by Chris Ryan
Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Glenn McGrath does not have the cunning of Dennis Lillee. He lacks the charisma of Malcolm Marshall. He is not as graceful as Michael Holding. He is not explosive like Allan Donald. He cannot swing the ball like Terry Alderman. He cannot reverse it like Imran Khan. He is not built of the animal hatred that drove Rodney Hogg and Merv Hughes. He lacks Joel Garner's height, Jeff Thomson's speed and Ian Botham's luck.

Glenn McGrath is a relentless, remorseless crushing machine, a wrecker of batsmen's nerves and reputations, with little thirst for theatricals. He is a wicket-taker, pure and simple. Most of the bowlers above are more gifted than he, but McGrath has taken more Test wickets than the lot.

His 400th, which he brought up on Monday, was much like the previous 399. He reached the top of his mark, glanced over his shoulder and turned. He stooped. He started to trot, stepping rhythmically into his own steady pace. No stuttering, no skipping, no switching the ball from hand to hand, nothing flashy. They don't do flashy in Narromine, McGrath's outback hometown.

As he approached the crease his mouth let out a puff of exertion. His chest straightened. He started, ever so slightly, to accelerate. He hit the crease with his back foot just shy of horizontal. He let go with his right arm high. The ball pitched a few millimetres outside the off stump and nipped back by precisely the same number of millimetres. Never the King of Swing or the Sultan of Speed, McGrath has long been the Maestro of Millimetres.

The ball cannoned into Waqar Younis's back pad. Had his leg not intervened it would have bent the off peg. So simple to do, so hard to deal with.

Except that there is nothing simple about it, for if that were true everyone would be doing it. McGrath has always maintained he knows more about pig-shooting than swing bowling, that his approach to cutting the ball consists of trying to hit the seam in the blind hope that something might happen. "I don't bowl that quick," he told one reporter at the start of this series. "I don't do a great deal with the ball. All I do is I land the ball ... where I want."

All part of McGrath's bluff, of course. But it works. Keith Stackpole, on commentary duty in Sharjah, was the latest to fall for it when he professed yesterday: "I always think of McGrath as the classic English county pro." Classic English county pros don't take 403 wickets at 21.53. Classic English county pros don't knock over Michael Atherton 19 times and Brian Lara 13 times, and they don't nail a Test wicket every 8.3 overs.

Now think of three of McGrath's famous bowling partners during his near-decade at the top. Merv Hughes had that blood-curdling moustache, Shane Warne sports a spiky blond haircut and an ear-ring, while Jason Gillespie is known to favour either a ponytail or goatee. McGrath has never strayed from his short back and sides. Always his intention is to deflect the focus away from himself, to play down the threat he poses, to make himself invisible.

McGrath has not been invisible for some time now. In a poll of 108 international players published over the weekend, 70% plumped for McGrath ahead of Muttiah Muralitharan as the world's No. 1 bowler. The survey should not be considered gospel: Steve Waugh was voted the second-best batsman in the world when, at present, he is barely the second-best batsman in his family. But it gives an idea of McGrath's standing. He is the omnipotent bowler of world cricket to a degree that even Lillee never managed.

To put it in the farming parlance he so enjoys, McGrath is an all-weather harvester of wickets. Study his statistics and the most remarkable feature is their consistency. On any continent, against any rival, his average seldom varies by more than a few decimal points. Win or lose, bowl first or last, the miserly quota of runs he gives away is always roughly the same.

In a five-Test series he has never taken fewer than 21 wickets. He averages below 26 against every country bar New Zealand. He simply does not have bad days at the office. Only once in McGrath's last 79 Tests, at the Boxing Day encounter against West Indies two years ago, has he gone wicketless. And he was hardly disgraced: his match figures were 25-13-25-0.

Few bowlers in history can have been so adept at pinpointing batsmen's weaknesses. No bowler has been so skilled at pricking away at those weaknesses - ball after ball, over after over - then switching to Plan B in the unlikely event that a batsman survives his initial onslaught. McGrath is like a gold fossicker who spies something glittering in a distant puddle and will not sleep until it is swirling in his pan.

He seems a happier, friendlier bloke too these days, not so much the "grumpy old man" South Africa's Graeme Smith spoke of a few months ago. While some of his team-mates have lost their cool lately, McGrath has tended to laugh at, rather than curse, his misfortune. On Sunday, when a bird flew into umpire Bucknor's hat, McGrath delicately cupped the tiny creature in his large hands and escorted it to safety.

Unless he retires to the bush, where he has bought up a sizeable chunk of Australia's arid interior, he should make a fantastic bowling coach some day. For here, truly, is a champion fast bowler who was made, not born.

Chris Ryan is a former managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

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