What your guard says about you

To take guard is to start as you mean to go on. Whether you have the talent or the application to go on is, of course, irrelevant. At cricket's lower levels intention is all that matters. We know that this game is played as much in the mind as on the pitch, and taking guard is all in the mind, the last phase of the game you can genuinely control before the 6ft 5in bowler storms up to the crease and bowls something you simply can't deal with. It also tells the opposition whatever you want to tell them about yourself.

A batsman, for instance, who refuses to take guard and just waves away any attempt by the umpire to be helpful is likely to score either 0 in four balls, a freakish 11, or a match-winning 86 not out. The opener who takes "middle and off" will be there all afternoon and may get to double figures before tea. Some batsmen take "two legs" primarily because they think it's a cooler guard than "middle". Strangely, no one says "middle and leg" any more, unless they are new to the game and don't know that no one says "middle and leg" any more. If someone says "centre" instead of "middle", he's telling you he's gritty and northern and didn't go to public school, whereas many of the public schoolboys I know don't say "leg" at all; they take "one leg", with an effortless one-upmanship it costs thousands to imbue.

And how do we mark our guard? When I started playing in the late 70s, you did it with your bat but no one does that now. Usually it's with the boot but we are all impressed when someone remembers the real one-upmanship method: take off a bail and bash the end of it into the ground with the handle of your bat. Magnificent. It takes about five minutes and the batsman always loses his mark and has to do it again four overs later but stylistically it's unbeatable. Some batsmen, once they start marking their guard with their boot, don't seem able to stop and after a while you feel like offering them a spade to speed up the process.

But what when such sparkling form deserts you? Our nervous, and last season almost scoreless, opening batsman Simon has been marking his guard with his bat because, as he said, he no longer seems able to make the right kind of indentation with his boot. He showed me what he was doing and I spotted a couple of minor technical adjustments he could make: using the outside of the boot rather than the inside and adjusting his balance to make it easier to judge the angle of the scraping motion. He is now practising in the nets and hopes to introduce his rebuilt boot-scrape into his repertoire along with the slog-sweep and a backward defensive in which he actually moves his feet. There are always tiny ways you can improve your game, even if you are useless.