Meet cricket's ‘bunnies' and ‘ferrets', who have the worst job in sport

New York Times

23-07-2025

It was one of those passages of play that only cricket can provide: bowlers being asked to win a Test match with their batting.
It was the final day at Lord's last week and the third Test between England and India was on the line. At one end was the tourists' Ravindra Jadeja, a 'proper' batter who took the bulk of the England bowling and attempted to score the majority of the runs as they chased a target of 193.
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At the other end were a succession of 'tailenders' — the bowlers trying simply to stay in and help Jadeja inch India towards victory. Nitish Kumar Reddy, the No 9, scored 13 and faced 53 balls; No 10 Jasprit Bumrah faced 54 balls, making five; and finally No 11 Mohammed Siraj managed to keep out 30 balls and score four before he, too, fell with India still 22 runs short.
It feels like perhaps the worst job in sport. There aren't too many other examples of professional sportspeople being made to do something they are simply not cut out for in their chosen discipline.
Yet there is also a strange thrill in seeing a 'rabbit' — cricket parlance for a batsman so poor that bowlers want to quickly send them back to their 'hutch' — trying to fend off the best bowling an opposition can muster.
Or two rabbits in the case of England's Monty Panesar and Jimmy Anderson, who contrived to deny Australia what looked like certain victory in the first 2009 Ashes Test at Cardiff with an unbeaten last-wicket stand of 19 that, more importantly, chewed up 69 balls.
'I never thought we would save the game,' Panesar tells The Athletic. 'I thought at any given moment I would just get out, Australia would win the Test match, and we'd go home.
'We just took it ball by ball. We didn't really think about the draw. We just thought, 'Let's see how long we can keep them out here' and eventually we'll get out. But it just didn't happen and we ended up staying out there much longer than we thought.'
Panesar and Anderson stayed so long that Australia were driven to distraction, with captain Ricky Ponting raging at England's repeated use of a physiotherapist as the clock ticked down to the close of play. That only added to the glee of the home crowd, with the momentum generated in Wales fuelling England's 2-1 series win.
'It gave people so much joy,' says Panesar. 'It is still talked about as one of the iconic moments in English cricket. At the time, I didn't appreciate how big it was, but I've come to realise how much of an impact it made. Particularly as I wasn't known for my batting. People said, 'Oh my God, Monty has pulled off the impossible when he can't even bat'.
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'It's not even so much about the result. It's about things like temperament, patience, self-belief, character and resilience. That's what we had to show in Cardiff and we just took it step by step.'
Some of the best bowlers can take inspiration from a moment of batting defiance or even inadequacy. England's Devon Malcolm produced one of the great spells of fast bowling against South Africa at the Oval in 1994, taking nine for 57 after he was riled into action by an incident when the tailender was batting.
'In the first innings, I'd bowled a bouncer at Jonty Rhodes and hit him on the head, so when I came in, the South Africans were encouraging their bowler Fanie de Villiers to give it back to me,' Malcolm tells The Athletic. 'I thought it was a bluff and he would bowl me a yorker, but it was no bluff and he hit me on the head with the fiercest bouncer I'd ever faced. It hit my helmet right on the three Lions.
'It caught me by massive surprise. In those days, there was a bit of an unwritten rule that bowlers didn't bowl bouncers at fellow fast bowlers and in return, you didn't smack them to the fence. But this was different.'
It led to one of the great lines in cricket history, with South Africa's Gary Kirsten subsequently claiming that Malcolm told the South African fielders, 'You guys are history,' before going out and destroying them.
Or did he?
'I just said, 'You shouldn't have done that. If you want to see what fast bowling is all about, wait until you come in again',' Malcolm says. 'Then what happened was a perfect storm. I just felt in the zone from the start. Every nick was taken, every lbw was given, and I just got on a roll. All started by being hit when I batted.'
If Panesar and Malcolm were rabbits, then some tail-end batters can be classified as 'ferrets' — because they go in after the rabbits.
The ultimate ferret was New Zealand's Chris Martin, who belongs to a select group of cricketers who have taken more Test wickets (233) than he has scored runs (123).
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Martin is rightly remembered as one of New Zealand's best seam bowlers, but he is celebrated just as much for tail-end batting that saw him fail to score a run in Test cricket for more than four years between December 2000 and March 2004 and hold the record for the most 'pairs' (two scores of nought in the same match) in Test history, with seven.
He is also the only batter in Test cricket to be twice dismissed for a diamond duck (run out without facing a ball).
'I never had any real ability with the bat,' Martin tells The Athletic with no exaggeration. 'That hand-eye co-ordination thing for me was mainly around being able to run in and bowl a cricket ball pretty fast. Not so much hit one that's moving fast.
'I tried to work on it without really succeeding and it does become a bit of a mental block after a while. You realise you are there to support your partner and they generally play a few shots when you get there, so that was the entertaining bit for me, seeing someone else have a crack while watching from the other end.
Not that Martin, who even had the nickname 'The Walking Wicket', enjoyed his fate. 'I wish I could have thrown the willow, I really do,' he says. 'I think it would have been a lot more fun. I definitely practised like that at times to see what I could do, but making a decision quickly, trusting it and getting everything biomechanically right in that split second was something I could only watch and admire in others rather than do myself.
'As far as standing there and facing a Mitchell Johnson, Shoaib Akhtar, Brett Lee or Dale Steyn, of course there was a bit of fear. I don't think in my everyday life I will ever get that feeling again. It's relatively addictive because you don't often get that situation where you have to make certain decisions to make sure you're not going to get your arm or ribs broken or you're going to get hit on the head. I was OK in getting out of the way of it, it was just defending my stumps that was the problem.'
Martin smiles at the realisation he is remembered just as much 12 years after his last Test for what he could not do with the bat as what he could do with the ball.
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'The crowd always cheered whenever I got a run and at times that was the loudest cheer of the day,' he says. 'But you had to enjoy people rooting for you in that way because perhaps they were seeing a bit of themselves in you.
'You're struggling and they're trying to imagine what it would be like to be out there with pads on and a bat in their hands. New Zealanders like a bit of irony and we tend to celebrate someone who's out there struggling. It was always me, unfortunately.'
Mark Robinson was an English equivalent of Martin, once setting a world record of 12 first-class noughts in a row and ending the 1990 season with Northants with three runs in 16 innings. But he was a good enough seam bowler to take 584 wickets for Northants, Yorkshire and Sussex before embarking on a stellar career in coaching.
'I was proud and I was brave,' Robinson tells The Athletic. 'I'd fight my corner, but it was frustrating when I got ridiculed for my batting. What was interesting was when I went to Sussex towards the end of my career, I got a lot more help with my batting and I ended up being nightwatchman (the tailender tasked with going in at the end of a day's play to protect the established batter).
'I did OK and it just shows that if you invest in people, give them a game plan and some confidence, they can achieve more. But there were plenty of times when I thought I was in an unequal battle.'
That greater help tailenders receive with their batting in a far more professional era means that the rabbit — and certainly the ferret — is in danger of extinction.
The England team under Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum even did away with the nightwatchman when they launched their Bazball era. Instead, they dispatched 'Nighthawks', where hard-hitting but limited batters such as Stuart Broad and Rehan Ahmed would try to score quickly at the end of a day to disrupt the opposition.
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Now the team reflect the modern game where there are few genuine No 11s and will go into the fourth Test against India on Wednesday with a tail so strong that Brydon Carse, who made a half-century in the last match at Lord's, will be at No 10, and Jofra Archer, another bowler with decent ability with the bat, will be at 11.
'It is nice looking at the team sheet and knowing you bat all the way to the end,' said Stokes at Old Trafford. 'You don't pick your team thinking about having a strong No 11, but we are blessed with some very good all-round cricketers.'
Malcolm would have welcomed that level of support. 'I genuinely loved my batting, but it was made clear to me I was there to bowl,' he says of his time in the England team.
And Robinson admits he would not have put up with a batter like himself in a coaching career that saw him lead Sussex and Warwickshire to the County Championship title and England women to the 2017 World Cup.
'There are far fewer rabbits in the game now because you're not allowed to be one,' says Robinson. 'As a head coach, I refused to have anyone like that. The game now demands that you can't just be a walking wicket, you have to fight your corner and put time into it.'
As Bumrah and Siraj showed at Lord's, there is still room for tail-end resistance against a far superior bowling opponent. And Test cricket is a richer game for it.
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