Cricket: A round of applause for a job half done

Normally I am the last person clinging to old routines and traditions as they sink, eclipsed by new thinking and gimmickry. Especially when it comes to cricket; I mistrust T20, umpiring referrals and, if truth be told, batsmen wearing protection beyond a rolled up newspaper stuffed down inside the sock.

It follows, then, that if I were alive a certain number of decades ago, I would certainly have been one campaigning against the covering of pitches. A batsman’s skill is never clearer than when he is scoring runs on a swamp of a track that threatens to swallow the ball as it fights to evade the clutches of the boggy strip.

However even I acknowledge that this change happened. Though I shut my eyes when Hawkeye comes onscreen, and curse when the sainted umpire is proven blind, possibly drunk and probably lunatic by an action replay, pitches have been routinely covered for decades now. As a result we get a hell of a lot more cricket per season than was once the case, where your average club player spent roughly one eighth of the time on the field of play on a match day, five eighths smoking woodbines under the eaves of the pavillion looking skeptically at the sky, and the remaining two eighths (a quarter, I suppose) getting a head start on something dark and frothy in the club house.

This minor positive of roughly 300% more cricket aside, life has got a hell of a lot easier for the batsman. Watching test cricket over the last few years has niggled me, and not just for the odious technological advances that seek to introduce such things as “fairness” and “consistency” into umpiring. What, I wonder now, is the point of a fifty? The half-century these days is only notable as a milestone en route to a ‘proper’ century, yet the crowd still applaud out of deeply ingrained routine and the batsman still raises his bat to acknowledge the crowd’s robotic appreciation of what is barely even a job half-done.

Think of the amount of test matches that include at least one innings of over 450. Think of the amount of test matches where the groundsmen have used their diabolical modern methods - covers and minions wielding ropes included - to ensure five days of play to maximise audience revenue. In this climate, where 400+ is attainable in one day cricket, never mind the five-day variant (did I say variant? I meant ‘pinnacle’), how often is a 50 a truly game-changing or innings-defining occurance?

It could be as part of a spirited lower-order fightback. Or an exceptionally fast-paced middle order gear shift to defy a batting collapse. Perhaps, ever so rarely, a batsman at the top of the order could feel proud of their day’s work if they score 50 as the rest of the side is bowled out for 97.

Yet this happens so seldom these days that it seems perverse to have a round of applause and the bat-raising celebration for a half century. Some batsmen now shirk the celebration in favour of a cursory bat waggle so as not to seem rude, juggling acknowledging the custom while being desperate to show that they understand the job is not done yet.

We celebrate the 50 because it is a statistical remnant of bygone days when 50 runs were hard to come by, and the number of people reaching this milestone was much lower. Commentators now read out things such as strike rate, first class average, and past performance against current opposition. These things are infinitely more relevant and interesting. Yet because the 50 remains a linear milestone, easily digested and applauded by the live in-stadium audience, it somehow retains its position in the statistical canon as worthy of a stoppage in the game and a round of applause.

There is something interesting in the frequency of a batsman’s “conversion” from 50 to 100; and once, in those glorious, dangerous, unpredictable days of uncovered pitches, the 50 represented a real achievement. Yet now a 50 is synonymous with a job not yet done, an unsatisfactory and frustratingly uncompleted task. Does this warrant its own column in a batsman’s statistics? I would argue not any more.