Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  Jeremy Snape, an off-spinner from Leicestershire, played an integral role in twin T20 Cup wins in 2004 and 2006 and appeared in the first T20 World Cup. Snape’s suitability to the format, although rooted in his skills, was partly a consequence of how quickly and effectively he understood the changed nature of bowling. ‘My best ball is not what I was classically trained as,’ he recalled of his approach. ‘My best ball is the opposite of what the batsman is expecting or what the batsman wants, so that’s a change in pace, it is balls under their feet. It is a ball wide of their stance. It is different variations depending on the batsman’s skills and strengths.’

  Bishop believed that the multifarious demands on bowlers in T20 had led to an evolution of skills. ‘The chess match now is so much harder than when we played. I have great admiration for the guys that do it well.’

  This change in mindset had a transformative effect on how to measure success and failure of deliveries. ‘The paradox of T20 bowling is when you’re young you’re supposed to bowl a wicket-taking ball or a dot ball. But in T20 you need to educate yourself that you want to give away a single. That is a strange thing,’ said Snape. ‘So bowling a low full toss on leg stump because you’ve got two men back protecting that area actually becomes a reasonably safe option because they rotate the strike, the hitter gets down to the non-striker’s end and then you get the chance to apply pressure through dot balls on the new batsman that has come in.’

  The extent of the change that this shift in focus demanded was well illustrated by the Indian off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin in a famous interview with ESPNcricinfo in 2016. ‘I basically think that six well-constructed bad balls could be the way to go forward in T20 cricket,’ he said. This was a remarkable revelation from a bowler regarded as a deep thinker about the game. What he was referring to was the value in remaining unpredictable and of bowling balls that surprise the batsman, especially with a field set for those deliveries. In Test cricket such balls might be considered ‘bad’ but in T20 if they forced a batsman to settle for a single then they represented a win for the bowler.

  The Australian bowler A.J. Tye, one of the world’s foremost slower ball bowlers since 2015, neatly encapsulated how T20 changed bowling. ‘In first-class cricket bowlers need to be consistently consistent; but in T20 bowlers need to be consistently inconsistent.’

  In this respect not only did the batting team and bowling team in T20 become like the batting and the pitching team in baseball in that they shared similar aims, their practitioners became more like one another too.

  As well as batsmen and coaches taking learnings from baseball hitters, so too did bowlers from pitchers. The career of English bowler Benny Howell was transformed after he attended a Major League Baseball game. Howell became fascinated with the battle between the pitcher and the hitter and taught himself the knuckleball using videos of baseball pitchers on YouTube. He was one of a generation of T20 bowlers who became almost entirely concerned with being unpredictable and remaining ahead of the game. These bowlers were obsessed by variation and disguise and were driven by a desire to be as hard to hit as possible.

  It wasn’t that bowlers were uninterested in taking wickets but they recognised that the balls that took the most wickets – very full or very short lengths – were often the most expensive. By concentrating largely on saving runs bowlers could force the batsmen into mistakes through a build-up of pressure. ‘The best way to stop runs is to keep taking wickets but if you stop runs then the batsmen can panic and do something reckless and you might end up with a wicket,’ explained Tye. ‘It’s almost like being an attacking bowler by being defensive.’

  What speeds and lengths fast bowlers adopted were largely influenced by the stage of the innings in which they bowled. The earlier a wicket was taken, the more valuable it was to the fielding team. Analysis by CricViz showed that a wicket taken in the first over of the innings typically reduced the total of the batting team by 12 runs but a wicket taken in the last over of the innings only knocked around two runs off their total. Generally this process meant bowlers became increasingly defensive throughout the innings.

  The first six Powerplay overs were the only period when consistency of line and length still had some merit. In this period when the ball was hard and new, fast bowlers were tasked with bowling accurate lines and lengths and looking to find any swing in the air or seam off the pitch. With only two fielders permitted outside the circle the batsmen were forced to pierce the infield with classical cricket shots. When the fielding restrictions were lifted and the ball got older, batsmen became increasingly aggressive and fast bowlers were forced to become ever more unpredictable, mixing their lengths and speeds up more often to make life increasingly difficult for the batsmen. By the time the death over phase came around and the batsmen were attacking without care, the emphasis was entirely on unpredictability, with bowlers mixing their lengths regularly from yorkers to bouncers to in between and their speeds from quicker balls to slower balls and back again.

  ‘In the Powerplay [the batsmen] are trying to pierce the field with proper cricket shots but in the middle [and death] overs they are trying to hit you 50 rows back into the crowd because if they do mishit it there’s a good chance they’ll get caught with five fielders out,’ said Tye. ‘It is massively different between a Powerplay bowler and someone who bowls through the middle and at the death.’

  While all bowlers adopted different tactics and methods there were two clear trends that could be discerned in T20 bowling compared to longer formats. Pace bowlers delivered far more of their deliveries on what was considered to be a ‘good’ length and bowled an appreciably higher proportion of slower balls, opting for variation over consistency.

  The change in spin bowling was slightly different but even more profound. T20 spin bowling was also defined by inconsistency and unpredictability but a more general pattern could be identified among most spinners that saw them bowl flatter, faster and shorter overall. They generally spun the ball less but those that could turn it both ways did so more often.

  This specific evolution was made necessary because against fuller lengths batsmen could prop on to the front foot and swing through the line of the ball – a so-called ‘step and hit’. Instead, the combination of a flatter trajectory, shorter length and faster speed made it harder for the batsmen to get under the ball and forced them on to the back foot. Occasionally a batsman might have been able to play the pull shot, which involved swinging from low to high, but the pace on the ball meant this was a difficult shot to play, requiring nimble footwork from the batsmen to get back in position and have time to play the shot. Instead batsmen often had to settle for cutting the ball out on the off side or punching it down the ground. These two shots were very difficult to hit for boundaries, especially sixes, and normally only brought a single – a clear win for the bowler.

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  Not only did T20 change the art of bowling but it changed the bowlers who had the most success. In both Tests and ODIs pace bowlers were notably more successful than spin bowlers, returning lower averages. Yet in T20 it was spinners who averaged less.

  Pace and Spin Bowling Averages by Format

  Format

  Pace Bowlers

  Spin Bowlers

  Test

  30.44

  32.80

  ODI

  31.05

  35.09

  T20

  25.31

  24.48

  It was for the very reasons that pace bowlers found T20 more difficult that spin bowlers were so effective: speed and movement. The speed that spinners bowled at – around 50 to 70 mph – was significantly slower than the speed of fast bowlers who operated above 60 mph and as high as 95 mph. These slower speeds made spinners harder to hit.

  ‘The batsmen have to create pace on to the ball,’ explained the spin bowling coach Carl Crowe who worked in leagues around the world and was a mentor to T20’s leading spin wicket-taker Sunil Narine. ‘If you’re defending against seamers
, probably with the pace you’re still scoring runs, but with the spinners, obviously you’re not.’

  It seemed as if the faster it was bowled, the further it went. In T20 cricket spinners had an economy rate of 7.12 runs per over while quicks went at 7.84 runs per over. Across an entire innings that equated to a difference of 15 runs.

  The lack of pace on the ball made it easier for spin bowlers to lock down areas of the field as well. Just 24% of runs off spin bowlers were scored behind square compared to 39% for pace bowlers, whose speed opened up scoring areas behind the batsman that were harder to access against spin. Ramp and scoop shots were extremely useful shots against pace bowlers – enabling the batsmen to manoeuvre the field by harnessing the pace on the ball. These shots were essentially useless against spin with batsmen unable to generate enough power. This made setting fields for spinners easier than against quicks who had more boundary areas to defend.

  ‘Spinners take away the easy hitting option,’ explained the New Zealand off-spinner Jeetan Patel. ‘With a seamer if you’re too full you can go over the top, and if you’re too short you can be hit square of the wicket so you can’t cover all bases. With spin you can cover more of the hitting areas.’

  Movement – the ability to spin the ball – was another trait which gave spinners an advantage over pace bowlers. For fast bowlers the ability to move the ball through swing in the air or seam off the pitch, although a skill, was one largely dependent on the type of ball and the nature of the pitch. Pace bowlers could control the direction of the swing – different grips were required for inswing and outswing – but not the direction of seam movement, which was essentially random and was made difficult by the nature of pitches prepared for T20.

  For spinners, the motion of imparting spin on the ball caused drift through the air and deviation off the pitch – to a far greater degree than that managed by the quicks and with far greater consistency. Spinners were less reliant on conditions: although some pitches spun more than others, spinners could always extract some movement.

  Moving the ball off the straight complicated the process of attacking batting, with the batsmen looking to swing hard and fast through their predicted line of the ball. Once the ball started to move laterally, attacking strokes became harder to execute.

  That spinners could control the spin and different types of spinners turned the ball in different ways meant that their captains could choose which batsmen to deploy them against. Batsmen generally preferred the ball spinning into them – towards the arc of their bat swing – rather than away from them. Captains could engineer these basic-level match-ups so that leg-spinners and left-arm orthodox spinners generally bowled to right-handers and that off-spinners and left-arm unorthodox spinners bowled to left-handers.

  As analytics within the sport evolved, these match-ups became more specific with fielding captains targeting or avoiding certain batsmen with certain types of bowlers based on their career record against that specific bowler type, rather than just their batting hand. For example, the left-handed New Zealand batsman Colin Munro – who would be expected to struggle against the ball spinning away from him and favour the ball spinning into him – scored at a strike rate of 139 against off spin which turned the ball away, but struggled against leg spin – which turned the ball in – scoring at a strike rate of 121. Match-ups with certain types of pace bowlers did exist – for instance the Australian Ben Dunk averaged 25 against right-arm pace and just 13 against left-arm pace – but these clear gulfs were rarer than against spin. Spin bowling, with its four different techniques and different types of spin, was like a key that could unlock all but the very best batsmen.

  The need for tactical precision and the lack of time to react created a more interventionist style of coaching, almost akin to football. ‘I get involved from the sidelines,’ explained Ricky Ponting who won the IPL as head coach at Mumbai Indians before moving to Delhi in 2018. ‘If you can see a bowling change is about to happen, and it’s not something that we’ve talked about or if we feel it’s the wrong match-up, we’ll try and influence where we can.’

  Such a coaching style was more necessary when the captain was inexperienced, as was the case at Delhi where 24-year-old Shreyas Iyer led the team to third place.

  ‘You could map it to the over if you wanted to,’ said Ponting. ‘As a coach you know, deep down in your heart of hearts, you have to give all the information because if you don’t you feel like you’re not doing the right thing by the team. We’ve got a fairly young captain and try to give him as much information as we think is right.

  ‘Every single ball that’s bowled in a T20 game is almost like a set play – you’re trying to come up with the right match-ups. When you’re in the field you want to try and come up with the right match-up bowling-wise to the batsman at the crease. If you can try and manipulate when you’re batting what the bowling team can do as well with the way that you stack your batting line-up – little things like that can go a long way to winning you a game as well. Our planning is pretty meticulous and so far the boys have bought into that – and they do a lot of their own individual planning stuff as well.’

  Ponting, who had once declared that T20 was ‘difficult to play seriously’, came to believe that strategy was ‘absolutely’ more important in T20 than in Test cricket. ‘We make sure that when we go into each game that there’s nothing that should happen in the game that should take us by surprise.’

  Gary Kirsten – who played 101 Tests for South Africa before coaching T20 teams around the world – shared a similar view to Ponting. ‘It’s very detailed, T20 cricket – much more detailed than Test cricket,’ he said on The Real Science of Sport podcast. This was an illuminating comment from someone who had experienced both formats close up. ‘Test match cricket is the simplest form of the game,’ he went on to say. ‘You don’t actually need that many plans. You are not under pressure as a batsman; you can have a couple of bad overs and you are under no pressure to score runs, whereas T20 cricket is on your case ball by ball.’

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  Batsmen were the headline stars of T20. The format was, after all, designed partly so that they could hit more boundaries, score faster and post bigger totals.

  Perhaps most ominously for bowlers, batsmen have an inherent physiological advantage, which they are only properly exploring now, in the uber-professional age. The theory here is very simple: that, because of the strain that bowling puts upon the body, bowlers can only do so much.

  ‘Bowlers will have limited capacity to practise, whereas batsmen can practise almost as much as they like,’ explained Timothy Olds from the School of Health Sciences at the University of South Australia. ‘You can’t have your bowlers practising 300 yorkers, but in theory your batters could practise hitting 300 yorkers,’ said Gillespie.

  ‘Batting has really advanced far ahead of bowling,’ reflected John Buchanan, the former Australia and Kolkata Knight Riders coach. ‘When batters are preparing for a game they’ll go to the nets and then the bowlers will go to them for a period of time. Then the bowlers stop. With sports science dominating decision-making around workloads bowlers really don’t spend a lot of time training these days, particularly in T20.

  ‘Whereas batters spend a lot of time playing because sports science is not so concerned about their workload, so batters then will move from the nets and say to the coach they need another half hour to work in the nets on specific skills. And then if they’re still not happy, and the coach has had enough – they’ll go to the bowling machine. And so the batter’s skill levels on all the types of deliveries that a bowler might be able to deliver in a game are so far advanced of the bowlers.’

  ‘Bowlers need to train more,’ Buchanan remarked. ‘They need to have the confidence when they get up to the top of their mark that they have got four or five different deliveries – an Andrew Tye might have eight or nine – that they can call on at any time. At the moment they’re just not training enough to be able to land those variations accur
ately enough, so batters take advantage of that.’

  The divide between batting and bowling was exacerbated by T20 encouraging batsmen to attack like never before. The first era of the T20 format was marked by a steady, albeit not spectacular, increase in scoring rates.

  T20 provided an immense test, but also a great opportunity, for bowlers. ‘Sixty-yard boundaries with guys teeing off from ball one. It’s an unbelievable challenge,’ remarked England’s ODI and T20 captain Eoin Morgan. ‘But also it presents a huge opportunity for somebody to be really, really good and make a good living and life around it.’ The higher scores got and the better batsmen got, the more valuable bowlers who could restrict and dismiss them became.

  ‘Batsmen are important – of course they are – but I think bowlers are hugely underestimated in T20 cricket,’ said Tom Moody, the head coach of Sunrisers Hyderabad from 2013 to 2019. ‘Generally the most successful teams are [the ones] that have the ability to bowl their 120 balls most effectively, with the right balance of attackers and defenders within that bowling core.’

  The most successful teams in the first era of T20 cricket were those who had strong bowling attacks: Hampshire in England, Kolkata Knight Riders and Sunrisers Hyderabad in the IPL, Peshawar Zalmi in the Pakistan Super League (PSL) and Perth Scorchers in the BBL.

  ‘I’m always a big believer that bowlers win you games in all formats,’ said Adam Voges, captain of Perth Scorchers during their years of dominance in the BBL when they reached seven consecutive semi-finals, three times going on to win. ‘We’ve always had a really strong bowling group. That is what our success has been built around. We haven’t always scored 180 or 200 runs in a game, but we’re the group that can defend 130 or 140 with the bowlers that we’ve got.’