Mystery on Haddin's head

An hour wafted by on Monday before Xavier Doherty got a bowl – crazy, seeing as how one of the morning’s big intrigues promised to be the sight of Australia’s new spinner operating on a last-day pitch with cracks in it. It took him a while but eventually he found one. This delivery landed outside off stump, bang in the middle of that crack, then swerved 90 centimetres to the left. Wicketkeeper Brad Haddin, failing to dangle a glove within 60 centimetres of it, scrunched up his nose in annoyance. Four byes was the wash-up. By the time poor Doherty was handing his cap to the umpire, itching to begin another over, something in the picture had changed.

It took a moment to dawn on you what it was: you couldn’t see the wicketkeeper’s face anymore. He had stuck a helmet over it. The helmet wasn’t there before. So why now? Something, you supposed, to do with the crack and those 90 centimetres. But that still didn’t tell you why. Something, presumably, to do with Haddin being scared of getting hit. Hit how? And by what?

By a wedge of wood in the eye from a flashing blade’s toe end? That didn’t seem much of a reason. Wicketkeepers can go a lifetime without that sort of ill luck befalling them. Maybe Haddin was afraid Doherty might dig into his trouser pocket and pluck out a leaping taipan, its beady eyes fixed on his windpipe. But Doherty is a slider, not a Shane Warne. Skid, not bounce, is his poison. The Gabba pitch – Warne’s traditional 22 yards of Queensland paradise – was Doherty’s idea of five days in Tennant Creek.

No. Haddin helmeted up because that is what people – children, park cricketers, Test players – do these days. And it is invariably the case that when everyone is doing something, no one is thinking.

No one, for instance, thought about the symbolism of it all. Michael Clarke had minutes before dropped a sitter at slip. Marcus North in the outfield had tummy-flopped over the top of a slow-coming cover drive. Australia were a rabble already. Now they looked like a rabble in hiding – hiding behind metal and bars. If one man is the barometer of a fielding side’s spirit, it is the wicketkeeper. Australia’s wicketkeeper was radiating fear.

And so Haddin’s helmet was strapped on. Doherty let rip. Here, out of 10, is an approximate and strictly unscientific danger-level rating for those first six deliveries. Zero.

Next over, North’s right-arm dobblies got their chance. If Doherty is no taipan, North is your friendly back-garden worm. Haddin’s helmet stayed on. There were nine overs till lunch. Fifty-four balls. Three out of 54 went past the bat. Haddin’s helmet stayed on.

Was he afraid, still: of a bloody nose? Of getting pocked on the forehead? Of … of he didn’t know quite what?

Apparently, yes. Because when everyone came back from lunch Haddin’s helmet came with them.

These plain stats and facts are recorded out of curiosity. They reflect no kind of craving to poke fun at Haddin. Anyway, an exhibiting of sensible caution is hardly cause for shame among your peers. There might, it’s true, conceivably come a point at which sensible caution metastasises into full-blown unfounded paranoia. And it does, when you think about it, seem a little remiss of Haddin not to helmet up before crossing the road, statistics showing, as they do, that more people get hit by buses than maimed by Marcus North arm balls.

Regardless, Haddin appears a likeable bloke who was having a rotten enough Monday without me adding to it. Half a day in the field. Sixteen byes. Whether his nose scrunched up for all 16, no one’s sure. No one could see his nose.

Which raises the first of two main objections to wicketkeepers helmeting up. Those metal bars between face and ball are a barrier, too, between spectator and spectacle. They are a gate shutting us out. As bye after bye fizzed past Haddin’s late-lunging gloves, any number of emotions, and perhaps several at once, all of them a mystery to us, might have been crossing his face. Embarrassment. Ruefulness. Frustration. Self-loathing. Fury. Sadness.

No sadder photograph exists in all cricket’s archives than an unknown Central Press snapper’s shot of a famous man’s last day: Bradman, bowled Hollies, nought. Peering down at his broken stumps, in freeze-framed eternity, is The Don. But it would not be a great and sad photo if not for the other character at centre-stage, the wicketkeeper. See the back of his neck; how taut, upright and startled it seems. It evokes, does it not, the profound wistfulness shared by most everyone at The Oval that day? Had wicketkeeper Godfrey Evans had a helmet on, the back of his neck would be hidden. The picture would be just another picture of a batsman getting out.

The second objection – more a sense of foreboding, for now – is to do with the art of wicketkeeping. For centuries a keeper had to be perpetually on edge. He relied on two soft hands and a gimlet eye to hold catches, execute stumpings and, yes, save his head from a clobbering. If responsibility for one department is delegated to the helmet, where does that leave the other departments? It is possible, even logical, that some subtle deadening of reflexes and alertness, of the wicketkeeper’s time-honoured skill set, must follow.

It is too soon to tell. Wicketkeepers in tin hats are too new a fad. But you seldom hear it said – and this might just be coincidence – that we live in a golden age of wicketkeeping.

At two o’clock Haddin was safe to remove his helmet, England declaring the massacre over and their innings closed at 1 for 517. Suddenly the next step in cricket’s evolution seemed obvious, and no less far-fetched: helmets for Australia’s bowlers.