The way Mushtaq Mohammad tells the story it all started in a one-day game at Vale Farm in Wembley, Middlesex against Rothmans’ International Cavaliers, on 15 August 1965. You know it must have been a Sunday because the Cavaliers were a hit-and-giggle exhibition team set up by Ted Dexter and Bagenal Harvey to fill the gap in the afternoon TV schedules on the sabbath. They paid Mohammad £10 a game to play, which, like the 209 Middlesex made off their 40 overs, felt a lot more back then than it sounds now.
Fred Titmus was bowling, and Mohammad says he was wondering where, exactly, his next run was going to come from. “So I looked around and realised that the only gap was at third man.”
The problem was how to hit the ball there. So next time Titmus came in, Mohammad decided to flip his grip around and reverse sweep it to the boundary. Titmus, who, like everyone else, had never seen such a thing done in polite society, was apparently so offended that he appealed (hoping, presumably, that the umpire would be of the same kind of mind as the one who gave Dermot Reeve out lbw when he tried to play the shot in a warm-up game on tour in India 30 years later – “bad cricket, not good, play straight, good cricket”, he told Reeve as he walked off).
Fortunately for Mohammad, this particular umpire just told Titmus to get on with it.
There would be some debate, years later, whether or not Mushtaq had been taught the reverse by his older brother Hanif, who learned it when he was a kid batting in the polo grounds. That’s best left between the siblings, but Mushtaq was certainly the first man anyone can remember seeing play it in a game in England. Not that anyone particularly thanked him for it. For 40-odd years it wasn’t even something you’d necessarily want to lay claim to if you wanted to stay on the right side of MCC.
Like sideburns, stubble and a subscription to the Guardian, a penchant for the reverse sweep marked you out as some sort of a Bolshevist. It wasn’t so long ago (in Jimmy Anderson years at least) that England’s chair of selectors Peter May banned his players from even attempting it after Ian Botham was clean bowled playing one against Greg Matthews in a one-day game against Australia. “I have thumbed through the MCC coaching manual,” May said to the press afterwards, “and found that no such stroke exists.”
What a shame he wasn’t here at Edgbaston, when there were, by my count, almost 20 in the day. Anyone listening to Test Match Special would have had a fair idea of what May might have made of it. “Oh my word! What is he doing? What was that?” Jonathan Agnew spluttered as Joe Root tried, and failed, to reverse-scoop the very first ball of the day over the slips for six. Listen carefully, and you could hear similar eruptions across the country, between great sprays of tea, toast and marmalade.
The labradors were still polishing off that lot when Root played it again, to the third ball of Scott Boland’s second over. “The bloody foo …” – this one went for six – “… flip!” The camera closed in on him, grinning like a kid who got to the ice cream in the freezer. He was enjoying it so much he took another dip at it.
When Root plays like this (and he did it during the first half of last summer, in the series against New Zealand and the one-off Test against India) he is as good as anyone has been for England. There’s a skill to it, a sporting artistry, that’s worth even what they’re charging for admission to the Test grounds this summer. It’s improvisation based on a complete expertise of technique. Having mastered all the rules, he knows exactly how to break them, and after being bound by them for the past decade he takes a lot of pleasure in doing it, too.
So should everyone else. You can imagine that right across the country the old sorts who like to decry the way they bat today felt, instead, unexpected zest themselves, found that they had a little twinkle in the eye. The only problem was it was all over so quickly. Root went for 46 off 55 balls.
There were more, Ben Stokes played three, the same number as Jonny Bairstow, who got out to one. The tailenders were at it too, Ollie Robinson and Stuart Broad played a couple each, and so, of course, did Anderson, who never misses an opportunity to do it. And you like to imagine, too, that kids will be out copying the shot in the parks and playgrounds this weekend, and that, perhaps, one or two of us who, at our age, should maybe know better, might just find ourselves reaching for a poker or umbrella, and thinking: “Now, how did he switch his grip again?”
