Why county cricket was pivotal in shaping history's greatest batters

In his new book, Jarrod Kimber seeks to explain both why legends of the game innovated – and the further impact their innovations went on to have

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The greatest players of any discipline, whether in cricket or otherwise, will always be a source of hot debate.

But in selecting his 50 greatest batters of all-time, Jarrod Kimber aims to apply factors such as science, skill and culture, rather than mere numbers, in making the case for the best players to have ever wielded willow.

In The Art of Batting: The Craft of Cricket’s Greatest Run Scorers, Kimber makes the case not only for how the top batting innovators changed cricket as we know it, but also how the time, conditions and environment in which they played the game caused those innovations in the first place.

Take, for example, Pakistan’s Mohammad brothers, who between them played international cricket between the 1950s and the 1980s.

“They’re fascinating because they basically teach us about premeditated shots, that reverse sweep,” Kimber tells The Cricketer.

They weren't the first guys to play it, but they were the first guys to play it regularly and for it to be a part of their thing - and that has changed batting forever.

“That ability has changed cricket completely.”

The book is further informed by interviewees including David 'Bumble' Lloyd, Nasser Hussain, Rahul Dravid and Brian Lara, adding the input of those who’ve played at the highest level to Kimber’s established expertise.

Kimber also notes county cricket’s status, pre-IPL, of being the place where overseas professionals from around the world would ply their trade over long seasons where the boredom of repetition created innovation in batting.

“I think county cricket's really important because of the amount of games you play,” added Kimber.

“The birth of the slower ball really comes out of it and bodyline comes out of it, but any time you have a movement within bowling, you have a counter movement with batting.

“County cricket has this churn of fixtures which I think does impact those sorts of things and then you get an explosion within that.

“You get these little patches of innovation that it's harder to do in domestic leagues outside of that world, like in the Caribbean or the Sheffield Shield in Australia, just because they don't have the amount of games strung in a row.

“Because of that, I think county cricket has this incredible impact because someone can come in with a theory and then it spreads really quickly because everyone's going to play that person within that year.

“I think that's a really interesting thing.”

Click here to buy Jarrod's book, The Art of Batting, OUT NOW!