T20 is not just slam-bang-action

By Rajadhyax

 

“Twenty20 is all slam-bang-action stuff; no chance for niceties and art of cricket,” says my friend Vinod, an architect by profession and a man never formally trained in cricket. This is, incidentally, also the opinion of many out there, but nothing is further from truth than that. Admittedly, the shortest version of the game accords marginally more room for muscle than the mind, but T20 is not just about big hitting hulks and 150 kph bouncers. Heavy bats and tall pace bowlers do play a role here but the fact is so do spinners and short, busy players who rotate the strike.

 

T20 may not be the sole future of cricket, but it is surely a fast-paced and dynamic new addition to a sport that is devouring the TRPs of others. And rest assured, there is opportunity enough for psychological warfare and the art of cricket. The “strategic break” is pretty fruitful to ‘think out’ the batting pair or for the batting side to out-do the bowlers’ designs. Note that the wickets that fell after every such break were not merely due to lapse in concentration.

 

In fact, in T20 you may have to think about twenty times faster, or else the game is over.  

 

While batting you don’t expect to put every ball into orbit and while bowling 150 kph does not guarantee wickets. The just concluded DLF IPL is a fair indication of this. Bowlers like Andrew Symonds and Harmeet Singh clocked around 120 kph and brought success to their side, while spinners like Anil Kumble, Pragyan Ojha, Shane Warne and Piyush Chawla played a significant role too. Even normally express bowlers like Brett Lee and Lasith Malinga bowled well within themselves, barely touching 145 kph and that too for some odd deliveries.

 

Among the batsmen the ones who cracked sixes from the word go, like Sanath Jayasurya and Swapnil Asnodkar did not succeed a lot while men like JP Duminy contributed quite a bit to the team totals. And then again men like Adam Gilchrist did well by pounding the ball too. So it’s a great mixed bag!

 

In all the hustle and bustle of this kind of cricket, are things that need thinking. Even in T20 you need to read the wicket well before going out for the toss. You need to think whether batting or bowling first gives your kind of side a clear advantage over the opposition. Prior to bowling you must have video-analysed the opposition batsmen to focus on the chinks in their armour. One reason why, for instance, pacemen kept targeting Suresh Raina with the short pitched stuff in the IPL.

 

Look at the shots played in this cricket. The late-cut and the softly paddled sweep are very artistic shots in the game of cricket. They are oft-played in this kind of cricket. For the leg break bowlers, it’s no use banging the ball hard with top spinners. Men like Mishra and Chawla depended so much on well flighted googlies to fox marauding batsmen. Or look at how Van De Merwe got out in the final to Ojha, on a well flighted, looping off-break. Or see how the split finger slower ones – part of the art of fast bowling – are making the damage. As a case in point take Praveen Kumar and Dwayne Bravo. Both have bowled the slower ones to great effect in the T20s they have played so far. So who says that the art of cricket is dying with T20? Yes, you may argue that the style and art of cricket is undergoing a significant change now and in all probability this will make even the ODIs and the Test Matches more exciting with close contests in the former and more result oriented approach in the latter.