Bat and ball / Andrew Hughes / 22 December 2008 /

If you think occupying the crease for hours on end without scoring many runs isn't an art, think again. Andrew Hughes explains to us the value of having a Dravid or Chanderpaul in your batting line-up.

Rahul Dravid's painstaking century at Mohali was a classic of its kind. Compiled run by painstaking run under immense pressure, he took 328 balls to amass a score of 136 and ground the England bowlers into the Punjab dust in the process. For a day and a half 'The Wall' was back to his obdurate best.

Dravid's innings was a classic of its kind from a batsman who is one of the few remaining exponents of that most endangered of the batting arts: stonewalling. There are only four such men left in world cricket and all of them are over thirty. Along with Dravid, there is the admirable Shivnarine Chanderpaul and two South Africans currently blunting the edge of the Aussie attack: Neil McKenzie and Jaques Kallis. A quartet of immovable objects.

Stonewallers have tended to have certain attributes in common. Though they may have the ability to play shots all around the wicket, they choose to build their game on a rock of immaculate defence. Their defensive techniques are usually orthodox (though Chanderpaul's shuffling, square-on style is a notable exception) ant they are always watertight. And along with defensive expertise comes a determination to sell their wicket dearly, immense powers of concentration and an appetite for crease-occupation.

Stonewalling goes right back to the beginning of the game. Information on balls faced was not routinely recorded until thirty or forty years ago so before that, we have to rely on anecdotal evidence. An early example of the type was the left-handed English opener William Scotton who once carried his bat throughout an entire innings for a score of 9. The legendary Australian batsman of the twenties and thirties, Bill Woodfull, earned himself the nickname, 'The Rock' for his unbreachable defence, based on a minimal backlift and phenomenally powerful wrists.

More recently, there was Trevor Bailey, nicknamed, 'Barnacle' who once took 458 minutes to score 68 in Brisbane in 1958. The New Zealander Mark Richardson, who reinvented himself as a dogged opening batsman finished his career with an astonishing average of 194 balls faced per Test match.

Marvan Atapattu is an interesting case and his experience suggests that stonewallers are born, not made. His first six innings in Test cricket yielded just one run. This horror start to his career threw him back on his inner resources and he began to bat far more defensively (and successfully). Geoffrey Boycott is regarded as the patron saint of stonewallers but because he had such technical mastery, it was often said that his refusal to play an expansive game was selfish, or that he was deliberately playing within himself (a charge sometimes levelled at Jaques Kallis). But that misses the point. Boycott and Kallis are perfectionists. They are only prepared to play the right shot to the right ball and their batting reflects their personality.

The same is true of the man regarded as the stonewaller's stonewaller, Chris Tavare. A nervous character, his batting was the definition of caution. In his second Test, he batted for an hour and a half and scored 42. In his third, his scores of 69 and 78 took over 12 hours. In Madras in 1982, he batted all day for 35 and later that same year, ground the Aussies into the dust at Perth, taking 8 hours to score 89.

But much as this style of batting may appear to be out of sync with modern cricket, it would be a shame if the art of the stonewaller were lost. In the age of Twenty20, the value of a stodgy innings is not always perceived, but a player who can occupy the crease can be vital, giving stroke-makers more freedom to play and battling to save lost causes whilst others lose their heads. Mike Atherton's century in Johannesburg in 1995 was a masterly display of defensive technique and resolution. A game that can regard a well-fought five day draw as a good result should also never lose its appreciation for the defensive arts.

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