Posted by Busy being described as ‘busy’ mostly. The word’s very quickly become a Taylor cliché and today it was used on Sky as early as his first ball – at which point he’d mostly been busy waiting.
What does ‘busy’ mean? As far as we can tell, it means the player in question scores runs without being reliant on a disproportionate number of boundaries or freaky improvised shots. It’s what used to be called ‘being good at batting’.
James Taylor is good at batting. He’s a good-at-batting cricketer. His unique, stand-out quality is apparently that he’s good at batting. Maybe if he could find a way of changing ethnicity, people might start suggesting that he was ‘wristy‘ instead.
To be fair, there’s also Alastair Cook-style good batting, which is about as “busy” as a barn door; or Eoin Morgan-style good batting, which is about as “busy” as an exploding airfield.
Looking further afield, we’ve got Misbah-ul-Haq, who combines both extremes; and AB de Villiers, who would be the exploding airfield kind, only it’s a controlled explosion that somehow results in the planes being turned into Haribo fizzy cola bottles.
Yes, I think I get the ethnic stereotyping idea:
James Taylor – busy
Jamshed al Tahir – wristy
Jackson Taylor – calypso
Josh Ros Taylor – nuggety
Jermain Taylor – punchy…
Josh Ros – SA or Kiwi? I’d have thought Jermain was NZ too, but for the adjective (which brings to mind David Warner).
Jermain Taylor is punchy is a joke in rather poor taste about a real sportsman by that name.
Taylor – swift?
Meh. Bring back players (Who Cannot Be Named) who score disproportionate numbers of boundaries and play freaky improvised shots, s’wot I say.