Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

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  A Premier League footballer can move freely between club teams but only represent one at a time. But, with short leagues played virtually non-stop throughout each year, a T20 franchise player can move from league to league, team to team and back again, in a way that is unparalleled by any other player in any other sport. Just as his batting grasped a simple concept – the worth of the currency of the six in this new game – and took it to its extreme conclusion, so Gayle’s career choices did the same. Gayle played for everyone: 25 different teams by the end of 2018, to be exact. No cricketer ever represented so many professional sides.

  In an age when the economics of the sport were skewed towards the rich – the West Indies earn £12 million a year from broadcasting rights, while from 2020 England’s broadcasting contract is worth £220 million a year, and they also receive more money from the International Cricket Council – the T20 free market allowed Gayle to earn what he was worth, unencumbered by not being from one of cricket’s wealthiest nations. Until the IPL Gayle was used to earning £800 per one-day international for the West Indies. Then, he earned £400,000 in his first IPL contract. ‘I’m like, “How much?”’ Gayle recounted in the documentary Death of a Gentleman. ‘That can’t be real. Then everything just changed just from there.’

  And there has been a central irony to his career choices, castigated the most by the same old-world suits in England who, through their backroom machinations, accelerated the growth in cricket’s financial imbalance between nations. Gayle’s career was not just an expression of his brilliant talents; it was also a reaction to the world that cricket’s administrators made, in which any player who had the ill fortune to be born outside Australia, England or India was doomed to third-class earnings from playing international cricket, regardless of how they performed on the pitch. A study from ESPNcricinfo at the end of 2017 found that, across international cricket, the most well-paid cricketers from New Zealand and the West Indies earned only one-sixth as much as the most well-paid from Australia. And while Australia’s Steve Smith earned $1.47 million a year playing international cricket, no one outside the sport’s economic big three earned over $0.45 million for playing internationals.

  So Gayle needed T20 leagues to be treated as an equal to those cricketers from richer nations. And, regardless of whom he played for, leagues needed him. Teams in the IPL, and other leagues, have been able to unlock extra sponsorship with Gayle in their squad. Until recently, the single biggest determinant of viewing numbers for the CPL in India was simply whether Gayle was at the crease. As W.G. Grace – the world’s first truly great cricketer – once said after being dismissed: ‘They’ve come to watch me bat, not you bowl.’ And so it was for Gayle.

  The path that Gayle has embraced is unapologetically transactional and yet also transparent: he depended on the currency of runs, not loyalty accrued over years or being a favoured child of the system. It has been a pioneering path, and one that made him a scapegoat for those who resented cricket’s direction of travel.

  ‘Chris Gayle is exhibit A in what’s wrong with cricket at the moment,’ the journalist Telford Vice wrote for South Africa’s Sunday Times at the end of 2018. ‘What’s a mercenary like Gayle to do if the suits keep inventing more of the same ways for him to make money?’

  And yet, for all the temptation to attack Gayle as a catch-all for the narcissism and moral failings of the modern T20 player, the image ignored that Gayle had time for 103 Tests in between his T20 gluttony – and managed 15 centuries. Gayle, indeed, is the only holder of a 3-2-1, devised by the cricket writer Jon Hotten, that demonstrated mastery of all forms: Test match triple hundred (two, in fact), one-day international double hundred, T20 international century. His full-throttled embrace of T20 was out of choice, not necessity.

  Gayle was almost 29, and over eight years into his international career, by the time of the first IPL. The Gayle effect could actually be felt most strongly among those who followed him, and were born into the world that he and the IPL created. Andre Russell, a strong contender to be the single most valuable T20 player in the world at stages of his career, played just a solitary Test match – one more than Kieron Pollard, the second most prolific six hitter in T20 history. Young cricket careers rapidly acquire their own momentum, one T20 contract leading inexorably on to the next. This is not exactly the path that Gayle took, but it is the world that he helped make. In 2009, when he arrived late from the IPL for a Test series in England, Gayle said that he ‘wouldn’t be so sad’ if Test cricket died out.

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  Gayle’s Instagram feed resembled that of an ‘influencer’, paid to promote nightclubs and alcohol. It was all tailored to giving off a simple message: wherever you were in the world, whatever you were doing, Chris Gayle was having more fun than you.

  If only it were that simple. In Gayle’s book there is a rather sad admission nestled between the bravado. ‘Personally, I can maybe count the loyal people on one hand. One hand. And not even five fingers. That’s how it is.’

  The freelance cricketer’s lifestyle more closely resembled an itinerant film star, forever chasing their next gig, than the traditional sportsman, with their firm attachment to a specific team and place. Dwayne Bravo, Gayle’s close friend and another pioneering freelance cricketer, explained: ‘I am an individual who plays a team sport, who travels and plays with teams around the world.’

  The T20 franchise circuit turned cricket from a team game played by individuals into an individual pursuit. Franchise cricketers are coming to resemble tennis players – they are effectively the chief executive of their own company, responsible for hiring and firing coaches and physios. While freelance players are generally able to make some use of the training facilities at their local first-class teams, they lack permanent access to coaches and trainers. Instead, they must hire their own private coaches and trainers to help maintain their standards – another unwanted stress upon their salaries, meaning that freelance players outside the elite cannot always afford them. And teams are often resentful of players bringing in their own coaches during tournaments, fearing that it will undermine those employed by the side. ‘Tennis players are allowed to travel with their own staff – I am not,’ said Bravo.

  From 2012, Bravo enlisted Zephyrinus Nicholas, a strength and conditioning coach and another freelancer, as his personal trainer, and paid Nicholas for his time out of his own salary. As Trinbago Knight Riders (TKR) captain, Bravo insisted that Nicholas join the coaching staff during the tournament itself. Nicholas sometimes travelled to other competitions too, and would spend the first week of this year’s IPL with Bravo, setting out his personal programme for the tournament. ‘I can’t fly with him everywhere I go,’ Bravo said. ‘But when I’m home and off season I have my personal team that I work with.’

  Whenever Bravo returned from a competition, he returned to Nicholas’s private clinic. Nicholas evaluated his physical condition, and puts in place a new gym workout programme designed both to help him recover from his last tournament and prepare for the next one.

  ‘It’s all based on what he need[s] at that moment; sometimes it’s strictly rehab,’ Nicholas explained. ‘If he has any injury, he will do therapy then we will do some work on the other part of the body not injured . . . We have a template we work from which includes squats, lunge, hinge, rotation, core, pull and press both vertically and horizontally. Because of his training age he is aware of his body.’ This, perhaps, is the logical culmination of the age of franchise cricket: players getting their own private support teams, who will know them far better than the coaching staff during a six-week tournament ever can.

  And yet this time is still some way off, so closely do franchises maintain control over players during tournaments. A sportsman tied to one team benefits from interests being aligned; an injury will be equally disadvantageous to both parties. But for an itinerant freelance player, the incentives for player and team are different. Now it is in a team’s interests to pressurise a player
to get an injection to get through one more game – but doing so may put the player at risk of injuring themselves, and so having to withdraw from future franchise contracts with other teams. ‘Understandably the team wants its pound of flesh from the player,’ said Tony Irish, the executive chairman of The Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations (FICA), the global cricketers’ union.

  A Netflix documentary following the Mumbai Indians in the 2018 IPL provided a glimpse of the demands placed on players by teams. After sustaining a wrist injury while fielding in a match the West Indian batsman Evin Lewis missed the next match and was encouraged to have an injection by the team doctor with a view to him returning for the following fixture. But Lewis was clearly not comfortable when batting in the nets and was hesitant to commit fully to his shots. ‘You always take a risk when you play on an injury because sometimes, if the injury gets worse, you can be out for months, so you think about your career,’ he explained.

  In an awkward net session on the eve of the match Lewis appeared to be in some discomfort but Mahela Jayawardene, Mumbai Indians’ head coach, was clearly desperate for Lewis to play. With Mumbai struggling in the league, he was under pressure to deliver results.

  ‘I know it is a little bit of pain but you probably have to play with a little bit of pain,’ Jayawardene told Lewis, who was visibly disgruntled. ‘The way you are batting right now it’s as if you don’t want to be out there. So that can’t happen in the middle if you go out there tomorrow. If the pain is less you should be able to play but your mind has to be right.’

  ‘I can’t bat with this,’ said Lewis to Jayawardene, gesturing to his wrist.

  ‘This is the best tournament in the world. These guys are going to come hard at you. If you are not prepared to change and evolve you will get found out and then you are just going to be another batsman,’ Jayawardene responded. ‘Go in again,’ he said – nodding towards the nets. ‘Grind deep and have a good six to eight balls and see what happens.’

  Lewis played the next day and struggled for timing and fluency before being dismissed for a 13-ball ten. ‘There is something wrong with his mental state,’ remarked Simon Doull on commentary as Lewis trudged back towards the dugout.

  Franchises can also be suspicious of freelance coaches, fearing they will undermine the coaching that the team are doing. Flying in a freelance coach – even if they could afford to do so – might be resented, or even outright barred; coaches, themselves insecure, may see their use during tournaments as a threat, or an indictment of their own coaching ability.

  ‘When the private coach loses access then they get replaced with a coach that has an idea of how your player should play,’ said Trent Woodhill, a leading T20 batting coach. ‘Rarely is there any open two-way communication between coaches.’ Instead, players are compelled to build a relationship from scratch with coaches every time they represent a new team. Sometimes, a player’s freelance coach works for a rival during a tournament – Woodhill, Shane Watson’s batting coach, worked for sides playing against Watson during the Big Bash and IPL.

  Yet perhaps the freelancer’s greatest challenge of all was staving off the loneliness that a life in hotel rooms and airport departure lounges can bring. Even the swankiest hotel can be like ‘a mini-prison,’ Gayle once told The Guardian. ‘You’re locked away in your room. You just see the ceiling and the TV. You get lonely sometimes.’

  Gayle’s singular achievement was to defy these multifarious challenges to establish himself as the Bradman of the first years of T20, a cricketer who has towered above his age. Such figures are often thought of as harbingers for the generation of athletes to follow. Yet while Gayle’s propensity to hit sixes, and reliance upon domestic cricket for his income, is of the cricket of tomorrow, in other ways he is best-conceived as a sporting giant of his own time.

  FOUR

  UP IS DOWN

  ‘In first-class cricket bowlers need to be consistently consistent; but in T20 bowlers need to be consistently inconsistent’

  Australian bowler A.J. Tye

  Stuart Broad bowled the ball upon which his great career would be founded. Angling across the left-hander from over the wicket, it pitched on a good length on and around middle stump. In Test cricket, where Broad would go on to take more than 450 wickets for England, it would have been an excellent delivery, invariably met with a respectful defensive shot. But this was a T20 international and everything was different.

  The batsman, Yuvraj Singh, seized on the fraction of length offered by Broad, opening his front foot up on to the leg side in preparation to attack. In Test cricket the batsman throwing his hands at a full ball such as this one would be fraught with risk. But – unlike in Test cricket – the white ball used in T20 very rarely swung and pitches were notoriously flat, providing very little seam movement. And, unlike in Test cricket, there was not a phalanx of slips waiting to pounce.

  This particular pitch, for the 21st match of the inaugural T20 World Cup, was specifically prepared to produce copious runs.

  With two overs left in the first innings, India were well set at 171 for 3 to explode towards the finish. With Yuvraj already having cleared his front leg, he knew that at this point in the innings there would be very little lateral movement to challenge his edge. So in a blur of willow he threw his hands through the line of the ball with almighty force. The ball met the middle of the bat and soared over the midwicket boundary for six. The graphic on the broadcast showed that the shot had travelled 111 metres – the biggest six of the tournament so far.

  The next ball was on a similar length, though this time it was a fraction too straight, meaning there was no need for Yuvraj to clear his front leg. Instead he just planted his front foot and flicked the ball over the boundary, helping it on its way for six more runs with effortless timing.

  Broad would go on to become England’s second highest wicket-taker ever in Test cricket. Over more than a decade he developed a mastery of accuracy and control. With a smooth, repeatable bowling action Broad could hammer away on a good line and length ball after ball after ball. In Test cricket, where the batsmen were defending significantly more often, Broad was almost a consummate seam bowler. Yet, in T20s, consistency was transformed from a strength to a weakness. Broad’s first two deliveries were fractionally too full and too straight – but Yuvraj knew where Broad was going to bowl. On a good length and on a tight line was where Broad always bowled.

  In a historic moment, Yuvraj would go on to hit all six balls in Broad’s over for six, only the third time in any format of the game that such a feat had been achieved. All but one of the six sixes came from good or full length deliveries; the other was an egregious full toss as Broad wilted. Yuvraj reached his fifty off just 12 balls – a record that had not been surpassed by the end of the 2019 IPL. Yuvraj’s evisceration of Broad in Durban was in stark contrast with the longer formats of the game, where Broad dismissed Yuvraj four times at an average of 31 runs per wicket.

  Broad’s mauling at the hands of Yuvraj in that World Cup match carried an essential lesson: effectiveness in longer forms of cricket counted for nothing in the helter-skelter environment of T20. If anything, the skills that elevated bowlers to be so dominant in Test cricket – consistency, control and predictability – were exactly the skills that would be punished in the shortest format.

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  It has often been said of Tests and T20 that they produce such starkly different spectacles that they may as well be different sports entirely. While ostensibly they were the same game, played by 11 players, with two sets of stumps and a 22-yard pitch, T20 inverted the framework of the sport.

  Just as T20 triggered a defining shift in the nature of batting, causing the batsman to prioritise attack over defence, it had the opposite effect for the bowler and fielders. ‘It’s becoming a little bit like baseball,’ said the batting coach Trent Woodhill who worked in the IPL and BBL. ‘The fielding team is seen as the defence and the batting team is seen as the offence.’ This basic
but fundamental change totally transformed bowling. And so the essence of what constituted a good ball was altered.

  In first-class cricket, when the batsmen were defending the large majority of the time, a good ball was largely universal. This would normally be on a length that was full enough to pull the batsman on to the front foot but not so full that the ball was a half-volley.

  ‘Test cricket is the war of attrition. There’s a spot on the pitch six to eight feet in front of the batsman, the size of a tea towel,’ explained Jason Gillespie, who took 259 Test wickets and then won the Big Bash as the Adelaide Strikers’ head coach. ‘Whoever owns that spot is winning the game.’

  Occasionally pace bowlers would mix things up with bouncers or fuller, wider tempters or try more unconventional plans to dominate batsmen. But, for all bowlers in first-class cricket, the notion of what a good line and length were was almost universal, and so was the sense that they should try to hit this spot time and again.

  In T20, this basic balance between the attacking bowler and the defensive batsman was inverted. And so bowling was turned on its head. Now predictability was an impediment, and unpredictability a boon – especially as batsmen in T20 were more individualistic, meaning that a good ball to one player could be terrible to another.

  ‘Back when we played we placed a lot of effort on consistency and of grouping of deliveries, particularly in Test matches,’ said Ian Bishop, a leading fast bowler in the 1990s for the West Indies who has since commentated on T20 around the world. ‘Now in T20, while consistency of length is relevant in some stages, it has become less relevant and it is almost second-guessing a batsman and making a batsman guess every two deliveries. There is more pressure being placed on reading the strength of the batsman and then hiding the delivery from that strength.’