Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  Ultimately Chennai recognised that the impact of better ground fielding in the shortest format was normally very marginal. ‘We are well covered in other areas,’ said Dhoni in a post-match press conference during the 2019 season. ‘We will never be a great fielding side, but we can be a safe fielding side. We might bleed a few runs here and there, but as long as we use our experience, we’ll make it up with our batting and bowling.’

  Chennai’s faith in experience was rewarded with a third IPL title in 2018; Watson, approaching 37, scored a match-winning century in the final. CSK’s season was defined by winning tight matches – eight of their victories came in the last over or by a margin of less than ten runs – with their know-how under pressure considered decisive.

  ‘Experience matters under pressure,’ said Dravid. ‘The ability to handle India, the ability to handle everything that goes on around the IPL franchise and the pressure of it all.’

  The very next season Chennai – who had retained 22 players of their title-winning squad – finished second in the league table before losing to Mumbai Indians in the final. Being one year older was no barrier to their success.

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  T20 was designed to be determined by very fine margins. The brevity of the format heightens the role of luck. Such a volatile game increases the need to manage and exploit home conditions. Teams that dominate at home in leagues often only require one or two wins away to ensure qualification.

  Some teams can ask groundsmen to tailor pitches and boundary sizes to their strengths – for instance, a team with a strong seam attack might request pitches with pace and bounce. But in the IPL, franchises essentially drop into venues owned by the state associations for two months of the year. Rather than tailor the ground to the team, franchises need to tailor their team to the ground.

  Chennai’s home venue, the M.A. Chidambaram Stadium in Chepauk, is one of the most spin-friendly venues in world cricket. The hot weather in southern India bakes the soil, producing dry pitches where the ball grips and turns. Ever since the inaugural auction CSK structured their squad around these conditions, where they would play half their matches.

  ‘We break the season into two halves: home matches and away legs,’ explained CSK’s chief executive Kasi Viswanathan in a 2019 interview with The New Indian Express. ‘The first and foremost thing is each team plays seven matches at home and you have to maximise it. So our target is to win five of the seven matches we play at Chepauk. Then when we travel outside, we look to win three to four away fixtures which will take the count to about eight wins. That number will mostly put you through to the knockouts.’ This was a basic strategy but it was one that was conspicuously underused: only 53% of T20 matches were won by the home team.

  In the 2008 auction the off-spinner Ashwin and the left-arm spinner Shadab Jakati were joined by Muttiah Muralitharan to form a spin triumvirate, with Raina providing an occasional fourth option. In 2012 Jadeja replaced Jakati; recruiting quality spinners was a recurring theme of future auctions. By the end of the 2019 IPL, the only team to have bowled a higher proportion of spin overs than Chennai were Kolkata Knight Riders, who also built a bowling attack to exploit turning pitches at Eden Gardens.

  Chennai’s spin-heavy strategy both exploited home conditions and ensured that the team could use the most successful type of bowler extensively. Spinners boasted lower economy rates than pace bowlers in every single over of the innings, and many analysts believed most teams underbowled them. Between 2008 and 2019, 42% of Chennai’s overs were bowled by spin, second only to KKR. In a match against RCB in 2014, Chennai bowled 17.4 overs of spin, the most ever by an IPL team.

  To support their spin strategy, Chennai generally recruited Indian batsmen, who were typically more adept at playing spin, in the middle order and focused on overseas players as openers, where less spin was bowled. ‘Playing in Chennai the one constant has always been the spinners. It has always turned here so that has been our home ground advantage,’ explained Hussey.

  ‘There’s such a massive home advantage [at Chepauk],’ said one IPL insider. ‘More so than Eden Gardens, more so than Mohali. You take ten balls to get yourself in whereas normally you only take four to get yourself in; but the Chennai player takes six balls rather than ten. There’s that swing. Other teams take too long to get into the game in Chennai and it’s game over.’

  Batting in Chepauk in Balls 1–10

  Team

  Strike Rate

  Balls per Dismissal

  Average

  CSK Batsmen

  113.43

  28

  31.62

  Away Batsmen

  107.86

  19

  20.61

  Chennai’s success at home was not only founded on their squad building but also on their training methods. In the IPL’s early seasons, Chennai and Mumbai – who also had an excellent home record – were the only two teams who regularly utilised ‘middle practice’.

  ‘That makes a difference because if you are practising on the square all the time the players are getting used to the pitches, the angles and boundary sizes,’ explained Dravid. The difficulty was not all teams could exploit this advantage. ‘Other teams are not able to do that because of the paucity of the square [number of pitches] or maybe they don’t have that much clout [with the state association].’

  By the end of the 2019 IPL, Chennai had won 41 of their 59 matches at the Chepauk, over two of every three they played, meaning they only had to win around one-third of their away games to reach the play-offs. Among all T20 teams only the Rajasthan Royals and Lancashire could boast a better home venue win percentage than Chennai’s 69% in Chepauk.

  In 2018 political protests in the first match at the venue led to the IPL governing council ruling that all Chennai’s home matches should be shifted to an alternative venue. With six frontline spinners and Bravo’s slower ball variations, Chennai had structured their squad around playing matches at the M.A. Chidambaram Stadium. ‘Making sure we had good spinners to play in Chennai was a big focus at the 2018 auction,’ said Hussey.

  To most other teams the move away from their home venue – especially having placed it so central to their plans – would have dealt a terminal blow. Not Chennai. ‘It was phenomenal,’ said Hussey. ‘But again I think it came down to the experience and attitude of the players and the leaders, the coaching staff and captain. No one complained about it. This is just what we are doing and we’ve got to get on with it.’

  Chennai’s remaining six home games were moved to Pune. Conditions at the MCA Stadium were the antithesis of M.A. Chidambaram Stadium. Instead of slow, low surfaces, Pune offered pace and bounce. Fortunately Fleming, Dhoni and a number of CSK players were able to draw on their experience at the venue with Rising Pune Supergiant where they had played during Chennai’s two-year suspension. An injury to the spin bowler Mitchell Santner enabled Chennai to adjust their squad and they recruited South African quick Lungi Ngidi, who excelled. Despite the relocation, Chennai’s flexibility helped them top the table after winning five of their six matches in Pune.

  While Chennai dominated at home, whether that was in Chepauk or Pune, Bangalore floundered. T20 was played to a very different tempo at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium. Notoriously flat pitches, tiny boundaries and being at altitude placed an emphasis on destructive batsmen who could utilise the advantages provided by the surroundings and, crucially, excellent bowlers who could nullify the threat of batsmen running riot.

  ‘There is zero home advantage at Chinnaswamy. We tried to create one but there isn’t one there because the surface is too good,’ said Trent Woodhill, who worked at RCB as a batting and fielding coach. ‘It’s such a 50:50 playing field.’

  In the early seasons RCB misunderstood not only the venue but the format. Their squad bore more resemblance to a Test match fantasy XI than a T20 XI. In the inaugural season Bangalore were regularly outhit by sides with more power.

  By 2011 Bangalore addressed this problem, belatedly
moving towards players more suited to the T20 format. But their shift to power hitters came at a cost. As RCB splurged money on Gayle, de Villiers and Dilshan they left themselves less to spend on bowlers.

  ‘Looking back on some of the auctions and for RCB you always felt they will be chasing a gun death bowler,’ said Dravid. ‘Then the first thing you realise is they’ve spent 15 crores on Yuvraj Singh and you think, “Oh, shit! They aren’t in the market for that!” and by the time a death bowler comes round they won’t be able to spend any money so we can outbid them on that one.’

  This unadulterated focus on batting prowess was a directive that insiders say came largely from Mallya, RCB’s majority owner and chairman between 2008 and 2016. ‘Mallya was the main decision-maker and he loved the superstars of batting,’ said one anonymous source. ‘Bowlers like Mustafizur Rahman were shouted down at the auction by Mallya because he wanted batting gurus.

  ‘It started with Dravid, Kallis, and then it went to de Villiers and Dilshan and Gayle. They were like the Yankees in the last couple of years. They’ve won nothing but fuck it’s a good game to go and watch. They lose but they still hit a lot of home runs.’

  The combination of Bangalore’s batting might and the Chinnaswamy produced some of the most remarkable displays of batsmanship ever seen in cricket. In 2013 Gayle bludgeoned 175 not out, the highest T20 score of all time; in 2015 de Villiers and Kohli set a new world record for the highest partnership in history by adding 215. In 2016 the pair beat it, adding 229 in 96 balls during a season heralded as the apogee of T20 batsmanship: Kohli scored a season’s record 973 runs in 16 innings, including four centuries, while de Villiers hit 687. With Gayle, Watson and Rahul also in the team, RCB’s top five was among the most formidable ever assembled in T20.

  ‘Definitely RCB were a batting team,’ said the team insider. ‘It just worked that way with the big three. They fell into it with Gayle, A.B. and Virat, and then found it difficult to afford the best bowlers.’

  ‘Bangalore have never balanced their team very well,’ observed Dravid. ‘They had their best year when they had a bowler like Mitchell Starc who was able to close out games for them. But they kept going out and picking gun batsmen.’

  The acclaim that followed Bangalore’s batting was not reflected in results. While the Chinnaswamy may have produced brilliant entertainment it was such a good venue for batting that it also placed a great emphasis on quality bowling, particularly in the death overs where unchecked batsmen could run amok. ‘They have never had a plan to counter the Chinnaswamy Stadium and particularly the difficulty of death bowling at the Chinnaswamy,’ said Sundararaman, their former analyst. Teams and their strategies are shaped by their home venues and in this respect RCB deserve sympathy: the Chinnaswamy was a more difficult venue to tame than Chepauk.

  RCB’s batting-heavy approach was to embrace the fundamental inequity of T20 – a bowler was limited to 24 balls, while a batsman could be there for an entire innings – and prioritise players who could have the greatest possible impact on a game. When it came off, there was nothing quite like it, as anyone who went to the Chinnaswamy and witnessed one of those Kohli-de Villiers partnerships would attest. Bangalore’s perfect game could probably beat anyone else’s.

  The snag was that securing those two required stumping up a lot of cash. In 2019, RCB paid Kohli and de Villiers a combined £3.47 million, over one-third of their entire allocated playing budget. Bangalore’s bowling was consistently compromised by this spending imbalance. Across their history their only bowler who consistently excelled was the leg-spinner Yuzvendra Chahal. Pace bowlers in particular struggled.

  While tapping into the inequity of T20 could bring benefits, the approach was laden with risk. On a near-perfect day a batsman might face 60 balls but on a bad day they might face just one. In contrast, bowlers could deliver 24 balls in every match. While the match involvement of a batsman was determined by how long they could survive, the match involvement of a bowler was determined by their captain.

  This meant that on the very best days, when the batting clicked and everything fell into place, Bangalore could post and chase gargantuan totals. But the vulnerability of their bowling – particularly at home – meant that they found it very difficult to defend even very large totals. Bangalore won 51% of matches chasing but just 40% of matches when defending. The Chinnaswamy demanded a quality of bowler that Bangalore simply couldn’t afford.

  The problems associated with Bangalore’s batting-heavy team were compounded by the way in which they deployed their batting stars. Aside from spending copious cash on batting firepower there was no discernible strategy that defined them. Instead there was something of a Fantasy XI feel about Bangalore: throw together some of the world’s biggest hitters and hope for the best.

  RCB bore similarities with Real Madrid’s galacticos in the early and mid 2000s. Then, Real’s President Florentino Pérez splurged hundreds of millions on some of the world’s best attacking players – Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo, David Beckham, Michael Owen and Robinho – while neglecting defence. In 2003, the same summer as they signed Beckham, Real Madrid sold the defensive midfielder Claude Makelele, renowned for his undemonstrative work. ‘He wasn’t a header of the ball and he rarely passed the ball more than three metres . . . Younger players will arrive who will cause Makelele to be forgotten,’ Pérez declared when Makelele was sold. Yet it took Real Madrid another eight seasons to next advance beyond the Champions League’s quarter-finals. Their neglect of defence mirrored Bangalore’s lack of regard for defence in T20.

  Where RCB’s batting lacked shape and structure, CSK’s was defined by it. While some teams saw the Powerplay as an opportunity to get ahead in the game, Chennai generally saw it as a period to set up the rest of the innings. In run chases Chennai’s steady Powerplay ensured they took the game deep; once they took it that far they were clinical. With experience and know-how at the death, Chennai won 57% of run chases that went to the last over, comfortably the highest proportion of any IPL team.

  ‘The goal was always to get 40 or 45 runs for no wickets down in the first six overs,’ recalled Hussey, who opened for CSK from 2010 to 2015. ‘When I first started playing we knew we had the power to finish with Raina, Dhoni and Morkel. The idea was to keep wickets in hand for the back end.’

  This was a strategy informed by Chennai’s bowling strength and the lower-scoring nature of their home venue. By taking a measured approach to the first six overs and not risking a top order collapse by attacking too hard, Chennai ensured that, when they batted first, they could at least progress safely and post a respectable total. They could do this because their bowling was capable of defending even sub-par scores; RCB had to score above par to protect their weaker bowling. ‘That’s where Chennai have always been successful because they’ve often had stronger bowling than Bangalore,’ said Dravid.

  Though Chennai’s batting had structure, they were not dogmatic in their approach. In 2014 and 2015 they adapted their strategy according to their resources, deploying the aggressive openers Dwayne Smith and McCullum in attacking roles in the Powerplay.

  Chennai also showed flexibility with perhaps the most significant strategic decision in the game: the toss. Between 2008 and 2011 CSK batted first in 81% of matches when they won the toss. From 2012, they inverted that strategy, choosing to chase 62% of the time.

  CSK’s team of the early 2010s was among the first T20 sides to think in terms of roles rather than set positions. Below a solid opening pair – Vijay and either Hayden or Hussey – Chennai had a series of powerful hitters – left-handers Raina and Morkel and right-handers Dhoni and Bravo. These four players would not be assigned batting positions. Instead, they moved up and down the order depending on the match situation, the opportunity to capitalise on a particularly short boundary or to exploit a favourable match-up.

  In the victory in the 2010 IPL final, Dhoni came in at No. 5 and Morkel No. 6; when Chennai retained the title a year later, Dhoni batte
d at No. 3 and Morkel at No. 5. Sometimes both would bat lower; on other occasions, Morkel would bat above Dhoni.

  Badrinath, a classical player with a modest T20 strike rate, was also used adroitly. If Chennai lost early wickets, Badrinath would come in early, often making crucial contributions. He walked in at 27-2 in a winner-takes-all league match in 2010, making 53; and at 1-2 in the 2012 elimination final, making 47. Otherwise he would bat lower down – he batted No. 7 ten times for Chennai, and No. 8 twice. Remarkably for a specialist batsman, Badrinath did not bat in 32 of his 114 games for Chennai. It was no indictment of his worth, merely a reflection that the circumstances did not call for his specific talents.

  Roles applied to Chennai’s bowling too. In the 2019 IPL Deepak Chahar, a classical seamer who bowled full and swung the ball, was deployed almost exclusively as a Powerplay bowler, regularly bowling three consecutive overs to start the innings. In contrast Dwayne Bravo was deployed almost entirely in the second half of the innings when his variations were most valuable.

  This role-based approach to team-building was taken to a new extreme by Islamabad United in the Pakistan Super League. They didn’t just adopt middle order flexibility, as CSK successfully did, but extended it to the entire order. Islamabad saw a batsman’s position on the team sheet as merely the basis for negotiation. Anyone could be moved based on insights gleaned from statistics, observations of how the game was evolving, or simple gut feel.

  At Islamabad, Andre Russell was used both as an opener and at No. 8. J.P. Duminy, a middle order player, was pushed up to open in 2018, to his surprise – but adapted well. Hussain Talat batted between Nos. 3 and 8; Asif Ali from opener to No. 8; Sahibzada Farhan from opener to No. 6. In a game in 2018, Shadab Khan batted at No. 10; six days later, he batted at No. 3 – one of six No. 3s Islamabad used in 12 games en route to the title that season.