Batsmen’s ‘suit of armour’ not enough
Phillip Hughes’s death puts focus on safety issues
PHILLIP Hughes’s death will reopen the decadeslong debate on how batsmen can be protected from a potentially lethal 156g “missile” travelling at about 145km/h.
The 25-year-old Australian international died yesterday, two days after being struck down at the Sydney Cricket Ground, illustrating starkly that batsmen put their lives on the line every time they face fast bowling.
Despite wearing a protective helmet, Hughes never regained consciousness and died from his injuries after trying to play a shortpitched “bouncer” in a domestic match and being hit on an unshielded area at the base of his skull.
Masuri, the UK-based manufacturer of the helmet worn by Hughes and one of the leading suppliers of protective headgear to the world’s top batsmen, said Hughes’s injuries were sustained in an area of the head that is difficult to protect.
“From the footage and pictures currently available to Masuri, it appears Phil Hughes was struck by the ball to the rear of the grille and below the back of the shell,” Masuri said in a statement on Wednesday.
“This is a vulnerable area of the head and neck that helmets cannot fully protect, while enabling batsmen to have proper movement.”
The question of how batsmen should protect themselves from a blow on the head is not a new one.
Patsy Hendren, the Middlesex and England batsman, briefly wore a reinforced, multiple-peaked cap made for him by his wife in 1933 following England’s infamous “Bodyline” tour of Australia in 1932/1933 that featured shortpitched, hostile bowling.
Hendren quickly abandoned his innovation and for more than 40 years batsmen made do with caps, sunhats or, as was usually the case, nothing on their heads.
The Laws of Cricket were adjusted to rule that repeatedly bowling short-pitched deliveries was “unfair”.
However, it was rare to see bowlers warned, much less withdrawn from the attack, for bowling an excessive number of bouncers.
The mid-’70s saw England’s Mike Brearley experiment with a protective skull-cap worn under the regular cap.
But the most notable change in headgear came during Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the late ’70s which attracted an exceptional crop of fast bowlers, including the West Indies’ Andy Roberts, Wayne Daniel, Michael Holding and Joel Garner.
Batsmen facing a short-pitched barrage, decided to take matters into their own hands and sought ways to protect their heads.
England’s Dennis Amiss, who had struggled against Australia’s celebrated fast-bowling duo of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson during the 1974/1975 Ashes, was a pioneer of the batting helmet.
“I went to a motorcycle helmet manufacturer, and he came up with something lighter than the fibreglass motorcycle helmets around in those days,” Amiss said.
“The problem was that it covered your ears, making it difficult to hear.”
It was superseded by the forerunner of the “cap”-design helmet which is now commonplace, with plastic visors giving way to metal grilles.
Former England captain Michael Atherton, an opening batsman, said this week: “Maybe helmets had made us a little complacent, then. Certainly, they have changed the game beyond all recognition.”
Atherton added that whereas in the pre-helmet era batsmen generally hooked cautiously and infrequently off the back foot, helmetwearing players such as Australia’s Matthew Hayden were emboldened to hook off the front foot, a potentially riskier option.
And according to former England opener Geoff Boycott, helmets have given a false sense of security to batsmen, who no longer have the necessary technique to deal with fast bowling.
“Most of my career I batted on uncovered pitches without a helmet,” Boycott said.
“This taught me how important it was to have a good technique against fast bowling.
“You required judgment of what to leave, when to duck and when to play the ball.”
You required judgment of what to leave, when to duck and when to play the ball
Boycott believes batsmen now feel impregnable at the crease, rather than playing with a genuine fear factor as used to be the case.
“Helmets have unfortunately taken away a lot of that fear and have given every batsmen a false sense of security,” he said.
“Even tail-enders come in and bat like millionaires, flailing away and having a go at short balls with poor technique and lack of footwork.
“Helmets have made batsmen feel safe in the belief that they cannot be hurt and made batsmen more carefree and careless.”
Boycott believes that injuries are inevitable, whatever improvements are made in the standard of helmets and safety equipment.
“There are no guarantees,” he said.
“Unless we batsmen wear a suit of armour there are always going to be injuries in cricket.”
Vivian Richards, one of cricket’s greatest batsman, bucked the helmet-wearing trend by hooking some of the fastest bowlers the game has known during the ’70s and ’80s with nothing more than a West Indies cap on his head.
“That you should cover yourself in a suit of armour, to make yourself brave, or to enable you to hook – when you have never hooked a ball in your life – just because you’ve got a helmet on. That’s rubbish,” Richards told the Guardian in 2009.
One way to improve batsmen’s safety would be an outright ban on bouncers – the game’s “terrible beauty” to use Atherton’s phrase.
Before Hughes’s death such a ban would have been almost unthinkable. Not so now. — reporting by Reuters, AFP