The Sledge, the Niggle and the Razzle Dazzle

In the wake of the Boxing Day Test and the failure of the anticipated Niggle to arrive on the field I've found my thoughts turning towards the avenues through which cricketers attempt to distract their opponents, thus giving themselves an edge in the battle between bat and ball.

There will be many, of course, who still persevere under the illusion that cricket was once, and could be again, a gentleman's game, and this sort of thing is, well, just not cricket.

Sharp practice has been part of the game since the year dot, and an examination of cricketing cultures around the globe will reveal local variations on the same theme, so there's no one out there (or no country, at least) who are definitely pure as the driven snow.

We tend to look back to Victorian and Edwardian England as some sort of halcyon era, but it was, remember, the era of W.G. Grace, the man who was known to replace the bails and remark on the strength of the wind after being bowled.

Yes, Mr Grace, was the alleged reply. Make sure it doesn't blow your hat off on the way back to the pavilion.

Having been bowled in a charity game he allegedly refused to leave the crease on the grounds that the spectators had paid to see him bat, and with ball in hand was apparently frequently able to spot flights of interesting birds flying across a portion of the sky that happened to have the Sun in it, and directing the batsman’s attention in the appropriate direction.

We get all het up about sledging and so on, but those who raise the strongest objections usually have their own version of gamesmanship, which is usually excused on the grounds that it's part of the way they play the game.

All this sort of thing is part of the way we play the game, because a game of cricket is a number of individual battles between bat and ball with enough of a break between episodes to allow for all sorts of interaction and byplay.

Sledging might degenerate into an obscenity-riddled diatribe from time to time, but the verbal jousting will continue to be part of the game until someone actually manages to persuade the players the game should be played in absolute silence.

Good luck with that if you're silly enough to try.

Sledging might be the most obvious expression of gamesmanship and/or intimidation and you'll run across the occasional practitioner who'll deliver a sledge or a send-off from the fine leg boundary or some similar position in the outfield. In most cases it's carried on at much closer quarters.

Sledging may turn ugly, but delivers regular gems from time to time, and not necessarily in the direction you'd expect.

A suggestion from Mark Waugh that a particular English player wasn't up to Test standard was met with a maybe not, but at least I'm the best cricketer in my family.

Touche, and all that…

The Niggle, on the other hand, is a much more discreet exercise.

Here the intention is to find something you can use too distract the opposition or, more subtly, break up their preferred rhythm. There was a story a few years back about an English player whose initials may or may not have been K.P. inquiring about the make of car certain Indian batsmen drove, for example.

That was, at the time, described as a Sledge and a pretty asinine one, whereas in Hughesy's classification of these things it was actually a Niggle.

The batsman was, presumably, going through his preparations to face the next ball as the question was delivered, and the possibility that the bat might pull away at the last minute on the grounds that someone was talking would be likely to have some impact on the incoming bowler's equanimity, which could actually also be part of the desired outcome.

And the Niggle works very well when it involves something that would be anathema in the opponent's cricket culture, something Mr Ganguly was particularly adept at exploiting.

Indian supporters might take offence at Hughesy's characterisation of subcontinental players as Niggle Merchants rather than Sledgers, but that has more to do with a lack of verbal resources rather than a lack of desire.

After all, you can curse an Australian player all you like in Hindi or Urdu and he won't have the faintest clue what you're talking about. Engage your colleagues in a hilarious discussion where his name pops up from time to time and generally results in fits of giggles, on the other hand, and…

From where I was sitting the question of the DRS in this series looked like a classic attempt to start up the Niggle, although to date things haven't got close enough in the right areas for it to be effective.

The other matter that doesn't seem to have been an issue to date has been the old one about over rates, and here we're talking about the intersection of the Niggle and the deliberate manipulation of the pace of the game.

It’s what my colleagues in NQ Primary Cricket circles would have been inclined to call the Razzle Dazzle or the Hustle.

There were specific playing conditions involved with Primary School cricket around fifteen years ago that don't apply in the world of international cricket, but attempts to alter the pace of the game to your own advantage have been with us for years.

Razzle Dazzle was code, in NQPS circles for the need to get the fielding side through as many overs as possible in a two hour session, particularly when fielding first. Under the carnival conditions back in those days while you played fifty overs, the game was divided into three notionally two-hour sessions.

The side batting first, in other words, had two hours until lunch, then completed the innings in the middle session before a ten-minute change of innings.

The other factor that came into play here was the fact that coaching from the sideline was strictly verboten. Everybody did it but you had to find a way not to make it obvious.

So, with two hours to play until lunch the objective was to get as close as you could to forty. Forty was usually a bridge too far, but sides occasionally managed it, often through the use of notional finger spinners bowling darts off about three paces.

If a reader wants to suggest this sort of thing wouldn't happen at international level I'd direct his or her attention to Lance Gibbs in the 1975-76 West Indies tour of Australia where he regularly got through his overs in about two minutes and several Australian batsmen remarked that something like Oh dear (expletive modified rather than deleted) here he comes again were often followed by a departure from the crease.

The Primary School as close as you can get to forty bit was because the only ways a coach could deliver modified instructions to the pair batting in the middle was to send them out with the twelfth man at the drinks break, by deciding a change of batting gloves was needed and sending them out with the twelfthy, or delivering them through the incoming batsman when one of the incumbents were dismissed or retired out.

Get to lunch with forty bowled and he only has another ten to implement whatever strategy he's going to use to lift the run rate, even if he's got eight, nine or ten wickets in hand.

All of this meant you spent much of your team preparation sorting out things that would facilitate quick changes between overs, and the standard benchmark was to have the field in place before the umpires were in position. In those circumstances, with the umpy there, there's nothing to stop the bowler from starting the over, is there?

The batsman might not be totally ready, but if he wasn't, that was a slight advantage to the fielding side.

As a result, you'd take a chunk of your team prep time to sort out steps the batsmen could take to avoid being hurried.

This mightn't be obvious to the spectator or parent on the sidelines, but the sight of the wicketkeeper and company jogging into position with plenty of verbal encouragement along the way would have been impressive enough, even if the reasons behind it weren't obvious.

It may seem that I'm a little oversensitive to the Niggle, but when I've finished this little chunk of Razzle Dazzle it'll be obvious (at least I hope it'll be obvious) I was on the receiving end of what may have been an unintentional Niggle, but was definitely successful.

I have my doubts about the unintentional, and include the story here as an example of the way things can work under the surface.

As I indicated before, during your team preparation you wanted to get your kids up for the Razzle Dazzle and the pursuit of forty overs in the first session, and you'd want to clue your batsmen into the ways they can avoid being Hustled.

That involved centre wicket practices where you had bowlers bowling overs from alternate ends and the field jogging through between overs, stressing the importance of the quick change while prompting the batsmen to take their time, meet in the middle, discuss what they're having for lunch if there's nothing else to talk about…

So you're aiming to cover most anticipated situations, aren't you? When you're heading into this sort of territory the stakes are relatively substantial. There are places in State sides up for grabs for a start.

In 1996 the Carnival was held on the Sunshine Coast and timing factors meant a format where twelve teams played in four pools of three, and after the pool games things proceeded through quarter and semifinals to a final, with the eliminated teams playing along on a who haven't we played yet? basis.

With three teams in your pool, the first priority was to win a game. We managed that reasonably comfortably, since we'd drawn the weaker of the other two sides first up. That might sound arrogant or unfair, but one of the other two was a Brisbane/Metropolitan side and the other wasn't.

Since we were on the Sunshine Coast, four teams had a bye and kids needed to be supervised while billets were at work and so on, the organisers had set up an excursion day to a theme park which might have looked like a good idea on paper, but wasn't the most enjoyable experience I've ever had, particularly when the opening bowler decided to play up repeatedly.

He seemed to have recognized the error of his ways and suggested with a suitably penitent expression, he might be better off as twelfth man the next day, when he managed to play up even more, providing a major distraction in a game that turned out to be crucial to our prospects for further advancement.

The Met side rolled us on Day Three, and the coach went as far to commiserate since second spot in our pool meant we were up against the traditional masters of the Razzle Dazzle. We'd drummed the need to be ready to Hustle them when the encounter came, and had enumerated appropriate means to avoid being Hustled ourselves.

And we were coming off two less than ideal days with a coach (that's me, folks) in a position where he was a prime candidate for the mental equivalent of the grain of sand inside the sock.

They on the toss and batted, and within five overs the whole Razzle Dazzle/Hustle preparation was in tatters, and Hughesy was on the receiving end of a major niggle. Fifteen years later it still gets me hot under the collar.

And how did it work? What little swifty did their kids pull to bring our kids undone?

Nothing.

The kids did nothing, but in a situation where there was a badged (and paid) umpire looking after the bowler's end, the batting team provided the square leg umpire and in this case it was their Manager, who stood around thirty metres from the bat and proceeded from square leg to square leg between overs, crossing the pitch at about the same time the field had changed over.

So we had our kids jogging through, chirping away as they went, bowler handing his cap to the umpire and standing at the end of his run up with the square leg umpire half way through his snail-like progress. By the time he arrived, the fielding side was all out of chirp. By about the tenth over they weren't even jogging into position any more.

When I complained, asking why he couldn't move from square leg to point without crossing the pitch, a distance of around eighteen metres when you take the creases into consideration I was told there was nothing that could be done, and the bloke was notorious for these things.

I'd been going to Carnivals for well over a decade without sighting this guy in a managerial role, but it seemed his tardiness was generally acknowledged in the south-east of the state and no further correspondence was going to be entered into.

We managed thirty overs before lunch, the opposition posted around 200 in a situation where anything over 150 was probably going to be difficult to beat and I got a lot of parents offside as I reshuffled the batting order to try to get up around the desired run rate early. Otherwise we had no chance.

We finished twenty-odd short, spent the next two days playing in the Eliminated Pool, and I was still ropeable when we got to the closing ceremony, learned that the favourites had taken out the final and had their coach inform me that we'd been the toughest opposition they'd encountered along the way.

Well, we must have had something, because we ended the Carnival with a single win from five games but two kids out of thirteen in the Queensland squad.

The strategic considerations that emanate from those schoolboy playing conditions don't apply mightn't quite apply at other levels of the game, but manipulation of the pace of the game is definitely an issue when it comes to Test cricket.

A decade of West Indian dominance was based on a stellar batting lineup (Greenidge, Haynes, Richards, Kallicharan, Lloyd, Gomes, Dujon or some variation thereon) along with four quicks who could bowl fifty overs in three and a half hours in an ODI but struggled to get much above seventy five in a six hour Test day.

Mind you. if the batting side were on the ropes it could be a different story.

I was at the MCG to watch the Windies roll Australia for 156 on 29 December 1981. Took them 56.3 overs to do it, and when Greenidge and Haynes took twelve off Lillee's first over and sixteen off Hogg's it looked like they'd have the first innings lead by stumps on Day One.

Time wasting and slow over rates continue to be an issue, and there was the notorious instance in Nagpur in November 2008 where Ponting bowled Hussey and Clarke in an attempt to lift the over rate and avoid suspension rather than attack an try to win the Test (see here for an example of the press coverage).

India were, at one stage in the second dig, 6-166 with Dhoni and the tail to bat, an effective lead of less than 230. We ended up chasing 382, and were bundled out for 209.

We were in Adelaide while this was going on, so I wasn't watching the whole time, but I saw the session in question. Ponting, from what I could gather, has always been a prime candidate for the Niggle, and I would love to be able to go back over the footage from that series to see whether there were multiple incidents of seemingly insignificant time wasting along the way into that session. It would be very interesting.

Which brings me back, after numerous lengthy asides, to the present and the immediate future.

I still think India are here to win the series (well, d'oh) and they'll have to level in Sydney if they're going to be any chance of doing that. In the press we've got headlines like Aussies brace for Indian backlash at Sydney Test and you're suggesting there won't be plenty of niggle this time around?

Get outta here!