The Game That Isn’t

GH on fantasy deliveries, samurai and JL's WhatsApps

Where the mind leads, it is said, the body will follow. That is why cricket involves so much essentially mental rehearsal. It is unusual in this respect. Footballers do not prepare for playing by kicking an imaginary ball; you don’t see tennis players essaying fresh air backhands. But the prospect of cricket has us making all manner of anticipatory shapes, playing ghost strokes, gripping phantom outswingers, spinning fantasy deliveries - drills of the spirit as much as of technique, like those of a martial artist or a samurai.

Here is Justin Langer - with the rank of Shodan-Ho in Zen Do Kai, by the way - the morning of a one-day international at Galle in 1999. It is another of Mark Ray’s superb photographs. Langer is lean, hungry, compact and vigilant. He is tapping his bat rhythmically as the spectral bowler approaches. His front foot is slightly upraised. He is all eyes for the non-existent ball. Yes, he’s in mufti, as it were: sunglasses perched, baggy green in his bag, respecting the pitch’s virginity in standing behind rather than in front of the stumps. Remember how Langer’s old mate Matthew Hayden used to plonk himself vastly at the crease for his pre-match visualisations? JL, still not quite secure in his career, is here being a little more deferential. But don’t be fooled by the casual attire, the void scoreboard, the empty terraces: Langer is already in game mode, drawing on the preceding to prepare for the forthcoming, aspiring to the grave solidity of the Galle Fort behind him, with the hope of dominating so starkly as to expel the fielders from the field. Today could be the day. He must be sharp of mind and method.

Langer, of course, worshipped at the altar of preparation. He never wearied of nets. He would run hundreds of runs in his pads off the pitch to ready for doing the same on the pitch. As a coach he pushed his men up sandhills and through superheated days, drove them with exhortations and dinned them with WhatsApps. But what he’s doing here, everyone can relate to. There’s something soothing about going through your motions in such a free space. They can be calibrated precisely, savoured for their own grooved certainty. This is the game at which you can’t fail, and it serves in some ways to compensate for the game in which failure is unavoidable.

Except, in the latter case, when you don’t play. Because the kicker here is that Langer did not. He was not selected in this Aiwa Cup, and, in fact, had already played the last of his eight one-day internationals. This, then, was as close as he got to the middle. But I bet they came off beautifully.