When it comes to the standard and manner of modern batting, maybe some of us greyer fans and pundits simply are playing down the wrong line.
We see a Test batter clear his front leg, or play a reverse sweep, and our mental reflex is to think of it as some sort of rogue happening, daring but risky and inelegant. We exclaim as if it is. Even as it thrills, it jars. Normal service will resume soon, won't it? Won't it?
We still think this way. It is nearly 40 years since Mike Gatting's infamous reverse-sweep dismissal in a World Cup final. It's nearly as long since Mark Waugh first dared to play a reverse sweep and an upper cut in Test cricket. It is a quarter of a century since the new coach of the Australian team, John Buchanan, predicted that baseball style switch-hits would one day be part of the game and was scoffed at. It's 18 years since the formation of the IPL, incubator of a new way of playing the game. Meantime, Bazball has come and gone, and so has the reluctantly eponymous Baz.
While coaching at Sydney's Cranbrook school in the early years of this century, Peter Roebuck once was shocked to hear another coach importuning his charges to manoeuvre their front leg away from the line of the ball, the better to take a full swing at it.
"Over the years Australians have concentrated on footwork. No nation has used its feet as well," Roebuck wrote not long before his tragic death in 2011. "Elsewhere shoulder, wrist, hands and head might be emphasised; down under, it is the pegs. Nowadays, though, clearing the front leg is regarded as more important than moving quickly and precisely into position. Techniques are not so much deteriorating as becoming more flexible and less secure."
In this, Roebuck discerned the influence of the fledgling IPL. That methodology was still a novelty then. It is the status quo now.
For now. Status quo implies changelessness. "The status quo would like you to believe that it is immutable, inevitable and invulnerable," wrote American author Rebecca Solnit, "and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view." She was commentating on society, but it has application here.
Cricket has its own quasi-Overton window. What was heresy a quarter of a century ago is orthodoxy now (and in another quarter of a century might be thought of as quaint). Maverick has become establishment. What was once seen as an indulgence is now a tenet, and soon, if not already, will be second nature.
As Australia imploded for 47 in Cape Town in 2011, Brad Haddin flayed the third ball towards the off side and was caught behind for nought. It wasn't as if it was a ball that had his name on it; it was that he as good as autographed it. He was torn limb from limb by the media at the time. I was one of the tearers. But maybe Haddin was simply forerunning these times.
Looking back through the stained-glass windows of the Test cricket temple, one can only fret about lost technique and scarcity of runs and Test matches that fall many days short. Looking through the Overton window, one can see that it's not going to change, or rather, that it is going to continue to change. But it is not going to go all retro. It's not going to revert. The IPL has become cricket's version of a multinational, prevailing across borders, shaping the paradigm more surely than any local authority can.
With the modern mindset of eternal attack by all means, it's not that batters won't adjust, it's that they can't. They don't change up, not for an innings, not for an hour, not even for an over. They have not the will nor precedent nor the imperative. In this cut-down, souped-up era, not very many runs are needed to win a Test match anyway, hence the birth of the carry percentage. It's no longer how many, it's how vitally - and how soon.
When it comes apart, it doesn't merely fail, it disintegrates. Refer England and their anguish. We laughed at the Poms in Australia last summer, but Australia's latter-day runs come not in their former torrent; rather, they arrive spurting and spluttering as if from a faulty tap, and sometimes make only gurgling noises; refer Darwin. Travis Head was Australia's leading scorer in the Ashes, playing predominantly - almost exclusively - from outside the line. Alex Carey, arch-exponent of the reverse sweep, was next. Theirs and Australia's ends justified their means. Australia won the series 4-1, and for all their paucity of runs are still No. 1 in the rankings and the championship.
But it was far from a classic series. After the Melbourne debacle that was the counterpoint to that rubber, Greg Chappell wrote from heart and head at once, ruing a lack of good old-fashioned heads-down, bum-up application by both teams in that micro-match.
So many of us felt his pain. But Chappell has always been a lead advocate for the idea that a Test batter must always be looking to score. The principle hasn't changed, but the practice has, and it will again. It's a matter of emphasis.
For the record (which, in another sense, is an archive of how things used to be), I am one who longs to see a bit of grit, tenacity, stoicism and forbearance back in Test match cricket. I, we, might be waiting a long time.
