Babar Azam in T20
A Stubbornly Square Peg In An Unyielding Round Hole
Babar Azam opened the batting for Pakistan in their T20 match against England at Old Trafford on Sunday. He made 56 in 44. It was a strikingly bad T20 innings. This is evident from his scoring rate. Pakistan ended up with 195. They didn’t lose early wickets. But it was even more evident from his approach.
Azam hit 7 boundaries in 44 balls. This means that he played 37 balls in his innings without hitting a boundary. The average score for an individual batsman in the 1st innings of a T20 international not hitting a boundary for 37 balls is 60.8 runs. In all T20 cricket it is 58.5. Azam’s innings is below average by this standard. But its worse than that. The average T20 1st innings which lasts the full 20 overs is 159 runs in 20 overs. In T20 internationals, it is 166. This match at Old Trafford was a full standard deviation (29 runs) above the average. In innings where the team scores between 190 and 200, the average innings in which a batsman fails to score a boundary off 37 deliveries is 73.
Azam faced 27 balls in the first 10 overs of Pakistan’s innings of which he scored either 0 or 1. Basically, these are deliveries which Pakistan conceded to England without a contest. After 10 overs, Pakistan had made 87/1 in 60 balls. Azam had made 43 in 35. The other end produced 44 in 25 balls.
56 in 44 still looks impressive. But its really not. For one thing, the bowling side is not trying to get the batsman out in a T20 game. The field is set to defend the boundary. The bowling is cagey, the line and length of the bowler is shaped by the field setting and is designed to force the batsman to hit the ball to that part of the boundary where there are fielders.
For instance, a bowler bowling with a deep fine-leg, a deep square-leg and a wide long-on is going to keep the ball on middle-and-leg, if not leg-stump. The bowler won’t stray outside off-stump because there’s probably no deep third-man. Now, the batsman can respond in two ways. The first is to take the risk free single to the fielder on the boundary. The other is to try and invent ways to hit a boundary, either by backing away to leg and hitting through the off-side, or by trying to hoick a six to leg, or by playing the reverse or switch hit. Now, a batsman will pick the former, risk free option as a matter of instinct. A hitter on the other hand, will constantly look for the latter. The batsman is basically conceding the delivery to the bowling side and taking only what they are offering, while the hitter is going to try and do what the fielding side is trying to prevent - score a boundary.
If a hitter and a batsman both face 15 balls, the batsman will probably happily take what the fielding side is offering about 12 times. The hitter will accept it only about 5-7 times. The batsman is going to play longer innings and score slower since that approach involves less risk. The hitter is going to play shorter innings and score quicker. In a game where a team has 10 wickets over only 120 balls, the latter approach is obviously more suitable. The hitter is prepared to risk dismissal more readily than a batsman.
This is the basic distinction between a hitter (as a proper T20 batsman should be called) and a batsman. It is a difference in approach. It shows why terrific batsmen do not make for terrific T20 players. It is why tremendous batsmen like Virat Kohli and Babar Azam make for average T20 players.
Observers are reluctant to make this point even though the logic of the contest, and the approach taken in franchise T20 cricket (which is of a significant higher standard than international cricket) makes it fairly obvious. Cricket twitter (for instance) is still packed with observations about a T20 batsman’s batting average - a useless measurement in a game where speed of scoring is paramount and where the challenge for a batsman is to learn to value their wicket less than they are used to. The most common observation is something like Mazher Arshad’s below.
195 was a below par score on that wicket. Look at England’s bowling attack in the game - Saqib Mahmood, Moeen Ali, Adil Rashid, Tom Curran, Lewis Gregory and Chris Jordan. If England fielded that attack in an ODI, let alone in a Test match, it would be considered a weak attack, well below the best possible English attack today. There’s no serious wicket taking threat there. Nor is there any great pace. It is a bowling attack selected with one eye, actually, make that one and a half eye, on the player’s ability to hit. There’s nobody in that attack like Mohammad Amir or Shaheen Shah Afridi - two players who contribute very little in the hitting department, and are essentially wasted in a T20 game since no hitter is going to care very much about the merit of the ball.
In contrast to Pakistan, England approach was textbook, orthodox T20. Banton, Bairstow, Malan and Morgan faced most if not all of their deliveries with both eyes on where the boundary was available. From a traditional cricket standpoint, their batting seemed outrageous. But seen with T20 eyes, it was perfectly commonplace. Banton hit a reverse sweep for six early in his innings. He did it because there was no fielder on the boundary behind square on the off-side to the spinner. It is shot which T20 batsmen have cultivated because it enables them to hit the ball where there’s no fielder. Its not outrageous. Its orthodox.
We often hear commentators say that “there’s a place for proper batting in T20”. By “proper batting” they mean batting as it might occur in longer matches. But we never hear commentators say that “there’s a place for hitting in a Test match”, do we? This asymmetry suggests that T20 is not taken seriously as a competitive contest in the international game. This explains the ridiculous obsession with T20 batting averages (it’s not just pointless for a batsman to average 50 in T20, its counterproductive).
The logic of hitting in T20 turns the traditional logic of batting on its head. Traditionally, batting is the art of constructing an innings. This involves being watchful early in the innings, getting set, and then opening out as the ball gets older and one is well set against tiring bowlers. In T20, the deliveries used up in getting set become a huge burden. If a batsman spends 20 balls getting set and ends up with 20(20), then just to break even and get to average expected score after 30 balls (which is 39), the batsman has to score 19 in the next 10. Even if the batsman does score 19 in the next 10 balls, all he’s done is to break even. The batting team has gotten only average returns from those 30 balls. What’s worse is that if the batsman fails to score these 19, the team is left in a huge hole because the batsman has sunk anywhere from 16-25% of the team’s total available deliveries. These deliveries are gone.
This is essentially what happened to Pakistan. They reached 195 despite conceding about 30 balls to England uncontested because Babar Azam used them up building his innings. He didn’t make an eighty (which is what he would have needed to do to break even), and consequently, left his team in a terrible hole. England didn’t break a sweat in the run chase. Their hugely experienced T20 line up kept picking spots and depositing the ball there.
Could Pakistan still have won with this approach? Yes. England could have had an unusually unlucky day where the chances taken by their batsmen failed to come off. But even so, England’s approach would have been the right one and Pakistan’s approach would have been the wrong one. This would have been so because England’s approach is designed to produce more frequent T20 success compared to Pakistan.
International T20 is still not considered a serious competitive event. It is a form of cricket celebrity where some tremendous batsmen play a few effortless, elegant shots in subpar T20 innings against some weak bowling attacks to fields which are not designed to challenge them. They build fat averages and climb high up poorly designed T20 player rankings.
But things are changing. Increasingly, teams like England, Australia and New Zealand have joined the trailblazing West Indies in playing proper T20 cricket in the international game. The days of the Azams are numbered in T20. That is, unless they decide to take the format seriously and actually play T20 in a T20 match. But this won’t happen unless their approach is seen to be the anachronism that it is. Currently, there seems to be little interest among those who cover international T20 to do this.