The final over of the 2nd Semi Final of the 2021 T20 World Cup began with Australia requiring 22 in 12 balls. It is worth reflecting on just how far away the contest between bat and ball was from any common notion of cricket.
Ball 1: Marcus Stoinis swiped across the line to a short of a length ball, got a bottom edge, and was nearly caught at the wicket.
Ball 2: Stoinis swiped across the line to a length ball, missed, and was nearly LBW. The ball pitched a couple of inches outside leg stump.
Ball 3: Matthew Wade attempted a ramp shot over the fine leg fielder who was positioned within the 30 yard circle, and missed. Ball was down the leg side, and ruled Wide.
Ball 3: Wade slogged across the line into the leg side, where the fielder attempted a running catch and dropped the ball. 2 runs.
Ball 4: 18 required from 9 now. Wade attempts a ramp shot again, and connects. Six.
Ball 5: Wade slogs across the line into the leg side and connects. Six.
Ball 6: 6 required from 7. Instead of pushing the single which was freely available pretty much anywhere to keep strike for the final over, Wade attempts a third ramp shot, connects. Match over.
It was T20 in a nutshell. Batters disregarding the possibility of dismissal when they address the ball. Bowlers entirely at the mercy of whether or not the chance taken by the batter comes off. Stoinis and Wade could have been dismissed on pretty much every single ball in that over, and yet, kept taking chances.
What is Bad T20 Play?
It is difficult to say what bad T20 play might be. Resources are so lopsided in favor of the batting side, that batters take chances and if they come off the batting side wins, and if they don’t the batting side loses. The bowlers are essentially irrelevant.
Bad T20 play, then, is when batters stop taking chances. Pakistan ended their power play with all 10 wickets in hand, and yet scored only 45/1 in their next 7 overs. Its the 1 which signals how poorly they played as much as the 45. Australia managed 51/4 in the same 7 overs of their chase.
The idea is that if a team loses only 1 wicket, they should score a lot more than 45 runs. And if they score only 45, then it should be because they lose a lot more than 1 wicket.
45/1 suggests that the Pakistan batters just did not take enough chances - that they were excessively conservative in spending their wickets.
Rizwan and Babar made 106 in 86 balls between them on a very good pitch. They scored only 12 boundaries in those 86 balls. Any opponent will gladly take that.
Glenn Maxwell, Steve Smith and Mitchell Marsh were all dismissed trying to hit the ball for six. It was good T20 batting, even if it didn’t work. We should think of the innings played by those three hitters the way we think of an accurate seam and swing bowler in a Test match. Even when the bowler is not getting wickets, the edges of the bat and the top of off stump are still constantly threatened. When batters take chances in T20, they are similarly constantly threatening the opposition. Not taking chances with the bat in T20 is akin to bowling wide outside off stump in a Test match.
The way to think about this is consider that to compete is to do what the opposition would prefer you didn’t do. In T20, where scoring rates are consistently above 7 (most commonly 8 or 9) an over, bowling sides would gladly offer the hitter a single.
A lot of great batters, like Kohli or Babar, seem to be unable to overcome their enormous training in batting (as in, in the art of scoring mountains of runs safely), when they play in T20.
A 160 T20 game is like those 210-225 ODIs which frequently occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.
Tosses And Chases
If we consider matches involving only India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia, England, South Africa, New Zealand, West Indies and Bangladesh at this T20 World Cup, then the chasing team has won 5 out of 6 in Abu Dhabi, and 8 out of 8 in Dubai. Of these 14 games, the chasing team has won the toss 13 times, and won 12 out of 13 games.
It has been a curious sequence of results. The dew has been mentioned as one factor. The advantage of knowing the target has been another factor. But essentially, teams batting first have just not been prepared to take enough chances. When they have taken chances, they have tended not to come off. Perhaps there is something in what the Australian captain said after the game - that the pitch quickens up a bit as the game moves into the late evening.
This sequence is not dissimilar to the period in the mid-eighties in ODIs. From 1984 to 1986, the chasing team won 104 and lost 63 ODIs. In 96 of these 104 wins, the team chasing won the toss and decided to chase. This period in ODI cricket occurred on the eve of the first systematic tactical revolution in the history of ODIs. This was the emergence of the middle order ODI specialist taking advantage of defensive field settings. Bobby Simpson’s theory about the side which scored more singles than the opposition winning ODI games (both by stealing more singles with the bat and conceding fewer singles in the field) was about the take hold. Neil Fairbrother, Dean Jones, Mohammed Azharuddin, Salim Malik and others were about the emerge as a new kind of middle order limited overs player.
T20Is will probably undergo a similar shift soon. A striking feature of the 2021 T20 World Cup has been the number of Test match superstars who have featured in it. This is probably a sign of international teams not really knowing what to do in the T20, because, on the day, its still the batting team whose chances come off which wins.
Great post, articulating your case superbly.
As someone who's read your work for years, I have a minor grammatical gripe
I cannot help but notice that you simply do not differentiate between "it's" and "its" -- not sure if it's on purpose, but it's super frustrating. It is not as if you've eschewed the use of the apostrophe altogether, because it shows up in other contexts (for example, "Rahane's" as opposed to "Rahanes").
It's a small thing, but it is what it is.