JOHNSON MARTIN

Whatever happened to great blockers?

In the course of the last three England-South Africa Test matches, what was once a growing suspicion has now acquired the status of an unarguable fact. Namely, that modern international batsmen have the attention span of a gnat.

Charged with batting for four sessions to save the game at the Oval, South Africa barely made it past two. Further evidence that the game-saving rearguard action is now such a rarity that the only link between this series and the WG Grace era is that Moeen Ali and Hashim Amla both have beards capable of providing a luxury nesting site for one of the Oval’s resident family of pigeons.

And the difference is going to become even more pronounced when you consider the government statistic that two thirds of modern schoolchildren suffer from attention deficit disorder. There’s the poor old history teacher, barely under way with Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, and he looks up to see 70 per cent of his class heads down and tweeting into an Ipad.

It’s the same on the cricket field. In the time it takes Morne Morkel to go from the end of his run-up to letting go of the ball, your average batsmen will flit between: “Will it be a yorker?” “Is it coming at my head?” and “I wonder what sandwiches we’ll be having for tea?”

My firm belief that batsmen like Alastair Cook and Dean Elgar will soon be consigned to history, like dinosaurs, and those green rubber spiked batting gloves, was re-inforced by coming across a quiz – comprising of 20 multiple choice answers – to determine whether someone has a potential problem with paying attention.

Question 2: “How often are you easily distracted by external stimuli, like something in your environment or unrelated thoughts?” And you realise that the modern batsman is forever waving at the dressing room for a drink, or holding up play because some some twerp in a Viking costume is moving in front of the sightscreen.

Q4: “How often do you have trouble listening to someone, even when they are speaking directly to you, like your mind is somewhere else?” What does this remind you of? Cook, or Joe Root, perhaps, cocking a deaf ‘un when Stuart Broad is demanding an lbw review?

Q8: “How often do you lose, misplace or damage something that’s necessary in order to get things done?” Strictly speaking, incidents involving forgetful cricketers hasn’t got much worse since Bob Willis walked out to bat without a bat at Edgbaston in 1981, although Matt Prior certainly misplaced his bat in damaging a Lord’s dressing room window in 2011.

Q16: “How often do you fidget or squirm in your seat?” When England or South Africa are batting in this series quite a lot. And Q17: “How often do you find yourself talking excessively?” Well, not many balls go by without someone

“There are no Trevor Baileys any more. This was a man capable of batting for four hours for 71 runs as he did against Australia in 1953 ”

in the slips shouting “bowled!” for any delivery that’s not total rubbish. Or a fast bowler like Kisigo Rabada trying hard not to say anything to the batsman after each ball, but mostly failing.

Attention deficit disorder is not just confined to cricket, as we discovered not so long ago when a footballer moving from Real Zaragoza to play for Stoke City forgot that he’d left his £100,000 Porsche behind in a Spanish train station car park. But Test cricket is no longer a game in which batsmen occupy the crease for so long without moving that they’re in danger of being removed by the security guards as an unattended package.

There are no Trevor Baileys any more. This was a man capable of batting for four hours for 71 runs, as he did against Australia at Lord’s in 1953, and 458 minutes for 68 at the Gabba in 1958, including the slowest half century (425 balls) in first-class cricket.

Bailey actually re-programmed himself to acquire his “Barnacle” nickname, having hit a century before lunch in his early days before realising the folly of youth. But no such claim could be made for the likes of Sunil Gavaskar and Hanif Mohammad, for whom the official scorers needed to consult a sundial as opposed to a stopwatch.

Gavaskar’s 36 not out in an entire 60-over innings of a World Cup ODI in 1975 will go down as the biggest case of self denial in batting history, although had Boycott been in the TMS commentary box at the time he might conceivably have tut-tutted for the Indian opener taking an unnecessary risk over the one boundary he hit in 174 balls faced. Hanif is famous for making 499 in a domestic game in Pakistan, which, had there been a members’ bar on the ground, may not have emptied it, but he also rendered a Test match crowd comatose in Barbados in 1958, by batting 300 overs for 337 runs.

When it comes to English batsmen capable of batting all day without doing anything hot headed, they’ve mostly all gone. Where are the next generation of Michael Athertons, who re-enacted Rorke’s Drift in South Africa in 1995, and Jonathan Trott, the only batsman in history who could bore a crowd to death merely by taking guard.

The only solution, in my view, is to confiscate all these iPads and smartphones and re-introduce 1950s telephone kiosks. In those days, when you wanted to make a phone call, you had to drive around for hours to find one that hadn’t been vandalised, locate four old pennies in your pocket to insert into a slot (you almost always only had three) before pressing button ‘A’ to connect your call.You’d immediately get cut off, but when you pressed button ‘B’ to get your money back, it swallowed your change. Which is partly why so many phone boxes got vandalised.

However, those old red boxes certainly taught you patience, and this was not an era when batsmen were unable to concentrate for more than a couple of seconds, or had their minds wander off from the task in hand. Which brings me to another vitally important suggestion.

Unless we implement immediately, and as matter of the utmost urgency, the, er, um, long overdue, ah, and, er, I’m sorry about this. Whatever it was appears to have slipped out of my head for the time being. Give me a week or so, and I’ll get back to you...