Are short people any good at sport? Part 2
What cricket stats tell us about the vertically challenged
Unsurprisingly for a middle class teen brought up in the Home Counties, one of the sports I took the keenest interest in was cricket. For me part of its appeal lies in the knowledge that it is incredibly welcoming to all shapes and sizes.
On their 17th birthdays, other teenagers might have snuck down the pub. Thrown a wild house party. Experimented with drugs. I wasn’t one of those teenagers. My idea of a birthday present was to play cricket for my local club.
I bowled terribly that day – so badly in fact that I remember being called a ‘pie chucker’ – a derogatory term for a particularly bad bowler - by the opposition. My batting wasn’t much better. But it didn’t matter. I still had a lovely day out, and wouldn’t have changed it for the world.
The rollercoaster of emotions that day – the joy of becoming more adult, mixed with the gutting experience of dropping a catch and losing the game – sums up why I love the sport of cricket, a game that, unlike others, I didn’t feel I was restricted from due to my stature.
Fast forward to the summer of 2019, and I found myself on a train from deepest darkest Wales back to my flat in London. I had been to a wedding the previous night and was suffering rather badly for my indulgences. It was baking hot out. I was operating on about three hours’ sleep, and was sweating out a combination of booze, rich food and cigar smoke. Sitting in a rickety, dated train carriage as it juddered through the countryside with minimal ventilation was hardly helping matters.
While I sat and sweltered, England won the Cricket World Cup final in the single most enthralling, nerve-wracking piece of theatre I could ever hope to endure. As the victory ticked down to its nail-biting finale, I was inches away from smashing every single electrical appliance on my person as I tried desperately to follow events through the patchy Wi-Fi and phone signal of rural Britain.
My tablet had died. My charger refused to do its job. My phone wouldn’t access Sky. Radio coverage dropped in and out as my battery cratered, through yellow and then into red warning lights. On the field, records were being broken. On the train, I was tearing my hair out.
The wedding had been exceptional. I would even say unforgettable. We danced late into the night as the Welsh and Greek cultures of the bride and groom were melded together in a uniquely blissful harmony. But even in my fragile, sleep-deprived, hangover-suffering state, I was just as aware of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in front of my intermittent cricket the day after as I was during the ceremony.
The summer the Covid-19 crisis struck, I was even more grateful for the rollercoasters the game of cricket takes all of us fans on. At the height of lockdown, I craved the emotion, the drama of live sport. None was forthcoming, so I watched that World Cup final again. I watched Ben Stokes’ sensational Ashes performance at Headingly from that same summer, as in April, the magical last hour of the utterly remarkable comeback he orchestrated against Australia made its way onto YouTube.
Reliving such halcyon days of the sport I love helped keep me sane. The summer heatwave had come early. The pandemic had rendered us Brits housebound, when not 12 months previously we had been out on greens across the country, bat and ball in hand. But that combination of oppressive heat and indoor isolation only helped conjure up more pleasant memories for me, thanks to the wonder of cricket.
Early in the coronavirus lockdown, I watched highlights of all five days of all five tests in the classic 2005 Ashes series (the age-old rivalry between England and Australia, for those unfamiliar with the contest). I would herald my bingeing as some kind of accomplishment, impressive by its sheer scale and diligence, but, in all fairness, I was suddenly left with a lot of free time on my hands and all my other (outdoor) hobbies vanished.
When that series first played out in real time, I was 15 years old. I spent the vast majority of that summer indoors, lost in the theatre, often falling into pleasant daytime slumber during the lunch interval. One of the matches coincided with a holiday to the Yorkshire countryside with my family. A younger me made friends with the children of an American couple, also on holiday. Somehow, they had heard tales that a special sporting event was happening. All they wanted to do was learn how to play cricket. Naturally, I had packed my bat and ball, and was only too happy to play such a vital role in their education.
Back in the less distant past of lockdown, I had rattled through pretty much every recap of every moment of significance in cricketing history that YouTube had to offer. I became irate that diary clashes and/or inclement weather scuppered my infrequent chances of a practice session with friends after we were given the all clear to meet up when lockdown restrictions subsided.
I had raised my hopes somewhat when I rediscovered my childhood cricketing stash, which had been lying dormant for years. A lockdown clear-out revealed where it was buried among the rubble of my youth. Along with the pristine cricketing whites that are the customary uniform of the sport, I found everything necessary to hold a passable match.
The one ball I dug up was soft with a tattered seam and disconcertingly-dark hue. What once was a neat sphere was now misshapen, like real vegetables from a farmers market, imperfect but somehow superior reflections of the polished variants you find in supermarkets.
My once-cherished bat had an alarmingly large crack in it, its disfigurement reminding me of when we used to take a cheese grater to one side of a ball in practice sessions to make its path through the air as unpredictable as an errant firework.
Cricket followed me once the hidden treasures resurfaced. Jogging through my local park in Southwark, south London, I quite literally ran into an amateur game being played on the square. Before long, I realised that some kind of organised league was meeting regularly. That league provided light relief for me, to sit down and watch while I regained my breath after an afternoon’s exercise.
My to do list, having knocked off a lot of boring household chores during lockdown, then chiefly consisted of one item: join a cricket club.
Alas, there were a number of spanners in the works. As I first wrote these words, we were coming to the end of the summer, and cricket is a game famously best played dry. Me and my then-girlfriend lived some 45 minutes away from each other. I didn’t want to have to choose between love and cricket, for they are two sides of the same coin.
By the time I revisited this passage for editing, we had bought a house together, the next summer was upon us, and I had found a convenient club to join. The addiction, the disease, that is my obsessive cricket watching is slowly but surely starting to infect her too, seeping into her life like coffee through a percolator.
Whatever happens, I will continue to enjoy test match cricket (the version that lasts five days, for those unfamiliar with it), far more than the shorter forms of the game. The joy of cricket comes in the sheer nothingness of everything around it while it is on. The complete release of settling down onto the sofa, safe in the knowledge that the only movement you need to make in the next eight hours will be for the purpose of essential bodily functions.
My friends frequently jest that I can only enjoy sports that other people find excessively time consuming and tedious, the others in my spectator diet being five-set tennis (three hours plus, but with no formal time limit), and American football (anything from two and a half to four hours, depending on what mood everyone is in).
In 2010, I was at Wimbledon to catch the start of a historic game of tennis between America’s John Isner and France’s Nicolas Mahut. I was still watching two days later, from the comfort of my living room rather than the stands. I was able to do so because that match lasted a total of 11 hours and five minutes. It included two hilariously named ‘tie breaks’, which achieved nothing of the sort.
It remains the longest match on record. After a 138-game final set, 6’10’’ Isner eventually triumphed. There were no expletives, no tantrums, just a cordial exchange of hugs between two very stiff looking gentlemen who knew full well they had both been part of something special. That was a simpler time when physical contact could convey total respect, not just pathogens. Isner’s seven inch height advantage did not lead to his victory by default, resulting in a fascinating tactical battle where Isner’s greater power on the serve and breadth of coverage at the net faced off against Mahut’s superior mobility and stroke play.
That respect, that knowledge that winning isn’t always everything, and relatively-level playing field between those of different statures, permeates the world of cricket (an infamous match fixing scandal of 2010 being a notable exception).
On two occasions in 2022, the captains of both England and Pakistan agreed they were evenly matched, and called the game off early with a simple fist bump. When 6’4’’ English bowler Steve Harmison dismissed Australia’s Michael Kasprowicz with just minutes to spare to save those Ashes back in 2005, teammate Andrew Flintoff, also 6’4’’, broke away from the celebratory huddle, and dropped all the way down to kneel beside the utterly distraught Aussie Brett Lee, who had batted so valiantly at the other end, in what became an iconic image of the game’s spirit.
Three years ago, England’s Ben Stokes begged for his World Cup winning runs not to be counted as the ball went careering to the boundary not through an intentional swish of his bat, but from an accidental ricochet while he was diving to avoid being run out. Stokes’ thick-set, 6’1’’ frame makes him a formidable opponent for any team, allowing him to bludgeon the ball to the boundary with the bat, and throw it down with vicious pace when he turns to bowling. But other stars like the 5’5’’ Sachin Tendulkar - possibly the greatest batsman of all time - and fellow Indian legend Sunil Gavaskar, as well as the 5’6’’ Asad Shafiq, show that the same results can be achieved through the poise and elegance of pure technique despite the owners’ boasting a less imposing physique.
In what I can only assume is a typographical error, Google seems to list South African born wicket keeper Cornelius Francoius Kruger van Wyk as 3’9’’, so we’ll leave him out of the sample of great short cricketers for now.
Long may the gentlemanly ethos of all of them, big or small, define the game. In 2020, during a match plagued by rain, and the literal plague of coronavirus turning the stadium in a Covid-secure bubble for players and staff, 6’2’’ English bowler James Anderson took his 600th test match wicket. A bowler who, at various stages of his career, pundits said was still not big or strong enough to bowl the ball at sufficient speed.
To put that achievement into context, only three people before him had ever reached that milestone, and none of them had put their bodies through the assault that is bowling for days on end at nearly 90 miles an hour - something that can actually take more of a physical toll on taller, ganglier bowlers as opposed to stocky ones.
There were zero spectators in the crowd when Jimmy hit the 600 mark. No fireworks to signify the reaching of this momentous landmark. Just a simple raise of the ball in the hand by Anderson, while the entirety of the opposition’s dressing room assembled on their balcony to applaud his dominance.
That’s what cricket means to me. It’s what it should mean to everyone, and it’s got very little to do with strength, size or athletic prowess.
But that’s enough about that game for now. I’ll take a final look at how height affects other sports next week.