Sweep

Tomorrow will see Joe Root become the 15th cricketer to play 100 Tests for England.   Fantasy Bob sends Joe his warmest congratulations.  This is just what Joe has been waiting for and will make all the difference to his performance.  

Equally good news is that locked down cricket fan will be able to see the match on Channel 4 as live cricket comes back to free to air TV.  It is the natural order of things.  If only other areas in these fraught times could also revert to how things should be in similar fashion.

Remarkably all 15 players to have reached this milestone have done so during FB's life time.  This is either a measure of FB's longevity or an indication that these years have seen an acceleration in the number of Tests played.  Or perhaps both.

The first player to reach the ton was Colin Cowdrey.  He did so in the 3rd Ashes Test of the 1968 season, played at Birmingham.  He scored a century - his only significant score in the series in a drawn match.  The series was also drawn, meanign Australia retained the Ashes.

Eight other players have scored 100 in their 100th Test.  These include one other English batsman - Alex Stewart, who did it against West Indies at Manchester in 2000.  It would be fitting if Root could become the third Englishman to do so.  He is in a rich vein of form so he has a great chance.  If he does so it is likely that he will sweep his way there.  FB read recently that in the last 18 months Root has scored 300 runs from the sweep for once out.   In the two recent Tests in Sri Lanka, Root scored 134 of his 426 runs with his sweep  more runs  than any other English batsman except Jonny Bairstow managed in total.

This is the kind of statistic that boggles FB's mind.  For he has thought hard about the sweep.  He has it from the philosophic, the socio-economic, the aesthetic, even the political point of view.  There may be nothing he does not know about the shot.  Other than how on earth to play it.   There have been rare occasions when his natural exuberance has overcome his characteristic common sense and he has attempted the shot.  There was no happy ending.  Bat and ball remained distant strangers.  FB invariably ended up in a tangled heap on the crease.  To score one run from the shot therefore seems unlikely - to score 300 is simply unnatural.

So all in all this is what Sweep really means to FB: