Use your head - don't wear a helmet

Did you see Bell, Root and Dhoni all batting at times without helmets during the ODI series in India? A pleasant surprise for me as I have always thought that the wearing of a helmet somehow impersonalises batsmen as they all tend to look the same under a lid. But it got me thinking - how has the wearing of a helmet changed batting technique since my day?

 

I am old enough to have learnt my cricket in the days before helmets. My protection then was pads, gloves and those sickly-looking pink plastic boxes (one size fits all), and as the bowling got faster I used a towel as a thigh pad, but it never occurred to me to protect my head. Many years later when I was still batting without a helmet I was showing my wife a graze on my forehead from a ball that had somehow beaten my solid defence -
“You wear a box don’t you?” she asked with welcome interest.
“Of course” I replied with a smile to reassure her all was still in working order.
“Well” she retorted “you have your priorities all wrong”.
Well maybe, if you are an ageing amateur cricketer with a family to provide for, but perhaps not if you are 11 years old and want to become an outstanding batsman.

To avoid injury it is vital to watch the ball
- Strauss follows the instructions

The human brain, in times of danger from injury, reacts instinctively to protect one part of the body before all others – the head. If you are faced with a projectile arrowing in on your head, you do not have to fight your natural instinct; the brain will take over and do its best to get your head out of the firing line. Research suggests that practice of certain techniques will hone reaction times and will also speed up what are now know as ‘twitch muscles’. In batting terms this means the more often you face a ball coming towards you, the better you will be at taking the necessary action. But this action will vary depending on many factors; the speed of the ball and its angle of deliver, as well as the surface on which it bounces – the pitch. Young batsmen therefore need to be trained in, and experience, all types of conditions and deliveries in order to learn the best action to take, whether evasive or pro-active. And I am not sure that wearing a helmet whilst batting really helps in honing instinct, muscles and decision making that are all necessary for turning good technique into a reliable skill.

Batting in England in bowling-friendly conditions against good seam bowlers will test the very best batsmen and quickly defeat the merely good. If a batsman has little experience in such conditions, batting becomes almost impossible - just look at how the current (admittedly very good) English seam attack completely destroyed and bemused the best batsman from India, Pakistan and West Indies. Now consider Hashim Amla of South Africa – against England in 2008 he scored 275 runs in his seven innings, four years later Amla was the rock of the top order batting with 482 runs in five innings that helped South Africa dominate and secure a series win. What is the difference between the years? Probably that Amla played for Essex and Nottingham in 2009/10 and re-learnt his technique for our seaming conditions. But how does this relate to the wearing of helmets?

 

When I was a teenager learning how to play seam bowling (mostly on uncovered wickets) I was indoctrinated with the mantra ‘watch it early, play it late’. If you got yourself forward too early then it was almost impossible to make adjustments for any seam movement off the pitch – which is what happened more often than not. So I learnt how to move into position as late as possible, use a short back lift, and punch the ball - elegant cover drives were only for later when your eye was in and you had the measure of the pitch, if not the bowling.

Edrich playing the ball late off the back foot
- look at where his back foot is pointing

Against fast bowling there was the added problem of ensuring you didn’t get hurt – a short pitched ball was not only likely to get up to head height it was also likely to be moving off the seam. Fast bowlers have always been keen to test a batsman with their bouncer early on and would pound you if you showed excessive fear or any weakness in technique. You learnt to watch the ball very closely and to take evasive action very late by swaying your head away from the line of the ball. You were told never to take your eye off the ball and look away. In those days batsmen got hit on the head when they ducked or turned their head away and didn’t follow the ball until the last minute. But guess what – I never got hit in the head directly from a delivery. However a consequence of this approach to short pitched balls was that you learnt pretty quickly how to play off the back foot – particularly through the off-side. This is because back foot shots gave you time to watch the ball and play it late. All the opening English top order batsmen, who learnt their cricket before the introduction of helmets, had to be good back foot players – Boycott, Edrich and Gower being masters of this art.

Helmets were first worn in the Packer World Series in 1978 with Denis Amis sensibly deciding that the West Indian quicks were too formidable on hard Australian wickets for his skills. (Incidentally with protective boxes being introduced in 1878 you could say that it took men 100 years to reassess their priorities in line with my wife’s thinking). With the advent of helmets, and particularly the compulsive wearing of helmets for youths, batting techniques started to change. This change has accelerated in the last ten years due to the introduction of shorter forms of the game which encourage big hitting and the development of bigger bats. Pitches at all levels of the game are now covered and have as a consequence become more batting-friendly surfaces. But it is the wearing of helmets that has allowed batsmen to introduce new batting techniques without fear of getting hit in the face or head. The Dilsham scoop is a shot that only a madman would play without a helmet and the increasingly popular sweep is a shot I was always told brings your head in line with the ball with the inherent risk of being hit in the face – but the helmet eliminates that concern.





Gayle cuts the ball for six
- a front foot shot now

Wearing a helmet also allows batsmen to get on the front foot early – if the ball rears up or the ball is pitched in short, then the batsman is not in real danger even if he isn’t good enough to play a decent shot. A big shot requires a big back lift and this is only really possible with a front foot shot. In the one day games, cuts and pulls are now played off the front foot more often than not – the big bats mean that the ball is easily lifted high in the air, or hit flat and hard - either way there are far more sixes hit square of the wicket now than there were ten years ago.

 

It is sad to conclude that good technique back foot play appears to be a skill of the past – only mastered by players brought up without wearing helmets in their formative years. Dravid, who didn’t wear a helmet until he was seventeen, played the ball late off his back foot, his left foot pointing between point or cover depending on where he wanted to hit the ball, or he waited and tucked the ball deftly off his hip - but Dravid was one of an increasingly rare breed. I believe that unless and until batsmen ‘relearn’ back foot play then they will always be very susceptible to good seam bowling. Of course helmets are a sensible protection for most of us, but perhaps coaches need to be given some freedom to discard the helmet occasionally to teach back foot technique to youngsters. What are your priorities – safety or skill?