Out in left field

Southpaws are supposed to be elegant. So how come some of the most successful cackhanders have some of the ugliest techniques cricket has yet seen?

● Jimi Hendrix, Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, David Bowie, Oprah Winfrey, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, Aristotle, Annie Lennox, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller, Bart Simpson, and Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. Not forgetting Chewbacca the Wookie.

But, eish, also Napoleon, Jack the Ripper, Osama bin Laden, George HW Bush (Dubya’s dad), FW de Klerk, the Boston Strangler. And Celine Dion.

They were and are left-handers all, people who would struggle to use a pair of scissors or a pen tethered to a bank counter. But they could do a stupendous paint job on your chapel’s ceiling, fight you a damn fine war, slit your throat in an eyeblink, be elected president, including apartheid’s last, make us laugh, make us cry, make us think, make us better human beings, and play a mean guitar.

Left-handers have also been 19.37% of all 2,932 men who have batted in Test cricket. More than half of them, 57.57%, have taken guard in the top four — 37.85% as openers, 32.04% as No 3s and 30.99% as No 4s.

Thanks for the gloves

Considering that us of the sinister hand (aweh: this reporter, too) amount to only 10% of the global population, we are outrageously overrepresented in cricket.

We’re also full of left field logic. Here’s David Gower: “The fact is both [left-handers and right-handers] have been horribly misnamed because the left-hander is really a right-hander and the right-hander is really a left-hander — if you work out which hand is doing most of the work.

“My right arm is my strongest. And therefore it’s the right hand, right eye and generally the right side which is doing all the work.

“So, if there is anything about this, then the left-handers, as such, should be called right-handers.”

Weirder still, not all cackhanders are created equal, and some of them are made, not born. The Graemes, Pollock and Smith, bowled leg-spin and off-spin: so, using their right arms. Smith plays golf left-handed, but writes with his right.

Sourav Ganguly batted from the left side of the crease because he grew up using his lefthanded brother’s gloves. Snehasish played 59 first-class matches but never cracked the nod for India. Sourav played 113 Tests, scored 16 centuries and averaged 42.17. Thanks for the gloves, boet, he might say.

Hanif Mohammad told the youngest of his four, also right-handed brothers, Sadiq, to bat left-handed to help his chances of selection for Pakistan. Sadiq’s 41 Tests and five centuries later, having opened in 41 of his 74 innings, proved that to be sound advice.

There are less subtle difference between some left-handers and others. Dean Elgar comes to the crease mean as a junkyard dog awoken by a howling drunk in the miserable blackness of a wet winter’s night. For Garfield Sobers, the crease was the back seat of a car at a drive-in, steamy windows and all, under the nudging, winking cover of darkness.

Sobers always drew a crowd, and who wouldn’t want to watch his genius dazzle in the sun. But who wouldn’t want to see the consummately cussed Elgar dare the world, or that part of it tasked with bowling to him that day, to do its worst.

Cricket has changed since Sobers strode the world’s ovals like the god he was. Rather than wonder how he might have taken white-ball cricket by storm — he made nought in his only ODI — we should be re-

We of the sinister hand are only 10% of the global population [but] are outrageously overrepresented in cricket

lieved that the red-ball arena had him to itself. Elgar doesn’t play the game Sobers did, but a version that has had parts of its soul excised and sold off to the highest bidder like muti.

Hiding in plain sight, too, are the facts that Elgar opens the batting and Sobers spent most of his career in the middle order.

As anyone from Kepler Wessels to Geoffrey Boycott will attest, there is no harder job in cricket than what you must do after you dare to walk to the middle when the pitch, the ball and the bowlers are all rudely fresh and new.

So there should be another level of understanding for Alastair Cook and his technique; a haphazard collection of moving bits and pieces, none of them in the same direction. Also for Gower, whose elegance would have convinced you he could make flossing his teeth look as if he was playing the violin. Vivaldi, of course.

Gower also had a thing for teaming his white and pink socks. In good company, or what: Da Vinci always painted his mountains blue.

Pictures: Getty Images Alastair Cook, above, looked like a drunk giraffe at the crease. Graeme Smith, inset, galumphed his way to a mountain of runs, while Dean Elgar, inset right, bats as if he has been pulled away from a braai with his mates. However, Garfield Sobers, bottom left, was a shining dream in pads, while David Gower, bottom centre, should have turned up to the crease in a tuxedo. Graeme Pollock, bottom right, hit the ball with Wagnerian intent. Left-handers are supposed to be elegant, and the last half of that half-dozen duly were. So how come the first three, who are among the most successful cackhanders, have some of the ugliest techniques cricket has yet seen? Perhaps the difference is that they are all opening batsmen and that the others all enjoyed the freedom of batting in the middle order. Or that cricket has become a less poetic, more prosaic enterprise. Or both.