Why batting at Lord’s is such a challenge: Sideways movement, inconsistent bounce and unreliable pace

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“From someone who loves Test cricket, is that something that will benefit Test cricket? I don’t think so.”

“It’s not a challenge for the bowlers — they just need to run up and hit a length. That’s not Test cricket, that is not skill.”

“The first thing to say is that the pitch … was sub-standard.”

Those were the words of Ben Stokes, the former England captain Michael Vaughan to the BBC, and the MCC chairman Mark Nicholas to the Times after the first Test between England and New Zealand at Lord’s earlier this summer. Three men with very different vested interests across their roles as player, broadcaster and custodian. Three men united in their assessment of how the match played out before them.

It’s not hard to see why. The first Test of England’s new post-Ashes era, led by Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum, may have resulted in victory but it was a sorry spectacle. For just the eighth time in history, a side won a Test in England with fewer than 1,000 balls bowled.

The pitch was declared “unsatisfactory” by the ICC, and Lord’s received a demerit point. Nicholas was forced to contact members and lay out an extended plan for how the surfaces would be improved, ranging from the straightforward to the nuclear. Typically level-headed commentators were talking of digging up the square — in all senses, pitchforks were in hand.

So why is everyone so bothered about one bad Lord’s pitch?

Well. for one thing, that debacle back in June was far from a one-off. If you look at how top order batters (Nos 1-7 for the purposes of this analysis) have performed in Tests in England over the last five years, Lord’s is comfortably the least batting-friendly venue going around.

It’s the same story at domestic level, too. In that five-year period, Lord’s ranks 16th out of the 18 regular County Championship venues for batting average, and 17th for dismissal rate.

In white-ball cricket, the story is no different, Lord’s being the second-slowest scoring venue across both the men’s and women’s editions of The Hundred. Going back further, England’s one-day international (ODI) World Cup-winning side managed a defeat and a tie in their two Lord’s matches during that 2019 campaign, consistently undone by the turgid, low-scoring nature of the venue — the antithesis of how England’s home pitches had been prepared across the previous cycle.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with red-ball surfaces favouring the ball over the bat. The 2010s produced far more watchable, engaging Test cricket than the run-laden 2000s, thanks in no small part to a shift in pitch preparation.

In this context, Lord’s has more than done its bit — no English ground has seen more swing movement or more seam movement post-pandemic.

The issue is that some of the movement there has been far less sporting.

‘PitchViz’ is a CricViz model that uses ball-tracking data to assess conditions; the model has Lord’s as unquestionably the hardest pitch in the country for batting across the last five years. Within that, the specific element of the tracking data which makes batting so tough is the inconsistency of bounce, with a large number of deliveries either spitting (bouncing excessively) or scooting (bouncing far less than anticipated).

It was the latter that was the issue in the New Zealand Test earlier this summer. That match had 24 dismissals either leg before wicket or bowled, a record for a Test in England. All 24 of those wickets fell to seam bowlers: in matches globally where ball-by-ball data is available, that is an all-time record.

In the post-mortem, the defeated Kiwi captain Tom Latham put it bluntly, telling reporters: “Throughout the whole match, you see the dismissals were either bowled or lbws, guys being caught on the crease, which shows the guys were not able to trust the surface.”

The wickets that fell in England vs New Zealand at Lord’s in June

The surface we saw that week was an historic outlier, but it sits as part of a concerning pattern.

The graphic below shows how many shots per dismissal when playing a defensive shot, essentially a measure of defensive solidity; it demonstrates that, at Lord’s, defences are more likely to be breached than anywhere else in the country. It isn’t the whole story, but how regularly a batter’s rearguard technique is beaten is a good illustration of the quality of the pitch.

If players like Joe Root and Kane Williamson can’t trust their defence, as was the case back in June, then something isn’t right.

Equally, it isn’t the only way in which the surface challenges batters.

The most dangerous length for the seamers at Lord’s, statistically speaking, has been bouncers — arguably the length affected most by inconsistency from the surface. The simple average of these deliveries is skewed by the 2023 Ashes, where more bouncers were bowled than in any Test on record, with England contriving repeatedly to lose wickets to the ball dug in short.

But even with that match removed, the point stands. Even excluding 2023, the bowling average for bouncers rises from just under 24 to just over 26, making it still the most effective ground to bowl them in England.

It’s notable that in response to the unreliable bounce, straight-batted shots have largely been the way to go, despite that huge sideways movement. Drives at Lord’s perform pretty much as well as anywhere else, even marginally better than some venues. Problems have tended to come with cross-batted strokes, batters falling cutting and pulling far more regularly than in other grounds.

On top of all this: you may have already heard, but Lord’s actually has a slope from one square boundary to another. It is arguably the most discussed quirk in world cricket, mythologised over years by pundits and players alike.

In simple terms, the slope doesn’t actually make that much difference. Balls that seam down the slope — in other words, into the right-hander from the Pavilion End — move somewhere between five per cent and 10 per cent more than balls moving in the opposite direction up the slope. There is no evidence that the ball moves more regularly down the slope than up it, with the distribution almost identical to every other venue.

While that 5-10 per cent difference is definitely relevant to the challenges of batting at Lord’s, you can argue that the effects on the batter are far more significant than the effects on the ball. The combination of physical aspects (the imbalance at the crease) and the mental effects of so much being said around the slope means that it does impact batters. Just not in the way you think.

The sideways movement is excessive. The inconsistent bounce is prodigious. The pace is unreliable. Players can’t defend, but they find it harder to attack than anywhere else. And also, the ground isn’t even level.

All of which is to say that the challenges for the Lord’s ground staff are not straightforward. The blend of art and science involved in preparing a Test match pitch is complex, and rarely is it a case of simply solving problem X with solution Y. But even if it were, this would be far from easy.

Speaking to Lawrence Booth of the Daily Mail, Rob Lynch, MCC’s director of cricket and operations, reiterated the number of ways that Lord’s are trying to solve these problems. Drop-in pitches, hybrid surfaces, and external consultancy are among the changes being made to combat these issues of “turf management” that the ground has experienced.

The other change is the use of data, the example given being a way to ascertain the “moisture content” of the pitches. Perhaps this is the most relevant of the responses. For all the ways we can quantify the output of batters and bowlers, on any given pitch — exactly as we have done in this article — there are very few ways to quantify and scrutinise the input, the surfaces themselves before a ball has been bowled.

Pitch-reading is far from an exact science, and plenty of highly experienced, intelligent players and pundits are completely in the dark about interpreting a 22-yard section of grass. Pat Cummins is one of the most successful captains of the modern era, but faced with the most straightforward bowl-first surface in Darwin last week, he batted, and Australia were skittled for 198.

ICC pitch ratings are made after the match, and remain understandably subjective.

Lord’s has not been at the forefront of very much in recent times. The ‘Home of Cricket’ is far more like a childhood home than where the game currently lives, somewhere important to be left behind, albeit thought of fondly. But if this crisis can inspire a new-gen approach to an ancient art, dragging one of the game’s more anachronistic elements into the professional era, then maybe it was worthwhile after all.

Data and visualisations provided by CricViz