Captain masters reverse shot with long history of causing controversy
There is no better illustration of Joe Root’s mastery of spin than his reverse-sweeping. If his slog-sweeping was extraordinary, his reverse-sweeping was miraculous, only ever matched by Kevin Pietersen among England batsmen.
To play the reverse sweep is one thing. To find the time to do it with a switch hit – and thereby make the shot more controlled – is another. To take the bottom hand – Root’s right – off the bat, then turn it into his top hand – is a stroke to make the fuddyduddies who wrote the MCC coaching book turn in their graves even quicker than Lasith Embuldeniya’s left-arm spinners.
The first recorded reverse sweep, in my reading of the game, was played in the first week of December 1928. The fixture was in the Bombay Quadrangular tournament – and was prompted by a left-arm spinner, just as Root took his reverse-sweep out on Embuldeniya.
The batsman was Kumar Shri Duleepsinhji. Barely less talented than his uncle Ranjitsinhji, and sharing the same wristiness, “Duleep” had finished school at Cheltenham College and won his Blue at Cambridge without being made captain of either team, even though the star batsman, and about to average 58 in his England Test career. This was how racism operated in those days, subtly, or trying to be so.
A crowd of 20,000 in Bombay or Mumbai, aware of his doings in England, turned up to see Duleep play his first match of any note in India. He was playing for the Hindus, the coming power in the Quadrangular, against the Parsis, the fading power.
It was when Duleep was facing the Parsis left-arm spinner Rustom Jamshedji, who was good enough to play a Test for India, that cricket history was made and this novelty unleashed.
The off-side field was packed, naturally, as Jamshedji was pitching wide of off stump until, so Edward Docker records in his History of Indian Cricket, “the young prince twisted the blade in his hands and drove the ball in reverse direction down to third man!”
Uproar ensued. The Parsis captain, Doli Kapadia, appealed for Duleep to be given out for unfair play. The umpire, Joe Birtwhistle, who was standing in his first firstclass match, gave not out. “He [Duleep] hadn’t obstructed the field or otherwise played the ball unfairly, he [Birtwhistle] explained afterwards, and for several more days the debate raged. Suppose, instead of twisting the bat round, he
had used the back of the bat to hit it away in back-hand fashion. Would that have been out? Nobody was sure,” writes Docker.
It could be argued, at least by spinners, that MCC should have reacted there and then by adding to the Laws, prescribing that no batsman should be allowed to turn round in his shot. But MCC did not, and the sport has become more varied and colourful – for batsmen touched with genius.
The next recorded time this shot was played was by another batsman from the part of India where Duleep was born, the Kathiawar Peninsula, which may or may not be coincidence.
Hanif Mohammad had then emigrated to Pakistan at Partition, and was batting for Pakistan at Lord’s in 1967 in a Test drifting to a draw. Hanif – known as “the Little Master” but the big master of the long innings, having already made the longest innings in Test history, his 337 against West Indies – played the shot, so he told me in an interview in Karachi in 1987.
Hanif ’s brother, Mushtaq Mohammad, is the third batsman recorded to have played the reverse sweep – cricket running in families. When Mushtaq introduced the stroke in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, David Houghton – a hockey player as well as cricketer for Zimbabwe – liked the look. From Houghton, his team-mate Andy Flower copied the reverse sweep and became arguably the best exponent of the stroke – notably against Sri Lanka’s demon off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan, although data does not go back beyond 2006 to prove this point – until now at least, and Root.
Root played eight reverse sweeps and scored 14 runs, and three switch hits for nine runs. Jos Buttler, the most audacious of strokemakers, played nine reverse sweeps for 15 runs and got out, if freakishly, in this process.