The Finest of Edges

 
Cricket is a big game played in a big roughly round shaped field measuring 200 yards in one direction and around 160 in the other and yet all what matters in the game takes place in and around a cubic metre of space where the player with a bat is taking guard as another runs up to let rip a hard ball up his jaw.

Unlike football where the ball control with the foot is quite visible, there is no way of telling what the fingers are doing to the ball in cricket. None of the consequences: the spinning, the seaming, the swinging, is visible to the spectator. By the time he might have worked out where the ball pitched, the action has already concluded. As he holds the bat up helplessly drawn to the rising ball, there is the faintest of knicks, 'the finest of edges' and with the humming background noise of the cheering crowd, the barely audible sound being heard or not by the umpire can make or break a budding sporting career, given the ball has flown to the wicketkeeper who has caught the ball in his gloves. Only zooming in with a television camera can one see what is really happening and yet hundreds pass through the gates content just to see an outline of the action. In summary, the vision of an athelete running in and moving one arm up and over in a hurling action and at the other end the athlete with a bat heaving it through the air. The spectator cannot see where nor how the bat touches the ball, he can only hear it. The sonic qualities of that incident are the indicators of the state of play.

The entertainment increases when Nathan Lyon, the Australian spin bowler comes on. In order to get the ball to spin, the bowler must launch it at a slow pace. Unlike a fast bowler who uses a long run-up to gain more speed on the delivery, the slow bowler winds up his whole body like a spring, then at the final stride, channels all that energy via his fingers on to the ball, making it spin and twirl, going sideways as it hits the pitch. Nathan Lyon accentuates these movements like a silhouette dancing in a pantomime. Because the action is not furious when they are on, spin bowlers are never as glamourous as the men who bowl fast who create the thrill and danger often pitching the ball around or near the batsmen's heads. The only exception was Shane Warne who spun the ball so much that his bowling was not dangerous to their bodies but definitely compromised the careers of many of the world's best batsmen who were not Australians.

The Australian Mitchell Starc is generally regarded as the best fast bowler in the world at the moment, taking over from South Africa's Dale Steyn who has become injury prone and now plays sporadically. Also from South Africa there has emerged a young star, Kagiso Rabada but he does not give the impression of brutal force as does Starc who has a loopy hammer action rather than the whipping action of Steyn and Rabada.

Cricket is undergoing great changes, in part due to the emergence of India as a major economic force where cricket has become a huge spectator sport, especially the shorter versions of the game which attracts raucous crowds at the stadiums and millions of subscribers to pay TV. The Indian Premier League has become a kind of a world premier league, regarded as the most prestigious of all domestic T20 tournaments drawing a worldwide audience with all the international stars stationed in India as members of the best eight T20 teams in the world during the six week period of the annual tournament. Now T20 cricket has its own athletic dynamic quite different from the five day Test matches and different again from the longer 50 over one day game. Reduced down to mere 20 overs per side, the impetus is to score as many runs as quickly as possible. The best way to do it is to hit the ball hard and long over the playing boundary scoring six runs. It is similar to the home run in baseball. The difference between a successful hit for a six and getting out caught just short of the boundary is a matter of centimetres on the surface of the bat or a fraction of a second in timing the shot. Thus even at the crudest level of the game's contrived excitement of an IPL final as the team batting second comes down to last ball of the match needing six runs to win, it means nothing if the phrase, 'the finest of edges' does not create some metaphysical imagery in the spectator's mind.
- Bevagna, 5 12 2016