Saturday, 28 June 2025
Saturday, 28 June 2025
The human body is a cathedral of complexity. From its physiology to its psychology to the interaction of both with the physics of its environment. Few sporting disciplines test this complexity quite like batting in cricket — an art where the distance between two fingers can be as crucial as the strength of one’s knees, where anticipating the final position of the ball matters as much as watching its release, all in less than half a second.
Batting is hard. But documenting all its nuances and tracing its evolution across three centuries can be harder. Add to that the task of ranking the 50 greatest men’s Test batters of all time.
Jarrod Kimber, an Australian writer and filmmaker, takes to this challenge like Virender Sehwag to off-spin. With the casual charm of a podcaster (which Kimber also is), the voice of cricket on Substack unpacks the beauty of batting by crunching data and telling stories.
The end product is The Art of Batting, Kimber’s magnum opus.
‘I was facing Sachin Tendulkar bowl[ing] medium pace because our seam bowlers had got tired’
“WG Grace played in a way that looks to modern eyes [more] like an uncle at a family barbecue than an all-time great,” writes Kimber in the early pages of The Art of Batting, providing necessary context to the origins of batting and its pioneers. There are some riveting tidbits here — from how batters began with bats akin to hockey sticks to contending with pitches containing lumps of dung!
The narrative gathers momentum as Kimber contrasts the demands of facing pace and spin. This is where Kimber’s access is worth its weight in gold. For the book, Kimber speaks to Rahul Dravid, Brian Lara, Nasser Hussain, Ross Taylor, among others, whose insights demonstrate the practical difficulties of batting.
Dravid talks about how preparing against fast bowling has changed across generations: “...When I see the way these guys can do [training] today, they have four throw-down specialists travelling with them, bowling machines and endless net bowlers. I was facing Sachin Tendulkar bowl[ing] medium pace because our seam bowlers had got tired.”
Kimber isn’t focused on the men’s game alone. The best part of a chapter is dedicated to female batters and how the past two decades have been more transformative for women’s batting than men’s.
Kimber is quick to underline the inequity still affecting women, especially in Test cricket. A fact that is evident in the career of Kiwi batter Suzie Bates, who has scored almost 9,000 international runs without playing a single Test match.
A cricket geek’s delight
At 287 pages, The Art of Batting can be longer than a T20. More so because it is packed with all kinds of numbers that are bound to tickle the neurons of a cricket geek. With the intricate tools of the cricketing database CricViz at his disposal, Kimber tells us things we never knew we wanted to know. Such as Kevin Pietersen’s average when playing the hook or the pull (32), how the Decision Review System (DRS) made bowling lengths a metre fuller in the 2020s, and that batting averages in ODI cricket surpassed those in Tests for the first time in 2017.
We learn why Ross Taylor had a genuine problem batting without the sun, how Daryll Cullinan once stopped a game by hitting a six into a calamari pan, why Victor Trumper was called the “original big bang”, how Brian Lara learnt to pierce gaps as a child by threading a golf ball with a stick between potted plants and furniture, and so much more.
A poignant story comes from a conversation Graeme Smith had with AB de Villiers in the lift of an English hotel, and how it became the turning point in making de Villiers a legend.
But Kimber is at his most eloquent when he lends equal limelight to the bowlers, in describing some of the most iconic duels in cricket. Sunil Gavaskar versus the West Indian quartet of fast-bowling giants, Vivian Richards versus Richard Hadlee, Kevin Pietersen versus Shane Warne, Virat Kohli versus Mitchell Johnson.
Who is the best after Bradman?
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The Art of Batting culminates with an exhaustive list of the 50 greatest batters in men’s Test history. For this, Kimber uses a mixture of qualitative and quantitative factors besides allocating each batter a range that offers a fairer reflection of their impact. For example, Hashim Amla is ranked 41 but given a range between 37 and 55.
There are no surprises about who tops the list.
“Don Bradman is not a textbook coming to life. He was a mess of contradictions and variations that made him the incredible batter he was,” observes Kimber, whose main argument for Bradman at number one is that he was leagues ahead of any of his contemporaries.
In a fascinating aside, Kimber highlights how Bradman should have averaged around 104 were it not for the Second World War.
Five Indian icons make it to the top 50 — Tendulkar, Gavaskar, Dravid, Kohli and Sehwag.
But it is Tendulkar who is deemed to be the closest thing to Bradman because of his consistency. Kimber reveals that Tendulkar had more “great years” than anyone else, with 12. Kimber justifies most of his picks and their relative ranking even as he agonises over the absence of Adam Gilchrist, whom he credits to inspiring his personal life more than any other batter.
Kimber’s writing occasionally runs into a rot, with certain passages guilty of lazy editing. But that takes nothing away from the essence of the book, which is a fun meditation on batting greatness.
According to Kimber, a good batter has talent and tenacity, but the great batters have a curious combination of patience, adaptability, and a single-mindedness for runs that borders on selfishness. And the greatest of them all have an insatiable appetite for runs — all day, every day. This is reflected in one of the most telling quotes in The Art of Batting, by former West Indian cricketer Jimmy Adams, who distinguishes between Lara and Tendulkar: “There are times when Brian gets bored. Sachin never got bored. Ever.”
