Are you being sarcastic?????????
Mark Waugh had fantastic footwork all the shots and should have had a far better average, made batting look easy and surely that is a sign of a class player?
Also watched him play some fine innings against some very good attacks when others failed surely his footwork would have let him down in these innings
First of all, Mark Waugh was a class act. He was a sublime talent, and one of my favorite players to watch. He had great balance, but he didn't have great footwork. Sunil Gavaskar had great footwork; Greg Chappell had great footwork, and so did Viv Richards, because they fully committed to either the front or back foot.
Mark Waugh, on the other hand, used to get caught on the crease quite a lot, and would often play around his front pad. It is testament to how much natural talent he had, that he was able to make so many runs, despite having a few technical shortcomings. In the end, it might have caught up with him, as he declined pretty rapidly in the twilight of his career. The fact that he was quite tall for a batsman, and was very upright at the crease, might have had something to do with his lack of footwork. Smaller batsmen like Sunil Gavaskar and Brian Lara, with their lower center of gravity, are often able to glide across the crease with cat-like movements, while taller batsmen often look heavy footed.
The larger question, is how paramount to batting success, is good footwork. Graham Pollock used to often say that as long as you were well balanced, and had your head in the right position, that was all that mattered. But, there are others like Geoff Boycott and Sunil Gavaskar, who believe that good footwork is the cornerstone of great batting.
You have your conventional masters like Barry Richards, Sunil Gavaskar, and Greg Chappell, who essentially built their games on technical purity, but you also have your geniuses like Viv Richards, Brian Lara and Graham Pollock, who were probably greater batsmen, and at various stages defied the textbook. I think the key to it all, is that all great batsmen understand their own games intimately: they understand their strengths and weaknesses, and develop a technique that works for them, as opposed to chasing some gold standard in technical perfection.
In the case of Mark Waugh, the technique that often left him vulnerable to the ball moving in, was the very same technique that enabled him to become one of the greatest leg-side players in the history of the game.
My memory always, for some reason, associates Courtney Walsh with the dismissal of Mark Waugh described. Trapped on the crease, hit on the kneeroll, and then he'd lean over and use his bat to hold himself up as the umpire gave him out.
Yeah, I remember him being dismissed like that quite often, particularly early on in his innings. For such a sublime talent, Mark Waugh could be a very sleepy starter. There were often stories about him taking a nap before walking out to bat, or playing table tennis against a wall, just to keep himself alert.
In regards to Ambrose dismissing Waugh as described, the two moments that are quite vivid in my mind, are the semi final of the 1996 World Cup, and the Melbourne Test match in 96/97, when Ambrose ran riot.
On both occasions, Waugh was caught on the crease, feet going nowhere, and Ambrose jagged one back viciously to trap him in front. The dismissals were a mirror image of each other.
) have more choices there.
