Joe Root takes pleasure in the reverse sweep, as should everyone else

The way Mushtaq Mohammad tells the story it all started in a one-day game at Vale Farm in Wembley, Middlesex against Rothmans’ International Cavaliers, on 15 August 1965. You know it must have been a Sunday because Cavaliers were a hit-and-giggle exhibition team set up by Ted Dexter and Bagnall Harvey to fill the gap in the afternoon TV schedules on the sabbath. They paid Mohammad £10 a game to play, which, like the 209 Middlesex made off their 40 overs, felt a lot more back then than it sounds now.

Fred Titmus was bowling, and Mohammad says he was wondering where, exactly, his next run was going to come from. “So I looked around and realised that the only gap was at third man.”

The problem was how to hit the ball there. So next time Titmus came in, Mohammad decided to flip his grip around and reverse sweep it to the boundary. Titmus, who, like everyone else, had never seen such a thing done in polite society, was apparently so offended that he appealed (hoping, presumably, that the umpire would be of the same kind of mind as the one who gave Dermot Reeve out lbw when he tried to play the shot in a warmup game on tour in India 30 years later – “bad cricket, not good, play straight, good cricket”, he told Reeve as he walked off).

Fortunately for Mohammad, this particular umpire just told Titmus to get on with it.

There would be some debate, years later, whether or not Mushtaq had been taught the reverse by his older brother Hanif, who learned it when he was a kid batting in the polo grounds. That’s best left between the siblings, but Mushtaq was certainly the first man anyone can remember seeing play it in a game in England. Not that anyone particularly thanked him for it. For 40-odd years it wasn’t even something you’d