Player Profile: Jonathan Beckman

Profile by William "The Guns" Watson

Forces of nature come in all shapes and sizes. The Tsunami, for instance, is a ruddy great wall of water sweeping away all in its path with brash and deadly aplomb. The Earthquake, a terrific tear in the very fabric of the planet itself, the result of shear forces built up over aeons, massively destructive and lethal. The volcano, a mammoth witches' cauldron of bubbling magma, so hot that brass balls themselves would melt in an instant if plunged into its Dantean depths. The list goes on. It covers thermonuclear reactions, tornadoes, cosmic strings, hurricanes, supernovae, black holes and more besides, all so powerful and so formidable that the human mind simply cannot cope with the immensity of the energies involved. And yet, all of the forces of nature mentioned above are exactly that. Forces of nature. They all obey the known laws of physics. As destructive and primal as they seem, there is a limit to their scope and power.

Which brings me on to the Beckmanator. People have described him as a force of nature. These people are wrong.

Jonathan Beckman is a force of un-nature.

He obeys the laws of physics only when it suits him. And luckily for us, that's not very often.

Watching The Beckmanator lollop into bowl with his insouciant lope, lazy action and Hasselhoffian tufts of chest hair sprouting out from a shirt open to his navel, one might be beguiled into thinking that here was just another village cricketer enjoying himself of a weekend. Not so. For when the ball leaves his hand a spectacle of Dali-esque proportions ensues. What happens to the ball as it travels its 22 yards to the batsmen has produced 12,293 PhDs and counting, a government grant of £43bn per annum into 'The Beckman Effect', and has earned the man himself no less than 3 Nobel prizes (including one for peace), and yet, still, no one has the foggiest how it occurs. The effect itself has been described as 'Banana Bowling', 'Curly-Wurly' bowling and, in slightly more rarefied circles, 'The Quantum Magnus Effect', but to give it any name at all seems somehow pointless given our total lack of understanding of the phenomenon. Many batsmen have retired hurt having faced only one mind-bending delivery, just ask Hamer Boot who the only man he fears is...

Explanations have ranged from The Beckmanator existing in 5 spatial dimensions, him being the second incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, him being able to warp space-time with only his thoughts, through to the source of his powers resting in his chest hair and that he is in fact an immortal being who has survived the collapse of numerous universes and thus has access to laws of physics that are contrary to our own. Whatever he may be, he's warping space time at a pitch near you this summer...

Career Statistics

Not the MCC

Batting

Bowling

Bowling