BEING HIT BY A BALL CAN NOT OFTEN BE AVOIDED
For those doubting the destructive power of a cricket ball to damage, both physically and psychologically, look no further than Luke Fletcher, the Nottinghamshire Outlaws bowler whose season was ended after he was struck on the head during a T20 match against the Birmingham Bears.
Fletcher, unusually, suffered the injury while bowling – his first ball of the match hit back at him by Sam Hain with such force that he was unable to take evasive action. It isn’t the first time a bowler has been clobbered this way and with batsmen wielding better rebounding bats with more intent now, it won’t be the last, though, mercifully, such injuries remain rare.
Cricket balls are made of leather, weigh five-and-a-half ounces and are hard. Being hit by one, especially at high speed, can break both a player’s bones and their spirit, which is why fast bowlers use them to threaten physical injury and to intimidate batsmen into giving up their wicket.
Better protective equipment like helmets, chest guards and arm protectors, along with those hardy perennials, gloves and pads, have reduced that physical threat though it has not disappeared entirely as the sad, untimely death of Phillip Hughes reminds us.
Hughes was struck by a bouncer during a Shield match at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 2014. The ball missed his helmet but not the artery that lies close to the surface between the back of the ear and the base of the skull. It was freakish but fatal and blame is still being sought.
Hughes’ death forced cricket to review its aggressive practices as well as its safety protocols though it wasn’t so long ago that batsmen routinely suffered for their art. Who present, for example, can forget the battering Robin Smith took at the hands of Ian Bishop and Courtney Walsh on a rogue Edgbaston pitch in 1995? Or the bruising Brian Close endured at Lord’s against Michael Holding in 1976?
Opening the innings, Smith was given a fearsome working over on one of the quickest pitches ever seen in England. Even wearing a chest and arm guard, the sheer impact of some of the blows made him totter and wince in pain. It was like being struck by a cross between a rubber bullet and a Mike Tyson uppercut, rock hard but with a ferocious power behind it.
Being hit by a cricket ball, especially at high speed, can break both a player’s bones and their spirit. Mercifully, injuries remain rare
Smith, a fierce competitor, never complained, as no batsman facing those West Indies fast bowling batteries ever did. If you were to tarry at the crease against them during their pomp in the 1980s and early 90s, pain was simply part of the deal.
The cricket ball as a weapon has been entrenched within the game since its beginnings. So long in fact that it has passed into the vernacular as invoking toughness. Why else would Sir Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, use it as a metaphor while criticising the Government’s Brexit negotiations which he likened to that of a “chocolate orange”, ready to fall apart at the first tap?
“It (the Brexit strategy) needs to be coming through a little bit more like a cricket ball,” Sir Amyas said on Wednesday, no doubt recalling the days when a Malcolm Marshall bouncer had given Mike Gatting a severely bloodied and broken nose.
Gatt’s injury was one of many suffered by batsmen at the hands of fast bowlers in that era. At least he had a helmet. In the early 1970s, when fast bowlers like Andy Roberts first began to make their mark, on batsmen as well as in the scorebook, there was no such protection.
In one of Roberts’ first games for Hampshire, a 2nd XI match against Gloucestershire, Andy Murtagh, one of his team mates, recalls the carnage.
“Gloucestershire Seconds had never seen anything like Andy before, especially his searing bouncer, and by lunch five of them were in the Bristol Royal Infirmary with various broken bones,” he said.
From then, until the rise of T20, the risk of impact injury was almost totally borne by batsmen, or fielders placed close to the bat at short leg or silly point.
Now, with better padding to protect them and better bats to wield, the ball is sent back even quicker than it comes down, a factor that has brought bowlers, and umpires, into the danger zone, especially now that boundary hitting has become the new forward defensive.
This new threat is why umpire Bruce Oxenford, one of ICC’s elite umpires, wears a small shield on his left arm while standing in white ball cricket. Mind you, he will still need quick reactions if he is to parry a shot like the one which struck Fletcher in his followthrough the other night. That was, apart from him perhaps not bowling it in the slot, unavoidable.
Everyone in cricket was shocked by the injury Luke Fletcher suffered last weekend when Sam Hain’s drive smashed him in the head as the Notts bowler was in his follow-through. And it’s the right decision to rule him out for the rest of the season.
I’d seen one of them before when I was playing in the ICL. A young Indian bowler, I can’t recall his name, had one smashed back at him like a rocket.
It hit his forehead before he had even looked up. It didn’t cut though, it just swelled up straight away, but he carried on playing.
It wasn’t great to see, and it’s been a concern to me for a while. Since going out to the West Indies and seeing how hard the West Indians hit the ball, it dawned on me.
One of the umpires in the CPL had a helmet on because he’d been hit before and Gerard Abood did the same at the Big Bash. We also see Bruce Oxenford with a shield to protect himself.
But something has to be done to help the bowlers. They’re obviously a few yards closer to the batsman than the umpire and something like skull caps would certainly be beneficial.
The game is changing with technology, but guys are much stronger than they were before, and we all know how much bats help power nowadays. It’s something that needs to be addressed because we don’t want these injuries, and it could have been so much worse.
In terms of Luke’s recovery, a lot of it will be mental. Physically, he’d probably be okay to play soon, but you need to get it out of your mind. I remember getting hit in the face by a top edge from Keith Dutch when I was keeping, standing up
It’s quite easy to be a bit stand-offish after incidents like that, pulling your head away – and it definitely takes some time to get back to being as normal as you can.
There are some that struggle with the mental side, and it takes them longer than you expect to recover. Stuart Broad is a prime example after being hit by a Varun Aaron bouncer in 2014.
It’s only recently that we’ve seen him back to his full potential with the bat,
It can be tough for other players on the field, too. Fletch had much more of a wound and that’s never nice to see
and that blow would have been one of the reasons.
You have to be careful when coming back to the game. It can feel horrible to sit out a match when you feel so close to full fitness, but that extra week or month helps massively in the long run.
You can also end up coming back and trying too hard – and that aggravates injuries and makes things ten times worse. It’s back to the mental side, and knowing what is right.
It can be tough for other players on the field with injuries, too. With Fletch there was much more of a wound and that’s never nice to see. The ICL incident was just like a big egg attached to his head, but it still wasn’t pretty.
But we saw the Notts lads and the Warwickshire batsmen affected by Fletcher’s incident, and it can be hard for some to get their focus back into the game.
It’s more because we are not used to seeing it. In rugby, you’re seeing injuries all the time and get hardened to it. I’m used to looking down and seeing fingers all over the place anyway, so most injuries don’t affect me too much.
Fletch has also said that he doesn’t bowl in the nets because he was worried about the speed of the ball coming back, but I’m keen as a coach to keep bowlers in the nets.
We do reaction drills where we have a coach hitting the ball back at the bowler as soon as he bowls it, with a proper cricket ball, to get the bowlers to get their hands and heads up and back in the game.
We build up slowly, and get the players used to it. First, it’s just underarm lobbed back at them, then with a bit more pace before we start having it come off the bat.
In general, bowlers are much better fielders than they were even a decade or so ago, and these drills help. It’s all about attention to detail and you see it with the likes of Chris Jordan as to how good their reactions are with catching the ball when it’s driven straight back at them.
One injury that struck a chord with me in the recent past was when Mark Boucher had the bail hit him in the eye. I actually had a couple of close blows where I got hit on the nose and head by a bail, and it does hurt. I very quickly learnt to put sunglasses on because I just had the thought that it could cause damage.
I also wore a gumshield when keeping, but just the helmet when batting. I didn’t like an inside thigh pad so never wore one of them, but my leg now is blue with bruising. Maybe I would have worn it every time now I see the damage, but at the time it was something that kept me on edge and I felt my defence was much better without one.