Leading Edge: Injuries, not performers, are defining cricket

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

HOW much would Chris Gayle have been worth to the West Indian team had a back injury not ruled him out of the test series against SA? How much will JP Duminy not playing in the first match at least because of a knee problem cost SA’s batting performance alone?

Those questions look like the kind of imponderables cricket types love so much, but they are not. Based on recent form, the answers are 13.47% and 10.76% respectively.

That was the size of the contributions Gayle and Duminy made to the total number of runs scored in the last test series they played - Gayle against New Zealand in the Caribbean in June and Duminy in Sri Lanka in July.

Nonsense. Test cricket’s allure is that its goalposts never stay in the same place for longer than a session.

So there can be no comparing what Gayle did against New Zealand’s limited attack on dour West Indian pitches to the challenge he would have faced on SA’s livelier surfaces with Dale Steyn, Vernon Philander and Morne Morkel steaming towards him. Duminy, meanwhile, would be backed to score a bigger chunk of SA’s runs on the greener, more giving grass of home than Sri Lanka’s dustbowls.

Even less measurable is what the sight of Gayle loping down Centurion’s dressingroom stairs, two-at-a-time, probably, on his journey to the crease would have done to SA’s bowling approach and their field placing. Similarly, now that Duminy is not a factor, the Windies no longer have to wonder how to deal with a scuttling left-hander who has all the strokes and twice as much confidence taking guard at No. 7.

Australia were no doubt quietly chuffed that MS Dhoni’s sore thumb meant they did not have to put up with India’s inspirational captain doing exactly that in the first test of their series in Adelaide. When Michael Clarke hobbled off in the same match, India would have been forgiven for hoping there was more back pain where that came from.

Clarke returned to complete a century made all the more rousing by Australians’ raw emotions in the aftermath of Phil Hughes’ death, but he seems to spend more time on the physio’s table than on the field these days.

And he is far from alone. Enough of cricket’s premier players are being crocked often enough to raise concerns that games are being defined not by the performances of those on the field but by the injury-enforced omission of big names.

Whatever the stats say, West Indies are a lesser team without Gayle. They know it and SA know it. Duminy’s absence was alarmingly conspicuous during SA’s one-day series in Australia last month, and they are likely to miss him when the series starts at Centurion on Wednesday.

He is the youngest of the four players discussed - and he is already 30. Clarke and Dhoni are 33. Gayle is a ripe old 35.

Kumar Sangakkara and Dale Steyn, the highest ranked test batsman and bowler, are 37 and 31. The same places on the one-day ladder are held by AB de Villiers and Saeed Ajmal, who are 30 and 37.

Football is a younger person’s game, but its finest modern exponent, Lionel Messi, is at 27 in the prime of his career - not a creaking veteran like his cricket counterparts.

Age is an enduring bastard that will not be beaten. Except by youth. Cricket needs more kids with class.