered watching Bob Simpson leaving the ball on length at the WACA. “He didn’t attempt to get in line and defend the ball. Instead he swayed to the leg side and let the ball bounce over the stumps. He didn’t want to get out defending the high bouncing ball… I was fascinated by his thinking and execution. When I tried it for that sixth ball I didn’t get far enough over when Michael bowled a touch fuller. My thinking was good, but execution poor.”

Boycott is accepting some culpability in the dismissal. The ball was an almost unstoppable one made even more deadly by the five that preceded it. Holding had not only bowled Boycott, he had out-thought him. He understood that the batsman was preparing for another short ball and bowled a fuller one. At that pace, in that rhythm, with the crowd around him going wild and feeling as though he couldn’t bowl any better, he was just too good during those tiny fractions of time.

But Boycott’s implication is that in a different over, at a different moment, he may not have made the misjudgement that he did. Even if Holding had sent down the same delivery as the first ball of the over instead of the last, he may have survived it. Maybe.

It’s in the nature of great batters to think that they can only be dismissed by their own mistakes. There is an odd kind of comfort in that because it means everything is controllable. Almost every innings ends in dismissal, but it does not end because the ball cannot be played. The delivery itself may have not been played, but that does not make it unplayable.

In part two, out at 10am tomorrow, we look at two contenders for a genuinely unplayable delivery, Warne to Gatting and Starc to Vince. Will either of them pass muster? Plus, Ollie Pope and the myth of the unplayable…