Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  The impact of such audacity has been particularly stunning against yorkers, the most effective delivery for seamers at the end of an innings. In ODIs and T20s Buttler scores at a strike rate of 130 against yorkers; well above the global average of 94.

  ‘The big thing about those shots is trying to pick up a length as quickly as you can,’ said Buttler. ‘So when you are batting your best the biggest thing I notice is that in the first yard of the release I feel like I’m picking up the length better.’

  Buttler gave great thought to combating the yorker – knowing that, if he does so, it can give the bowler nowhere to go. As well as hanging back in his crease – thereby turning a yorker into a half-volley, which he can club away reliably – Buttler tweaks his grip when he expects the bowler to revert to a yorker. ‘If someone is bowling yorkers really well I’ll then think about, ‘Okay, well he’s getting them in, I will change my grip because that may help me slice a yorker out or something like that.’ Ball by ball I’m quite happy to play around with that.’

  At his best, Buttler is like a puppetmaster, manipulating the field and then hitting the ball into gaps he has created earlier in his innings. His best innings fuse dazzling skill with meticulous planning.

  ‘Having options both in front and behind the wicket allows you to feel like you’ve got options and put some bowlers under pressure to set a field,’ he explained. Careful preparation, and studying video footage and data analysis of the opposition bowlers, liberates Buttler to be spontaneous in high-octane situations. ‘I like to know what variations they’ve got, what ball they go to under pressure, what ball they follow up a boundary with.

  ‘Those kind of statistics are really good but you don’t get too caught up in them – you’ve still got to be out in the middle reacting to what happens. Statistics are an average of what’s happened – so on any given day a certain delivery they might bowl differently because of the conditions. So as much information as you can get is good but then to use it in the right way and still be trusting your instincts and reacting to whatever is going on in the game at that certain time.’

  The research by scientists Michael F. Land and Peter McLeod highlighted how little time batsmen have to adjust to the ball. These margins are even smaller when playing shots like the ramp, which involves moving the entire body around. Buttler is one of the most adept in the world at playing a ramp shot – or even a reverse ramp, switching his hands to hit the ball as if he were a left-hander. ‘Shots like the ramp shot are 100% premeditated but you still adjust throughout the shot.

  ‘That’s when you improvise and use your natural talent and instinct to relax. Other times you might be targeting certain areas of the ground but you’re still then trying to be more reactive to what comes down and not put all your eggs in one basket of this is the exact shot I’m going to play to this ball. Because, as much as you can, I think now in T20, like you would do in the longer formats, you practise certain shots and try and be in a clear state of mind and react to what comes down.’

  Rather than seeing it as an indulgence, Buttler embraces the ramp as a pragmatic option. ‘There’s never a fielder behind the wicketkeeper so it just made sense to me that between fine leg and third man is one of the biggest gaps in the field, so why not try and utilise it? And it just developed over time.’

  The first time that Buttler remembers playing a ramp in a professional game was against Sussex at Hove against the medium pace of Robin Martin-Jenkins. Buttler was 19, and playing only his second professional T20 match.

  ‘I felt like he brought fine leg up but I still felt he was going to bowl into the wicket. So to go down and do it wouldn’t work. To stay up – that’s how the thought process went. I wasn’t really brave enough to keep my head in the way either so it just developed from there.’ Now, Buttler has a range of ramp shots, each subtly different from the last, so that he can exploit any vacancy in the field.

  But as Buttler matured he realised that, sometimes, he was best advised to leave the ramp alone completely and instead hit the ball straight, with the full face of the bat. ‘Some days you just get a feel of something’s working, some days it just feels a bit off.’ His 150 in an ODI against the West Indies in 2019 – the second-fastest 150 in ODI history, after one from de Villiers four years earlier – contained only two ramp shots.

  The brutality of his strokes is underpinned by timing more than raw power. Both players used bats that weighed no more than average – Buttler’s bat weighed 2lb 9½oz, de Villiers’ was 2lb 8oz – to make his contact as smooth as possible.

  He honed a slightly idiosyncratic method of hitting sixes: by hitting the ball unusually flat and low, which gives a better chance of making a clean connection with the ball. ‘Sometimes on those slower wickets if you’re looking to hit up that would actually end up going higher than I wanted to and then my weight would be back. So the actual mindset of hitting a ball flat means I have to come back into the ball and actually even on slower wickets it might end up going a bit higher anyway. So I’d rather that way than it goes straight up.’

  Buttler reached this stage by focusing on what a shot achieves, not on how it looks. ‘My way of practice is to think of the outcome first and then work back from that. So if I want to hit the ball flat, pretty naturally your body gets into position. As opposed to “right, I’m going to get my weight forward”.’

  Like de Villiers, a fundamental simplicity underpinned the range of Buttler’s batting. ‘I actually like to nail the really basic stuff as well, so I feel like if I’m hitting on drives I’ll just get someone to throw from the hand if possible. For me to play that shot I have to be getting in the best positions I can that suit my game.’

  In the same way as de Villiers, Buttler has at times suffered from his adaptability, for it means that he has been shuffled around the order to cover up his team’s failings, rather than be empowered to bat where it suited him best. Up until the 2018 IPL Buttler was used largely in the middle order, where he averaged 27 at a strike rate of 141. On the rare occasions when he opened the batting he was even more effective, increasing his average to 35 and strike rate to 147.

  On 2 May 2018, Buttler arrived in Delhi for an IPL match with Rajasthan Royals. He had been playing in the middle order, and only contributing middling returns. Then, it rained. In their desperation at requiring 151 from only 12 overs, Rajasthan elevated Buttler to open; he promptly smote 67 from 26 balls. So began a record-equalling run of five consecutive fifties in the IPL, which ended with 95 not out and 94 not out: on both occasions, Buttler hit the winning runs in triumphant run chases.

  Here he was enacting the lessons he had learned when given his first proper run opening in T20 the previous IPL season, with Mumbai Indians. ‘That was a big moment for me actually – opening the batting for Mumbai. It went okay. It could have gone really well. But having the confidence of Mahela saying I think you’ll be a really good opener – that was good. It actually gave me a new lease of life; being 27 and learning a new position, actually it was really invigorating,’ he recalled. ‘The exciting bit for me was knowing that I’d played a lot of middle order cricket and batting at the end. If I could marry up the two – the Powerplay and the end – it could have really good effects.’

  The ambiguity over where best to bat Buttler in T20 was no more. He had only opened once for England before 2018, making 73 not out from 49 balls, but was now entrusted to the role permanently, making 60s in his first two innings as full-time international opener. All told he made 13 fifties in 28 innings as opener from the start of the 2018 IPL to the end of the 2019 season.

  It all added to the sense of a cricketer whose clean hitting, range of shots and sheer chutzpah channelled the spirit of A.B. ‘Buttler is an incredible prototype of a T20 cricketer,’ said John Buchanan, the former Australia coach. In 2018, Buttler scored 1,119 runs, averaging more than 60 and scoring at an astonishing strike rate of 165.

  Alfonso Thomas, who played with Buttler at Somerset, drew an unprompted com
parison between his former teammate and de Villiers. ‘I had the privilege of playing at the Titans in South Africa when de Villiers came into the side and A.B. had a very strong belief which was not arrogance at all – but he knew where he was going and I saw that same characteristic in Jos when I first came across him,’ remembered Thomas. ‘People laughed at me when I said this kid could be as good as de Villiers. He was fantastic. People said ‘no chance’ but look now – he’s not far off.’

  As he reaffirmed in the 2019 World Cup, Buttler is an extraordinary cricketer in an extraordinary phase, not just elevating his own game, but the art of batting itself. Like de Villiers, he approached batting as if he were an explorer trying to uncover hidden lands.

  ‘T20 skills, with the invention of the game and natural evolution of people trying to improve – people are just getting better and better at these things and more consistent,’ Buttler said. The world he embodies, and is shaping, is best summarised by one shift. Once, ‘the practice would have been forward defence all the time. Now, people are practising hitting sixes all the time.’

  SEVEN

  THE IMPOSSIBLE JOB

  ‘You could bowl six good balls and go for six boundaries. That’s how much it has changed’

  Jade Dernbach

  Jade Dernbach had just bowled the over from hell: two no-balls, one wide, nine balls and 26 runs. ‘I still remember it like it was yesterday,’ he recalled more than five years later of a night that had been burned into his memory. ‘A.B. de Villiers single-handedly ended my international career.’

  The date was 29 March 2014 and the venue was Chittagong, a major port city nestled in the Bay of Bengal in south-eastern Bangladesh. England were playing South Africa in a must-win match in the T20 World Cup.

  ‘The conditions out there were as tough as I’ve ever had. The dew factor, how hot it was, the humidity. Everything that I had never faced back in England.

  ‘It was honestly like bowling with a bar of soap. In order to bowl a yorker you’ve got to have full confidence that you can just chuck it up there because one mistake, you get your warning and you’re taken out of the attack. Then you throw into the mix the batsman is A.B. de Villiers who is probably the world’s greatest T20 batsman, plus I wasn’t in great form. It was a perfect storm.’

  After 17 overs of South Africa’s innings they had 141 runs on the board and England were hopeful of restricting them to a manageable run chase on a good batting pitch. It was then time for Dernbach to assume his designated job as death bowler and close out the innings.

  This was a role that Dernbach was familiar with. The majority of his overs in T20 were bowled either in the Powerplay or at the death – the two phases of the innings where the batsmen attacked hardest and scoring rates were highest. Only fourteen bowlers in T20 history bowled a greater proportion of their overs at either end of the innings than Dernbach’s 87%.

  The intensity of the role forced bowlers to take risks in order to survive. Dernbach had been selected for the role because he was prepared to take those risks and because he was good at taking them: his slower balls, yorkers and decent pace were ideally suited to countering marauding batsmen. Dernbach was prepared to try, and able to execute, skills that very few bowlers in the world – and certainly none in England – could.

  The nature of this role was highly volatile. T20 was designed to produce close finishes and because Dernbach would invariably bowl at the death he was often bowling when the match was seemingly won or lost, even if events earlier in the day were just as significant. Dernbach was either the hero or the villain, and in a weak England team it was often the latter. Dernbach accepted as much. But this time was different.

  ‘I remember thinking at that time – and it’s not been often that it’s happened in my career – I was running up to bowl and I felt like there is nothing I can do to stop this guy. It was ridiculous.’

  ‘Some of the shots . . . I’d bring third man up and he reverse swept me. I dropped everyone back leg side and he got back and swept me over short fine leg. I missed my length and he banged me back over my head. Everywhere I seemed to put the ball it was disappearing.’

  Not only was Dernbach’s bowling – littered with trick balls – flashy, but his appearance was as well. With slicked back hair, earrings, tattoos and a penchant for sledging batsmen, Dernbach was an ostentatious cricketer. The combination of his role at the death, the high-risk nature of his bowling and his flamboyant guise made him a popular target for criticism.

  Bowling in T20 was exceptionally difficult, bowling pace in T20 was even harder and bowling pace at the death was as hard as it got. But if this wasn’t enough, life was only made more complicated by the intense scrutiny of the media and wider public – something Dernbach found himself regularly subjected to.

  As de Villiers tore into Dernbach, shredding England’s World Cup hopes, social media was ablaze. ‘Imagine if Dernbach spent less time in the tattoo parlour and more time practising in the nets. He’d still be shit but maybe less so’, tweeted one user. ‘Hopefully that is the last we see of Jade Dernbach in an England cricket shirt – again he turns a promising position into likely defeat’, fumed another. ‘So Jade Dernbach’s slower ball bouncer/full toss/yorker tactics help yet again. Surely time to stop the experiment and pick a bowler?’ raged a fan.

  Dernbach’s over cost 26 runs and turned the match on its head, shifting the momentum irrevocably in South Africa’s favour. From that point the match spiralled out of control. Fifty-five runs came from the final three overs and South Africa finished with a final score of 196 – a total which proved too many for England who were eliminated from the tournament with the finger of blame pointed at Dernbach.

  ‘It almost looked like to everyone else that it was a complete and utter capitulation,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to really put into words. To feel completely helpless out on that stage at a World Cup and in front of all these people but you feel completely helpless because someone is that good. It’s quite a tough place.’

  ‘That one over by Dernbach is the reason England lost the game. England fans must have hard time seeing Dernbach in their team #EngvSA #wt20’, tweeted one man after the match. ‘The reason England lost in the Cricket today in 2 words, Jade Dernbach! That guy is a fkn club cricketer at best’, ranted another.

  ‘I first started playing for England when Twitter was just coming to the forefront and it was great because I was doing well,’ recalled Dernbach. ‘You’re getting a load of followers, people are sending you a load of love on there and you think this is a great platform and you’re loving this.

  ‘Then, when stuff wasn’t going so well and you still find yourself there because it was new and I searched through looking for something positive to pick you up . . . You think let’s find a bit of love out there. And inevitably there isn’t. You’re just getting completely slated. It felt relentless.

  ‘Stuff on social media started escalating and getting worse and worse and worse. After that World Cup defeat I remember the worst message received was after that MH370 flight went down and someone sent me a message saying I wish you were on that flight.

  ‘This is a game of cricket where someone has been better than you – nobody deserves to be sent that. And I remember coming home and thinking I don’t want to leave my house. It was that bad. I didn’t want to leave because any time you did you felt like people were looking at you and talking about you. That’s paranoia. Everybody has a bad day in their job but it is amplified at this level.’

  For Dernbach with England, that night in Chittagong was the end. He was dropped for the last match of the tournament – a dead rubber against the Netherlands two days later – and never played international cricket again. He bowed out of the game with the joint highest T20 international economy rate of all time – a reflection as much on when he bowled his overs as it was on his ability.

  ‘If you are going to play T20 and bowl in those situations you have got to accept that batters are so good that you will
get dealt with sometimes. That’s how good they are. So it is how you react to it. It’s about adjusting your mindset when it comes to bowling at those times.’

  In many ways, Dernbach embodied what it was to be a fast bowler in T20. For all his bag of tricks and willingness to bowl in the tough periods, his career was marked by the immensity of his task. Fast bowling in T20 was the impossible job.

  ‘It is a tough world out there for fast bowlers. But the thing you have got to remind yourself of is that people don’t pay to come and watch a bowling masterclass and them score 120 runs. That’s not what puts bums on seats. So we’ve got to understand that we are in the entertainment business after all.’

  It may have been an entertainment business and bowlers may well have been the support cast but that did not mean that they would not fight back. To try to keep pace with increasingly powerful and aggressive batsmen, bowlers had to continue to evolve and master a wide range of often contradictory skills: accuracy in the Powerplay, variation outside it; slower balls, yorkers and bouncers at the death. Even all that would rarely be enough.

  ‘Bowlers have had to accept that things are stacked up against you,’ Dernbach added, ‘but you have got to find a way. That’s the beauty of T20.’

  ***

  The role for which Dernbach became renowned – for better or for worse – was as a death bowler. But before he would assume those unenviable responsibilities at the end of the innings he would more often than not start a match by bowling two overs in the Powerplay.

  Bowling with the new ball in the Powerplay was unlike bowling in any other phase of a T20 innings. For the majority of the time in T20 the primary focus of the bowler was on run preservation rather than taking wickets. But for fast bowlers in the Powerplay both wickets and control were in demand. The death over phase may well have been more difficult, with the batsmen focused purely on hitting rather than having to protect their wicket, but at least then the objective was straightforward. In the Powerplay bowlers had to focus on competing demands – and do it while just two fielders were allowed outside the 30-yard circle. No other phase of the innings asked as much of them.