Cricket 2.0
Page 36
Rashid could bowl googlies so regularly without being deciphered because, unlike most leg-spinners, he used his fingers, more than his wrist, so batsmen could not scour his wrist for clues about when he was bowling a googly. Rashid made only the slightest adjustment to his grip, which was barely discernible to the batsman. He disguised his googly like an elite poker player concealing a flush. ‘The release point is the same for both wrong one and leg spin. I think that makes it a little bit tough for the batsman. The googly is my main weapon.’
While other wrist spinners generated revolutions on the ball by rolling their wrist in a way that one might turn a door handle, Rashid instead only used his wrist to get into his release position and then imparted revs using his fingers. The wrist rotation of typical leg-spinners allowed them to turn the ball far but compromised their control. By using his fingers to spin the ball Rashid sacrificed his degrees of spin – and he did turn the ball less than typical leg-spinners – but gained essential control.
Rashid’s speed harried batsmen; his line and length cramped them. All the while, the direction of spin – into the batsman, away from him or not turning at all – changed almost every other ball. Compared to T20 leg-spinners who had come before him, Rashid was faster, flatter, shorter, straighter, more varied and unerringly accurate. This template rose above the conditions and match situations, allowing Rashid to succeed all around the world on a variety of pitches and in all three phases of the innings.
The Third Era of Spin Bowling – Leading Spin Wicket-Takers, 2015–June 2019
Bowler
Spin Type
Wickets
Rashid Khan
Wrist Spin
254
Imran Tahir
Wrist Spin
194
Sunil Narine
Mystery Spin
181
Shakib Al Hasan
Finger Spin
174
Shahid Afridi
Wrist Spin
156
Mohammad Nabi
Finger Spin
156
Yuzvendra Chahal
Wrist Spin
141
Ish Sodhi
Wrist Spin
133
Adam Zampa
Wrist Spin
117
Shadab Khan
Wrist Spin
103
Piyush Chawla
Wrist Spin
102
Imad Wasim
Finger Spin
99
Kuldeep Yadav
Wrist Spin
98
Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack occupies a unique place in the sport. It is an annual that doubles as a moral authority on the game it covers. Each year since 1889, the Almanack has selected its five cricketers of the year: a moment that is considered a news event in its own right.
Virtually all of the most famous names in the sport have been selected among the Almanack’s cricketers of the year. And yet only players who represented ten countries – the first ten to play Test cricket – have ever been honoured in this way, which speaks of cricket’s insularity. (A couple of players raised away from these ten nations, like England’s Irish-born Eoin Morgan, have won the award – but only when they were representing one of the old ten countries in international cricket.)
In 2018, Wisden created a new award: the Leading T20 Cricketer in the World award. Rashid was the inaugural winner: a perfect distillation of how T20 has democratised cricket. Unlike traditional international cricket, the IPL doesn’t care about hierarchies or status. Only cricketers from 12 countries – ten before 2017 – are allowed to play Test matches. The IPL is a democracy in which everyone is welcome. (Well, not entirely everyone: Pakistani players are banned because of the geopolitical situation between India and Pakistan and some Sri Lankans have been banned due to political tensions.)
One of the greatest virtues of the IPL is its contempt for cricket’s traditional hierarchies: a league that doesn’t care about a player’s passport or history, only their ability to help win cricket matches.
And while Associate players receive scant salaries from their international fixtures – leading Associate players very seldom earn more than £30,000 a year from their penurious national boards – T20 leagues allow them to earn what they’re worth. While Rashid had a comfortable home life before – ‘We had money, it’s not about that we had no home or cars,’ he explained – his IPL contract showed how T20 leagues created a stage on which players from emerging nations were equal to those from cricket’s traditional powerhouses.
T20 leagues also meant that players from the sport’s Full Members could be paid what they were worth, rather than this being determined by the nationality on their passport. In international cricket in 2017, ESPNcricinfo found, New Zealand’s captain Kane Williamson earned £0.19 million, while England’s captain Joe Root earned £1.05 million – even though Williamson is ranked a better batsman in Tests and T20 internationals. Yet in the 2018 IPL, Williamson was sold for three crore (£330,000) while Root went unsold. That season, Williamson was the top run-scorer in the competition, captaining Sunrisers to the final.
In his debut season in the IPL Rashid did more than just enjoy stunning success. By showing what talent existed beyond the sport’s traditional outposts, he served as a gateway for all players from beyond cricket’s old ten Test nations to enter the hallowed world of T20 leagues.
Rashid’s remarkable impact – he proved even more effective in the Caribbean Premier League, where he got a hat-trick just with his googlies, and in Australia’s Big Bash than in his first season in India – led to leading T20 minds actively scouting Afghanistan in search of similarly precocious talents.
Teams focused especially on mystery spinners. Spinners had shown themselves the most valuable bowlers of all in T20; those spinners who, like Rashid, were uncoached and had unique actions, were especially potent. One of the joys of T20 has been that, especially among spinners, the format has encouraged individuality of style; the less identikit a spinner’s action, the more effective they tend to be. T20 has placed a premium on bowlers nurtured away from the almost industrialised talent production systems in countries like Australia and England, where cricketers can appear as if mass-produced. Such idiosyncratic talents are more likely to be found outside the sport’s traditional economic and sporting powerhouses.
After Rashid and Nabi, scouts kept returning to Afghanistan, and kept finding more talent. ‘In Afghanistan, everyone loves spin, it’s like a natural talent they have,’ Rashid said. ‘They just need to be polished up to come into international cricket and show their skills. They have enough talent, they have enough skills. It’s all about something natural – naturally they have good power in their fingers in the schools. That’s how I think we’re getting more spinners from Afghanistan rather than the fast bowlers.’
In the 2018 IPL, three Afghan teenage spinners – Rashid, the left-arm wrist spinner Zahir Khan and Mujeeb Zadran, who possessed so many different variations he was best classed simply as a mystery bowler – had contracts.
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The ascent of T20 led to, for the first time in cricket history, Associate nations creating high-profile domestic leagues, featuring overseas players and televised around the world, either on TV networks or over YouTube. The economic landscape for such leagues was challenging; like many T20 leagues the world over, they consistently made a loss in their first years, while attempting to build up an audience and their commercial worth. But for players in Associate nations such leagues created an avenue for them to learn from established players, showcase their talents and ultimately be picked up by more prestigious leagues.
In 2016, Cricket Hong Kong, the sport’s governing body in Hong Kong, created the Hong Kong Blitz, a short franchise T20 competition that featured private investment and five overseas players per team. It was the first of its kind in an Associate nation.
In March 2015 Nepal’s coach Pubudu D
assanayake was on his way to the wedding of Nepal cricketer Basant Regmi. Halfway through the six-hour drive from Kathmandu, Dassanayake stopped in the city of Bharatpur. Dassanayake was invited to check out the local talent. ‘I went to the small cricket grounds next to the main road and there were about ten youngsters training inside a net,’ he recalls. Dassanayake’s eyes were drawn to Sandeep Lamichhane, a leg-spinner who was 14 at the time and had learned how to bowl leg spin following Shane Warne. ‘I used to watch him on TV and follow him on YouTube,’ Lamichhane recalled. ‘I used to watch his videos and follow his action in my childhood.’
A few weeks later, Lamichhane was included in an U-19 camp. In November 2015, he played an unofficial match for Nepal against a touring MCC team. One MCC player, Hong Kong’s Scott McKechnie, then recommended that Kowloon Cantons, a side in the Hong Kong Blitz recruit Lamichhane in the first year of the competition.
In Hong Kong’s inaugural T20 Blitz tournament, Lamichhane impressed the former Australian captain Michael Clarke, who joked at training he should move to Australia as they need a good leg-spinner. Clarke helped Lamichhane get a contract for Western Suburbs, his club side in Sydney. ‘Playing in Hong Kong was the biggest turning point in my career because I went there and met Clarke,’ Lamichhane said. ‘When I went there I had nothing with me.’
Lamichhane’s experiences in Hong Kong and Australia helped him thrive in lower levels of international cricket for Nepal. Rashid had shown that this could be the catalyst for wider recognition. ‘When Rashid can do it why can’t I? That’s what I asked myself.’
As word of Lamichhane’s talent spread, the agent Talha Aisham enlisted Mushtaq Ahmed, a former Pakistan leg-spinner, to look at footage of his bowling. Aisham subsequently signed Lamichhane, helping to put him into the draft list for T20 leagues, and get him a contract in the Bangladesh Premier League in 2017. ‘It was a difficult job to convince the T20 leagues around the world to give him a chance, especially when he was from an Associate cricket nation,’ Aisham said, suggesting that franchises are still less willing to entrust in players from emerging countries.
In January 2018, Lamichhane was training with Nepal in Dubai, when one of the team officials interrupted the practice session with the news that he had been signed by Delhi Daredevils, who picked him up for INR 20 lakh (£23,000) in the final round of the IPL auction. ‘Everyone came to me and congratulated me – they were really happy everyone. I was so excited.’ In the new world of T20, domestic leagues in Associate countries had now become a pathway to the biggest leagues.
‘Not just me, but the entire nation is proud of you,’ Nepal’s prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba said after Lamichhane was signed at the age of 17. Few expected Lamichhane to play a game but, after Delhi endured an abject season, he was thrust into the final throes of their campaign.
In his very first match, Lamichhane was entrusted to bowl to Virat Kohli and A.B. de Villiers: a Nepalese teenager suddenly on the same field as two giants of the sport. ‘Something you have been dreaming of – bowling against them and playing against them.’ Lamichhane proved he was not just a signing for show, conceding just 25 runs in four overs on debut and then excelling in two more games that season. By the time 2018 was out, Lamichhane had thrived in the Caribbean Premier League, the Big Bash and Canada’s new star-studded Global T20 tournament too.
‘It’s really amazing, someone from Nepal getting chances in the biggest leagues of the world – IPL and all the other leagues,’ Lamichhane said. ‘People from Nepal always text me good luck for the game and you have been doing really well for our country – keep doing the fantastic work. That gives me a lot of motivation.
‘We’ve got a huge fan base back home and everyone there is really enjoying this moment. You can’t even describe in words how happy right now watching me on TV and against the big players.’
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Other T20 leagues in Associate nations had a similar democratising effect. By 2019, there were established leagues in Afghanistan and Nepal, which both attracted a good calibre of overseas player, while the Netherlands, Scotland and recently promoted Ireland were about to launch a joint T20 league.
That venture was to be bankrolled by Mercuri, an Indian investment company who funded the Global T20 Canada league, which debuted in 2018. This was a stunningly ambitious venture: it had no restrictions on overseas players in each XI at all, and thus could, in theory, assemble a player pool to make it the highest-quality T20 league in the world. Things did not quite work out like that in the first year, though the money available to overseas players was such that many players preferred playing in Canada to England’s T20 Blast tournament, which was played at the same time. The first year was marred by poor pitches and crowds – not helped by all 22 matches taking place at the Maple Leaf Cricket Club, a ground in King City, 30 kilometres from Toronto.
Yet, for all these challenges, the Global T20 also provided a vehicle for the advancement of North American talent of the sort unthinkable in the pre-T20 age.
In 2010, when he was 19, Ali Khan moved to the US from Punjab in Pakistan. His uncle, who already lived in Greater Dayton, Ohio, sponsored Khan and his family to get a green card. Khan had a job lined up working for a telecommunications firm there. The company was called Cricket Wireless, though it had nothing whatsoever to do with cricket.
Khan had been an enthusiastic tape-ball player in his youth, but seldom played with a hard ball. Assuming that there would be no possibilities to play cricket in Dayton, where Khan was moving with his family, he didn’t take any cricket equipment on his flight.
‘I didn’t think there’d be any cricket when I got here, so I didn’t pack anything. I was pretty much giving up on cricket when I was moving,’ he recalled. For all his excitement about moving to the US, he had ‘mixed feelings’ because he would have to abandon cricket completely.
A few weeks later, Khan learned about Greater Dayton Cricket Club. His uncle was actually a significant figure in the club, though he hadn’t mentioned it to Khan before. Khan, a fast bowler, bowled well in his first evening practice session and was invited to play in a game on the Sunday. The standard was mixed, but Khan relished playing. His success led to the chance to play for a side in the Midwest Cricket Tournament too, a competition for sides from across Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. Here the standard was better, because the talent was more concentrated, but it would often take Khan hours to travel to games.
In 2013, when he was 22, Khan messaged ‘Maq’ Qureshi, who ran the US Open cricket tournament: a short annual competition which took place at the end of the year in Florida and paid enough to attract a number of West Indies international players. Qureshi said, ‘You can buy a one-way ticket and come down here. If we like you we’ll pay you back,’ Khan recalled. ‘I went down there, bought my own ticket and we lost in the quarter-final but I got four wickets.’ He had done enough to persuade Qureshi to buy his return ticket home, and get him opportunities to play elsewhere in the US. In his determination to further his cricket however he could, Khan used to drive five hours each way to play in Chicago’s 40-over league, and even flew to Washington DC to play in the Washington league.
‘It was very difficult,’ Khan recalled. ‘Especially when you’re living in the US and working five or six days a week and then only able to play cricket on the weekends and that too on AstroTurf because we didn’t have proper facilities. It was very hard but it’s just always believing in yourself and working towards your dream. I knew it’s tough right now but maybe down the road it would pay off so I never gave up on it and just kept playing – every day after work I went straight to the gym, did my workouts. I continued doing the work. I always believed I could become something.’ Even though Khan was normally paid small match fees, these were less than the amount he earned at Cricket Wireless. As Khan was paid by the number of days he worked, he effectively lost money when he played two games a weekend.
Khan came through open trials for the USA to be selected in the USA squad which
played in the Caribbean 50-over tournament for the first time in 2016. He also earned a contract in the Caribbean Premier League, which mandated that all franchises had to select one North American player. Khan dismissed Kumar Sangakkara, the great Sri Lankan batsman, with his first ball in the Caribbean Premier League while playing for the Guyana Amazon Warriors.
Two years later, he hadn’t played another CPL game, and was finding it increasingly hard to justify the amount of time he was devoting to cricket. ‘It was starting to get tough for my boss as well. He was saying, “You’re starting to get too much now, you’re getting too many days off,”’ he recalled. Khan was told that he could become a logistics manager if he stopped playing, and considered giving up cricket altogether.
In December 2017, Khan returned to Florida for the US Open tournament. One of his teammates was Dwayne Bravo, who was impressed, telling Khan, ‘Don’t give up,’ when he said goodbye at the end of the tournament.
Soon afterwards, Bravo was selected in the Global T20 league in Canada, and recommended Khan be signed by his side. Khan thrived and, again on Bravo’s recommendation, then joined the Trinbago Knight Riders in the CPL. Khan, who regularly bowled at speeds in excess of 90 mph, was outstanding for Trinbago; he was named in ESPNcricinfo’s team of the tournament as they won the title, and was signed by the Bangladesh Premier League shortly afterwards. Once again, a domestic league in an Associate nation had helped elevate an Associate cricketer to the big leagues – even if, as with Lamichhane, Khan’s tale showed the importance of contacts in the T20 ecosystem, something many Associate players still lacked, hampering their chances of earning an opportunity.