by Arunabha Sengupta
Helmets.
The same cliched argument thrown over and over by casual cricket conversationalists.
Casual because most often these blokes are not ready to test their assertion that helmets indeed made a huge change to the equation, and if they did by how much.
Common sense tells us they did. But that is perception. And as we keep repeating, perceptions are most often misleading. They have been scientifically shown to be so.
Why don’t we, once and for all, try to find how much difference they actually made?
17 March 1978, Barbados.
It suddenly looked as if a welder with an oxy-acetylene flame cutter had mistakenly loitered onto the cricket field. Graham Yallop was recognised under the cumbrous white helmet and a transparent face guard and he was booed and jeered all the way to the wicket. The Victorian batted about two and a half hours and scored 42, and started a fashion that changed the game forever
It was actually Patsy Hendren who designed his own helmet way back in 1933—a rubber hat with three peaks two of which fitted over the side of his head—as he faced Learie Constantine, Leslie Hylton and Manny Martindle at Lord’s.
But, it took 45 more years for the trend to catch on. Just after the Bodyline series.
Why that long?
To use a cliché, necessity is the mother of invention. Helmets are not revolutionary gadgets. They are rather easy to design.
But they were not deemed necessary after Bodyline was frowned upon and the new fad went out of the game. There were fast bowlers, some of them quite dangerous. But the dangers did not really amount to degrees that made batsmen regularly fear they would be killed.
It changed when first Lillee and Thomson terrorised the batsmen from 1974-75 and then Clive Lloyd retaliated with his own battery of bowlers. Helmets became necessary. Helmets became necessary. And myths started exploding.
The perception is that ever since batsmen started donning helmets, fast bowling lost the edge of physical intimidation, techniques suffered, the game lost its edge … you have heard all that before. Perhaps even said so…
As I said earlier, perceptions can be misleading.
To drill down objectively, let us look at a list of excellent fast men whose careers spanned through the helmet revolution, and try to find out how they fared through the phase.
To do this, we look at six years, two before the helmet, two during the first period of its use when men were adapting to it and two more by which time it grew into a norm. Fortunately, we find ten exemplary bowlers from the period who generated enough data.
A visual inspection of the table tells us a lot.
Holding, Lillee and, to a lesser extent, Roberts, started off with a bang, moved into a steady mode and became lethal again.
Thomson was no longer his threatening self by 1980.
The performance of Garner, Len Pascoe, Hadlee and Imran Khan actually improved a lot down the years.
Overall, as a population of bowlers, they remained consistent – a bit of a dip during 1978-80 and then back to best in 1980-82
All these are between-person variations, riding the crest and trough, the ebbs and flows of their own careers.
What is perhaps more striking is that, with the advent of helmets, the strike rate of these bowlers went down and though it recovered to some extent in the third phase, was never quite the same again
All these assertions are validated by scientific tests. Statistical tests do not find significance difference in the three data sets of averages. There is not enough evidence to say that the bowling averages improved or deteriorated during the three phases.
However, Mann-Whitney Test of strike rates does yield a result which loosely means that we can say with 92.2% confidence that the strike-rates deteriorated for this group of bowlers during 78-80 (a p-value of 0.077)
What does this mean in cricketing terms?
i. With helmets, scoring runs did not get easier against the fast men of the generation.
However, getting wickets became more laborious. Batsmen could resist longer against the quick bowlers, perhaps powered by the protection aided confidence. Batting technique changed. People no longer bothered about moving to the off side of the ball to play the hook shot. The new batsmen were not necessarily inferior to the old brigade, it was the evolution of a different technique with the diminished risk of head injury.
ii. When new fast bowlers arrived, they developed new skills to pick wickets at the same rate as their predecessors. With physical intimidation not being what it used to be, they extended their repertoire. In Marshall, Walsh and Wasim Akram we witnessed many splendored munitions in their arsenal. Waqar Younis perfected his toe crushers because no one wears helmets at both ends. In came the slower ball, reverse swing and other innovations.
Cricket is a game that evolves. The appliances and technology come into the game, ammunitions are neutralised, but it does not lead to one sided showdowns.
New thoughts fly through the gunnery and out come novel weapons – which may not threaten life and limb, but can be potent enough to make batsmen hop.