Day of the Probot: How run machines Hussey and Kallis are taking the excitement out of cricket

In every generation, a new breed of cricketer evolves. Like fish growing legs and apes having sex for pleasure. You know, Darwin and stuff.

The '30s gave us the run machines like Don Bradman and Wally Hammond. The '80s gave us perfect all-rounders like Ian Botham and Richard Hadlee. And the naughties, the '00s or whatever you call them, have given us the Proboters (PROfessional roBOT cricketER).

Their king is Michael Hussey, a man whose talent seems to be only marginally better than the average first-class cricketer, but whose results make Ricky Ponting and Inzamam ul-Haq look below par.

Hussey is not a bad batsmen, his technique is solid enough, his eye pretty sharp, but it’s his instincts as a probot that separate him from the pack.

He slogs over mid-wicket like a normal batsmen, but somehow when he does it, it doesn’t have any real danger to it. Only a proboter could suck the fun out of slogging. While he is the king, he also has a large number of minions infecting the current game.

Jacques Kallis, the man who bats as if his average is more important than life itself, could make a calculator look exciting.

Mahela Jayawardena's batting is pretty, perhaps a little safe and nice, not so probotic. But it’s his captaining that gets him on this list. He sounds as if he came straight from a corporate positive-speaking seminar.

Brad Hodge is the Hussey without the Mr Nice Guy programming - oh, and without the Baggy Green headwear.

Paul Collingwood is the man who makes you appreciate the greatness of Kevin Pietersen and Freddie Flintoff. The man can often look more out of his depth at this level than a pygmy dwarf with no hands, but he makes runs, not a bucket full, but enough of them, consistently.

Shaun Pollock, Stuart Clark and Chaminda Vaas are all bowling machines. Line, length, no real anger, no real emotion, even their celebrations are usually calculated. But they are all wicket machines.

A proboter can even be an attacking cricketer, like the aforementioned men, but they only attack when the odds have been carefully calibrated in their favour.

They graft out runs, place balls into gaps along the ground or scoop the ball in the emptiest parts of the paddock.

They nudge, run hard and convert ones into twos, into threes and generally play the game in a way that a mathematician could enjoy.

If Andrew Symonds, Chris Gayle, Yuvraj Singh and Shahid Afridi are the wild beasts of the game, then proboters are the lawyers and accountants.

Forget squash balls, monkey chants, 2020 underwear cricket, dodgy Indian bookmakers, Australia’s dominance of world cricket, chucking records or Martin Crowe's press conferences, this is the biggest danger to world cricket at the moment.

World cricket doesn’t need these problems right now, it’s boring enough as it is.

Measured, exact, precise, and calculated aren’t words that are going to get anyone excited. I do not think the proboters are bad cricketers. Most of the players listed are in elite class at the moment, they just don’t make me wanna turn the telly on.

Give me a Gayle swipe or a Shaun Tait wide any time.

And feel free to use this term when impressing your father-in-law or that know-it-all-dude at the office.