Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  Badree was a portent of an era in which, after 2015, leg spin would become the most effective bowling in T20. He was the PE teacher from Arima who tamed the art of wrist spin.

  SIX

  THE UNICORN

  ‘I could see him reading what I was doing before I did it’

  Andrew Tye on bowling to A.B. de Villiers

  ‘I don’t overthink it in T20s; my instincts are normally accurate’

  A.B. de Villiers

  The ball cracks off A.B. de Villiers’ bat. There is no real hint of violence; just a marriage of beauty and brutality.

  De Villiers’ every shot, wondrously crisp and yet flying off his bat with alacrity, feels like a riposte to any who still deride T20 as slogging. The 40,000 at the ground intoxicated by his show are too mesmerised to think of such subtleties.

  Welcome to watching A.B. at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, an experience that, both on and off the field, feels like the apogee of T20 cricket.

  Six follows six, each thundered more emphatically than the last. There are slog sweeps against spin, balls flicked 100 metres over long on like a topspin forehand and drives propelled flat over extra cover. De Villiers seems to have a preternatural sense of where the ball will be delivered and how he will hit it. After each six, the screen flashes up with a reverential sign: ‘AB Dynamite’ or ‘A dmirable B rilliant D azzling’.

  The NBA basketball league today is in thrall to its unicorns. Previously the sport had rigid ideas about each position’s role. In recent years, these notions have been uprooted by a new breed of players unshackled by the old compromises between tall players and smaller, agile ones. Instead, new-age players like Kevin Durant can do it all, combining the technique of point guards – who run games like deep-lying football midfielders – with the athleticism of power forwards, and so redefine the parameters of their sport.

  Batting’s unicorn is A.B. de Villiers, capable of playing with dazzling impunity or the self-restraint of an ascetic monk. He has scored the fastest one-day international century of all time, in 31 balls. He has also played with staggering self-denial. In a Test match in Delhi in 2015 he batted for 354 minutes to score 45 off 297 balls – and in Adelaide in 2012, he made 33 from 220 balls to help salvage a draw, the prelude to thumping 169 in the decisive Test a week later. Perhaps no one has done more to show the full range of possibilities in T20 batting. ‘A genius’ is how Brendon McCullum described him. In the five IPL seasons from 2015 de Villiers averaged 49.74 – the numbers of a great Test batsman, while scoring those runs at a strike rate of 164. No player to average within ten of him had a strike rate of 150.

  ‘You watch Lionel Messi play football and if you love the game you can just see something else in that bloke that other footballers just don’t have basically and I think de Villiers is exactly that,’ said England’s Sam Billings, who played against de Villiers in the IPL. ‘That is why he is one of the best players ever to play the game because of that ability to be that versatile.

  ‘It is a tough one to describe. Yeah, fine, someone can score 30 off 20 balls but de Villiers’ 30 off 20 balls compared to Player A is just . . . I would pay to watch that.’

  The idea of compromise, and trade-offs, is wired into T20 batting. Most batsmen can be thought of as existing somewhere on a continuum, between aiming to hit as many sixes as possible and aiming to score off every ball. Chris Gayle and Virat Kohli – the first an extraordinary six-hitter who allows 50% of his balls to be dots; the second a near-perfect technician who faces just 35% dot balls – embody the two contrasting approaches. Similar trade-offs are detectable in other areas, too. Reliable eviscerators of pace bowling, like Chris Lynn and Brendon McCullum, are comparatively weak against spin. The leading destroyers of spin, like Glenn Maxwell and Shane Watson, can be shackled by pace. Some of the most destructive batsmen in the Powerplay, like Aaron Finch and Alex Hales, can get bogged down afterwards. Those with the most extraordinary strike rates, like Carlos Brathwaite and Kieron Pollard, often sacrifice consistency. Those who are supremely consistent, like Kohli and Shaun Marsh, typically have lower strike rates – particularly at the start of their innings.

  The wonder of A.B. de Villiers is that he rejected these trade-offs as false. ‘He walks to the wicket and tries to impose himself on the game from ball one,’ remarked McCullum. Most players typically would take five or ten balls to get used to the nature of the pitch before focusing on run scoring – Gayle started his innings famously slowly – but de Villiers was different. De Villiers had a preternatural ability to arrive at the batting crease and immediately appear at one with conditions – perfectly attuned to the pace and bounce of the pitch, the dimensions of the ground and the glare of the lights. The apparent comfort of de Villiers at the crease was translated into his performance.

  Despite de Villiers often starting his innings in the early middle overs when he was afforded more time to play himself in and run rates were typically lower, he scored significantly faster from the outset than almost every player in the world. In the first ten balls of his innings he scored at a strike rate of 126.72, compared to 107.51 for all players, even while getting out much less frequently.

  Quick starts were crucial because they were an efficient use of resources. On the rare occasions when de Villiers was dismissed early he had often still maintained a healthy scoring rate that had made a positive contribution, rather than consuming deliveries with a view to accelerating later in his innings.

  Just after the fall of a wicket the pressure was on the batting team but by starting quickly de Villiers was able to flip this around, counter-attacking to put the bowling team under pressure once more. In a Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) match in January 2019 de Villiers arrived at the crease with his team, the Rangpur Riders, 5 for 2 after 1.5 overs chasing 187 to win. De Villiers started his innings in thunderous fashion: six, dot, four, four, dot, six, four, four – 28 off his first eight balls and in a flash the match had been turned on its head. Rangpur ended the Powerplay 63 for 2 with the required run rate back in check and won the match by eight wickets and with ten balls to spare. De Villiers finished 100 not out off 50 balls.

  De Villiers’ ability to start with alacrity was underpinned by having no obvious weakness against any bowler type. While most players had a clear preference for pace or spin – the skills required for playing one often compromised those required for playing the other – de Villiers was equally strong against both. He scored at a strike rate of 135 against spin and 155 against pace but was dismissed by spin far less often.

  One of the first major influences of data analysis on T20 was the rise of ‘match-ups’ which saw fielding captains target batsmen with specific bowler types based on potential vulnerabilities displayed in the records of the batsman against that bowler type. The issue for fielding captains against de Villiers was that he had no obvious match-up to exploit. All of the six types of bowling produced negative match-ups for the fielding team with de Villiers averaging at least 30, while scoring at a strike rate of over 130 against all of them. He even excelled against what were ordinarily the most effective deliveries: no player scored faster than de Villiers’ strike rate of 139 against yorkers, and only three players scored faster than his 189 against slower balls.

  Such multifarious strengths allowed de Villiers to be very selective in which bowlers he targeted and when. ‘He has the ability to know which bowler he is going to target and when he targets them he takes them massive,’ observed McCullum, who played with de Villiers at RCB in the 2018 IPL. ‘If he decides to target you then you are in major trouble.’

  From Barbados to Bangalore and from Dhaka to Durban, T20 leagues around the world were played in a vast array of differing conditions but de Villiers appeared at home wherever he played. In all five countries where he played at least ten matches – India, South Africa, England, Bangladesh and the Caribbean he averaged at least 30 and scored at a strike rate of at least 130. Different conditions could not quell him.

 
***

  Bowling to de Villiers in T20 could resemble tossing a ball into the mouth of a cannon. Andrew Tye, the Australian T20 international bowler, distilled the experience of bowling to de Villiers: ‘I could see him reading what I was doing before I did it.’

  Only de Villiers was not really watching the ball. Not for all of the time anyway.

  Fewer than 20 yards separate a cricket batsman from the bowler when the ball is delivered. When bowlers reach speeds of 90 miles per hour or more, as Tye and other international bowlers routinely do, that leaves batsmen about 0.6 seconds to ascertain where the ball will pitch, how it will bounce after pitching, whether it will swing in the air before pitching, and whether it will seam off the pitch after it lands. Then, batsmen have to hit the thing, and find gaps between the 11 opponents on the pitch designed to stop them from scoring runs.

  When confronted with a 90 mph bowler, ‘I’ll have a bit of a pre-ball routine. I’ll make my mark, and then once I switch on and the bowler’s coming in, I try and think of absolutely nothing,’ de Villiers explained. ‘I want it to be that my mind is a hundred per cent clear. So is my body. So I try not to think about too many things.’

  That is sensible, for de Villiers does not have time to watch where the ball lands and how it moves before playing a shot. Even the best athletes need about 200 milliseconds to adjust their shots, depending on the trajectory of the ball, the scientists Michael F. Land and Peter McLeod have found. That means that batsmen must fully commit to their shot 0.2 seconds before the ball reaches them – when the ball still has one-third of its journey from the bowler to the wicket opposite them to go. Whatever the ball does in the last third of its flight it is impossible to adjust. And the margins of failure are infinitesimally small: the batsman must judge the ball’s position to within 3cm and the time it reaches them to within three milliseconds if they are to make effective contact.

  Human reaction times are simply too slow to ‘watch the ball on to the bat’, the aphorism endlessly recycled from coaches to players around the globe. Instead, batsmen must use clues from the bowler – their run-up, action in delivery and their own game awareness – to work out where the ball is going to be before it gets there. The best batsmen do not consciously calculate all the variables that determine a ball’s trajectory; instead, their subconscious, experience and mastery do it for them.

  The research from Land and McLeod showed that elite batsmen only watch the ball for just over half the time after it is released – they watch it after release, then adjust their eyes to where they predict the ball will be at the point it reaches them, and then watch it again as they make contact.

  ‘What I 100% need to do is I don’t try and think about too much,’ de Villiers explained. ‘I try and make sure that I see the ball coming out of the bowler’s hands, and then my technique and my body take over.’

  De Villiers constructed a template that could easily be transferred across all three formats of the game. This has been underpinned by a purity and simplicity of technique that can withstand the greatest pressures on the field. Whatever the format, the tenets of his method remain the same.

  ‘I’ve always kept it very simple,’ he explained. ‘I’m a big believer in the fact that basics stay the same for all the formats. I don’t overthink things. I know Test cricket is more about endurance. T20 is more about innovating, creating and the energy at the wicket. And I base my plan on the same fundamentals and the same basics in all three of the formats that I play in. I’ve never changed that. The only thing that changes is my mindset a little bit at times.’

  In the longer formats of the game, a de Villiers hallmark was his adaptability to the situation. In T20, de Villiers is regarded as the opposite: a player who bats as if impervious to the situation – which is meant as a great compliment. The ground conditions; the notion of a par score; who the bowlers are. Such thoughts do not weigh de Villiers down: ‘I don’t overthink it in T20s; my instincts are normally accurate.’

  In any phase of the game, the effect is devastating. But it is particularly potent in the traditional lull after the Powerplay – the nearest T20 has to boring middle overs. Between 2015 and 2019 the average strike rate in overs seven to ten in the IPL was 117.62; for de Villiers, it was 133.33. In the slowest phase of the game, de Villiers was still operating on a different plane.

  ***

  Like football’s Premier League, T20 cricket has a tendency to try to monopolise all the sport’s recent innovations, presenting all that is good as all that is new and ignoring what came before.

  Yet the first intimations of many of the dazzling array of shots that have become standard in T20 came before a professional game in the format. The reverse sweep – in which batsmen play a sweep after switching hands, so that they hit the ball through the off side rather than the leg side – was played in the 1970s by the West Indian Gordon Greenidge and Pakistan’s Mushtaq Mohammad, and popularised in the 1990s in one-day cricket. South Africa’s Jonty Rhodes took the logic of the reverse sweep further and played the switch hit – hitting the ball as if a left-hander, rather than a right-hander – in an ODI against Australia in 2002.

  Perhaps the most remarkable of cricket’s shots – the scoop – was first played as far back as 1933 by the West Indian batsman Learie Constantine. ‘The ball was as big as a full moon to me that day and I remember I moved out of my crease to meet the ball which Allom was coming up to deliver. He saw me move and tried to send a slow full toss over my approaching form. I spotted it in time. I could not reach it with a textbook shot because there is nothing in the textbook about that situation, so I wrote a new chapter by helping it on over my head and the pavilion.’ Constantine was a man well ahead of his time. It wasn’t until 2001, when Zimbabwe’s Dougie Marillier tried the same thing in an ODI against Australia, that the scoop was played again. A year later the wicketkeeper Ryan Campbell helped it evolve further.

  Campbell was sitting in a bowling meeting for a domestic limited overs match in Australia in 2002 when he had an idea. The bowlers kept saying how, towards the end of the innings, they would look to bowl yorkers – balls that bounce right at the batsman’s feet and are notoriously difficult to score off.

  ‘I always knew no one ever fielded behind the wicketkeeper,’ Campbell said. ‘So I thought the theory must be sound: if they’re bowling yorkers, and if I get forward and get my bat down, I’m going to get a full toss. And if I get a full toss, it’ll just hit the face of my bat and go over my head or my shoulder and it should be runs. That was the theory.’

  If only it were that simple. Against fast bowlers, Campbell had three quarters of a second or less to get forward, get down into position – unlike Marillier, Campbell’s shot involved going down on one knee to get under the ball – read the line of the ball and execute the shot at just the right moment so that it carried over the wicketkeeper. If he missed the ball he risked serious injury. Being fearful of getting hit – or his teammates mocking him – Campbell had never even practised the shot in the nets before unveiling it in a domestic one-day match, which speaks to cricket’s conservatism. The first two times Campbell attempted the shot in a match, he hit the ball for four. With this new shot – the ramp – Campbell had access to all 360 degrees of the pitch with his strokes.

  So relatively little of what would become the hallmarks of T20 batting were actually a direct product of the format. What T20 did, though, was popularise such audacious shots like never before. McCullum, who was among the finest players of the ramp and scoop shot, believed ‘T20 accelerated the process of playing 360 degrees’. And where once such shots were actively curbed by coaches – Roger Twose, a Warwickshire player in the 1990s, was once expelled from the nets for trying the reverse sweep – T20 led coaches to empower players to expand their possibilities, and play in a more natural and instinctive way.

  The intensity of T20 leagues has propelled batsmen to hone their methods against specific types of deliveries – like how to get underneath yorkers and divert
them over the wicketkeeper to the boundary, just as Campbell first did. ‘The ramp shots were always there but now they’re encouraged, they’re explored and they’re experimented with,’ said Trent Woodhill, a long-time batting coach in the IPL. ‘Now players aren’t afraid of what they look like, they’re just concerned now with getting the job done.’

  The freedom – indeed, the necessity – to embrace such thinking in T20 led batsmen to innovate further. In the 2009 T20 World Cup the ramp shot was enhanced by the Sri Lankan batsman Tillakaratne Dilshan. While Campbell played his ramp against balls on the full, which had not yet bounced, Dilshan dared to play his shot against balls that had bounced too. This modification – the Dilscoop – required exceptional hand-eye coordination; Campbell had to predict the right line of the ball before making contact, but Dilshan had to respond to the bounce too, before ducking his head out of the way at the last moment.

  This was only the next phase of batting’s evolution. In the next decade, batsmen like McCullum, England’s Jos Buttler, Australia’s Glenn Maxwell and de Villiers would push the boundaries further. They would not so much perfect one ramp shot as several, using their wrists to deflect it to the right or left of the wicketkeeper depending on where the fielders were. Even more extraordinarily, de Villiers would perfect a reverse ramp – switching his hands around, so that his right-hand would be on top of the bat, as for a conventional left-handed batsman, and then flicking the ball through third man for four.

  During an international career that lasted for 14 years, defying everything from braying Australian crowds to the cauldron of the IPL, de Villiers kept a simple joyful quality to his art. He called this ‘the passion’, sustained by a training regime that was always evolving, and in which he would experiment ceaselessly with new shots. All of this lent itself to an adventurous spirit and zest for self-improvement which, leaning on his youth as a proficient player of other games, led to the remarkable creativity that defined de Villiers’ batting.