I remember an evening in a hotel room in Pakistan, Brian McMillan beside me. Geoffrey Boycott was talking batting, and he said something I have carried for more than 30 years. Batting, he said, is all about angles.
I did not fully understand it that night. I think about it often now, because he was describing the relationship between the body, the bat, the hands and the line of the ball - the geometry every batter has had to be aware of, whatever era they happened to be born into.
That thought returned recently, hearing Boycott call Ted Dexter the finest English batter he played with. Boycott was precision and judgement. Dexter was instinct and authority. Yet I think Boycott recognised something of his own thinking underneath Dexter's technique, because Dexter believed batting was essentially a sideways game, the body kept narrow, out of the hands' way, so the bat could travel down the line rather than across it.
Sunil Gavaskar, over breakfast many years ago, gave me another piece of advice when I asked him about trigger movements. Keep them small, he said, because no player can repeat exactly the same movement every time, and in a game decided by precision, timing and balance, simplicity makes for better consistency. Pearls of wisdom earned the hard way and over time.
What matters as much as what they believed is the world they learned to play the game in, and how that was so different to the world today.
It was in English county cricket that Dexter and Boycott learned their trade. I remember arriving for my first county season in 1995, genuinely worried about the swinging ball. By the end of that summer the worry had gone, not because anyone explained things to me but because I faced it every single day, watched others and listened to them, and slowly found my own answers. A full county season handed a batter different pitches, bowlers and conditions every week, and for an overseas player it could feel like several domestic seasons compressed into one summer. You could only get better.
County cricket did not sit in isolation either. Three- and four-day cricket was still, by a wide margin, the most played form of domestic cricket for overseas players fortunate to be contracted to play in England. They got a year-round education. Beneath even that, in club and school cricket, the real nursery where most of us first learned this game as boys, it was still "time cricket" that was played, matches decided properly over a full day rather than settled inside a fixed number of overs. A young player's pathway, from school to his first club and provincial match, to a Test debut, kept asking the same question at every level. Could he build an innings, and defend his wicket, patiently, for a long time?
"As the first-class apprenticeship disappeared, sports science, biomechanics, video analysis filled the space it left. The trouble started when the language built to describe movement became the language used to teach it"
That question barely gets asked anymore, at any level of that old pyramid, which is precisely why the players standing at the top of it now have answered it far less often than the generations before them. That's why difficulty presents itself.
Look at a list of the great Test batters of the last 50 years and the pattern is not hard to miss. Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd, Martin Crowe, Brian Lara, Jacques Kallis, Rahul Dravid, Steve Waugh, Matthew Hayden, Justin Langer, to name a few, all spent time in county cricket. Different techniques, different countries, the same apprenticeship underneath, one that exposed a batter's weaknesses honestly, long before international cricket got the chance to.
There was a wider alignment behind all of it. Test cricket was the pinnacle, county cricket was the biggest apprenticeship opportunity, and for many overseas players, it was real income too, so ambition, preparation and reward all pointed the same way. Modern cricket points elsewhere now, toward franchise leagues, which signify money, opportunity, and a busy international schedule.
Preparation will follow whatever environment rewards it the most. I do not blame any player for making the choices they do these days. If I were 19 now, I am not sure I would choose differently myself. The inconvenient truth is that red-ball batting, for a great many players, is no longer the central discipline a career gets built around. It has become something on the edges of a calendar built for a different game.
As the first-class apprenticeship disappeared, sports science filled the space it left - biomechanics, video analysis, a far richer language for describing movement than my generation ever had. Much of that has been a genuine gift. The trouble started when the language built to describe movement became the language used to teach it. My generation learned the movement first and found language for it afterward. Increasingly now, young players are handed the language first, and asked to build the movement to fit it.
The modern backlift is a striking example. The bat once flowed naturally from the ground into the backswing, and the extent of that backswing was shaped by the intention behind it: to attack or defend. Today logic has reversed the sequence: if high hands help generate power, why not simply start there?
It sounds reasonable when movement is frozen into a photograph. Batting does not happen in photographs, and the visible shape of skilled movement is not necessarily what creates the skill. You see this thinking being taught in academies around the world now. The stance is open, off stump becoming the new middle stump, an open stance the result. Hips and shoulders are pointing in different directions, the bat sitting high in periscope fashion - a whole sequence completed before the bowler has even released the ball. Geometry and alignment have gone haywire.
Enter Steve Smith, the chief influencer. Few batters have challenged convention as successfully, and still scored as heavily against the best bowling in the world as he has. The mistake was assuming what worked for Smith should become a template for everyone else. Smith understood his own method intimately and adjusted it constantly to the bowler and the conditions in front of him. An elite player proving something can work does not prove that everyone should be taught it. Smith's greatness has duped a whole generation of coaches and players - which is a tribute to his genius.
The old apprenticeship offered a safeguard we have not properly replaced. Theory never got the final vote there; the game did. A batter could arrive with almost any method he liked, and over a long season the ball would reveal whether the method survived serious examination. Without that kind of process, Test cricket is left to be the finishing school, which it should never be. The school before a batter gets to the top is simply not good enough now, the way it was in the past.
I do not know what Dexter would make of batting today. Perhaps he would simply ask what each piece of it was actually solving, and what had quietly been sacrificed to solve it. Perhaps he would remind us that technique should never exist because science explains it, or because one great player made it famous. It exists to solve the problems posed by the ball, and the ball has changed a great deal less than the world we have built around it. It still swings, still seams, still rewards the bowler who makes a batter genuinely uncertain about length and line. The bowler's prize ball is still the one aiming to hit the top of off stump, whatever he bowls. The grass and soil are still the same, and so is the pitch length. If the chorus is growing louder that the modern batter can't deal with a moving ball, then we need to ask: what were batters of the past doing different when they could deal with it?
That old finishing school is largely gone now, and I do not expect it to come back. But the lesson it taught still holds true. The great players were not built by removing difficulty from their path. They were built by spending enough time, facing enough failure and enough real consequence, to work out for themselves what actually did the job.
We cannot replace that process with cricket science, or the belief that other formats can somehow meet the same demands by different means. If we genuinely want players who cope better with a moving ball, they need the chance to develop that skill well before Test cricket asks it of them, not when they are playing Test cricket, under the highest pressure, for the first time. If we don't, we will continue to see players come and go, and teams keep looking for continuity, excellence and a winning culture.
Otherwise, let's be honest about what a good performance against the moving ball actually is now. An anomaly, not a reflection of anything built to last, and a winning result for the team on the right side of luck.