by Tim Wigmore
‘Cricket would be six months of the year and then football and then athletics. We would move with the tide. Say for instance if it was an Olympic year, everyone would come outside and go and run. And you’d be Maurice Greene. If there was a football World Cup you’d be Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, whoever. Then cricket came back around. Brian Lara scores runs, today you’re Lara. Curtly Ambrose takes wickets, you’re Ambrose. Courtney Walsh takes wickets, you’re Walsh. That’s how it used to be.’
Sport offered Pollard a retreat from the toil of life in Maloney Gardens as well as the tantalising prospect of an escape. ‘In 2000 one of my friends who I used to play with made the Trinidad and Tobago Under-17 football team. And that was a big achievement for us. Him coming from there and playing for Trinidad and Tobago.’
Pollard was always big for his age which put him at an advantage playing sport. ‘Growing up I was always a bit taller,’ he said. ‘I was a bit skinnier than I am now. But big enough.’ In particular his size made him well suited to boundary hitting. ‘I had a natural ability to hit sixes.’
At secondary school Pollard’s power quickly attracted attention. In 2006, Pollard played for West Indies Under-19s. Later that year he would play the first professional T20 match of his career: for Trinidad and Tobago against the Cayman Islands in the Stanford T20. Pollard did not bat but he bowled and took a wicket. The match was also the debut for leg-spinner Samuel Badree, another player who would change T20 cricket.
It didn’t take long for Pollard to make the step up: in 2007 he made his ODI debut at the World Cup. But while Pollard was breaking through in the Caribbean, the sport’s tectonic plates were shifting. In September 2007 India won the T20 World Cup; months later the first IPL auction was held, exposing players to untold wealth. Only England, who established their fateful relationship with Sir Allen Stanford in the Caribbean, blocked their players from participating. There had never been a better time to be a cricketer, and in particular a West Indian T20 cricketer: uniquely, they had the opportunity to play in both the IPL and Stanford’s million-dollar match.
These two events changed Pollard’s life. First came the Stanford match in November 2008. Pollard took three wickets in the game, helping rout England for 99 before the Stanford Superstars razed the target with 7.2 overs to spare. ‘The first pay cheque when I got huge amounts of money would have been the World Cup but the 2008 Stanford game was a different level.’ Each player on the winning team took home one million dollars. ‘So then life was comfortable and all I had to do was work hard.’
Less than a year later Pollard shot to global acclaim with his brutal fifty in Hyderabad; shortly after he landed an IPL contract with Mumbai Indians worth $750,000. Pollard’s price tag had a profound impact on his attitude towards the game.
‘Going into the IPL, where all the megastars were, as a big-priced player was very satisfying to me,’ said Pollard. ‘That sort of changed my mentality towards cricket – you have to go out there and be that ultimate professional. I think I’ve really, really done that especially in the IPL.’
Being in demand on the T20 circuit set Pollard on a collision course with the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB). The WICB found themselves vying for Pollard’s attention with T20 leagues around the world who could pay him better money, for less time. Pollard wanted to play for the West Indies but he also wanted to play in T20 leagues; being contracted by the WICB meant he had to be available to play for the West Indies at all times and left his availability for domestic leagues controlled by the WICB.
In 2010 Pollard took the widely vilified decision to refuse the offer of a central contract from West Indies after they requested that he made himself available for an A tour of England rather than fulfil his contract with Somerset. ‘It’s a decision that I never took lightly,’ he recalled. ‘It’s something that I sat and thought about.
‘I was in and out of the West Indies team for a bit and I had a decision to make: am I going to back myself to play and go around the world, back my performances, take that chance? Or am I just going to sit back in the Caribbean, wait and see what they are going to do with me and when they are going to do it?’
Both options were lined with risk. The West Indies contract offered far more certainty – locking him in for 12 months, but at $80,000 per year it was worth a lot less. On the other hand, the freelance T20 route was far less secure, with contracts lasting only six weeks and determined at drafts and auctions where vagaries of form and fitness play a large role in selection. But the potential rewards were far greater.
The T20 circuit was still viewed with great scepticism by administrators and many former players, whereas the international circuit was regarded as the arena where reputations were forged. In 2010 the former West Indies fast bowler and commentator Michael Holding, a staunch critic of T20, attacked Pollard because he had not played Test cricket. ‘Kieron Pollard, in my opinion, is not a cricketer,’ he said.
Holding’s view embodied that of many ‘purists’ who valued Test cricket above all else. ‘All these people motivated me quietly without people knowing and understanding the situation,’ said Pollard. ‘You would never understand the situation until you are in the situation.’
One West Indies administrator pointedly asked Pollard: ‘Do you want to be remembered as a legend or do you want to be remembered as someone who is a mercenary?’ ‘I said at this point in time I’ll take my chances and I’ll go around the world, I’ll back myself and I’ll back my ability.’
Pollard continued to play for the West Indies when selected and appeared in more than 100 ODIs and more than 50 T20Is over his career. But he refused his central contract and set himself on a path as a T20 freelancer.
Absent from the large majority of West Indies’ international cricket, Pollard was a case study in what might drive cricketers of the T20 age without the motivation of representing their nation.
‘I think the key for me is three things,’ said Pollard. ‘One is family. Cricket is a way to provide that comfortable life for your family. I had my first kid, Kaiden, when I was young. Everything happened at a young age. The responsibility was always there and the responsibility was on myself. So that in itself keeps me going, knowing that there are other people depending on me to go well in order for them to have a comfortable life and see different things.
‘Secondly is knowing that being a sportsman you can only play cricket for a certain amount of time. You wanna maximise every opportunity that you get. So knowing that now I am 31, 32, it is not going to be as long as when I was 21. So that keeps me in check and wanting to stay fit and wanting to learn and to improve.’
At the heart of Pollard’s choice there was also a universal truth: professional sportsmen wanted to excel and they wanted to win, whichever team they were playing for.
‘The third thing is you always want to do well and be at the top of your game,’ he said. ‘The game is changing. Everything is changing. And you want to change along with it and you want to challenge yourself alongside the younger guys as well. You want to maintain that sort of standard for yourself and have that personal pride in your performance. No matter what team you play for, what competition you play in, you have that willpower to win in anything you are doing. So for me it is about the team and it is about winning.’
By May 2019 Pollard had played for 14 different T20 teams in eight different countries. The boy from Maloney Gardens had become a pioneering, gallivanting T20 cricketer.
‘I got a lot of backlash for it from the media all over the world. I took a lot of licks, I took a lot of punches, I took a lot of different things, but I have lived to see the day where cricketers are leaving international cricket to play T20 around the world when they still have a lot of international cricket left in them. But in order for it to happen someone needed to take the initiative and make the change.’
Across a career spanning more than 450 T20 matches, Pollard had plundered more than 8,000 runs, more than 600 sixes and more than 600 fours, and he had taken mor
e than 250 wickets and 250 catches. Only one man – Chris Gayle – had scored more runs than Pollard and he was seven years his senior, and Pollard had scored his from the lower middle order, where he faced fewer balls and was asked to bat in more varied situations.
Although Pollard was too modest to admit it, T20 had not only made him very rich, but also a legend of the format. Pollard had once been presented with a choice between becoming a legend or a mercenary. He had done both.
‘T20 cricket has given me a lot and that I appreciate daily. To the guys who have belittled T20 cricket and said what they said about T20, it is for them to look now and see what it has become.’
***
The Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur is a cacophony of noise and a kaleidoscope of colour. Horns sound, drums beat, people scream, music blares. Vendors selling popcorn, sweets, chicken and local delicacies squeeze their way through the throngs of people – the ground is at its 30,000 capacity on a sweltering April night. The air is heavy and thick as yet another IPL league stage match lurches towards a frenetic conclusion. The IPL show rolls on.
Four enormous floodlight towers reach high into the night sky, illuminating the insects that buzz in the air and throwing bright light on to the playing area below. It is so loud inside the stadium that there is no use in the fielding captain shouting to move his fielders; instead he waves his arms frantically to capture their attention as if conducting an invisible orchestra.
At the centre of it all and standing at the striker’s end is Brad Hodge, the 37-year-old Australian batsman and Rajasthan Royals’ designated finisher. From the distance of the stands Hodge is just a blue speck – a man in the eye of a storm. The big screen shows him close up: his bat is on his shoulder, his blue shirt – tight against his muscular body – is covered in sponsors. Sweat drips from the peak of his helmet. ‘When you actually walk to the crease you need 12 runs an over. There’s no good feeling,’ said Hodge. ‘There’s nothing good about it at all. You are under pressure. Your stress levels are high and basically it is all up to you.’
If Hodge is stressed then his eyes aren’t showing it: they are alert, darting from fielder to fielder as he surveys the field, but they are at the same time calm: he has been in this situation many times before. Hodge was one of a generation of exceptionally talented Australian batsmen and although he struggled to establish himself in Australia’s teams he carved out a very successful career at domestic level in the T20 format. He is repeating a process that has become second nature to him.
The role of the ‘finisher’ in limited overs cricket was originally defined as much by psychology as by power. In ODI cricket in the 1990s run rates in the last ten overs of the innings hovered around a run a ball. Asking rates such as these were most effectively scaled by batsmen carefully managing risk. As complicated as the skills of batting themselves was knowing when to execute them and against which bowlers. Pakistan’s Javed Miandad in the 80s and 90s and Australia’s Michael Bevan in the 90s and 2000s carved out great ODI careers through their judgement, placement and mental strength more than their boundary-hitting prowess: Bevan, who played from 1994 to 2004, hit just 21 sixes in 9,320 balls in his ODI career, one every 443 balls he faced.
In this era the South African all-rounder Lance Klusener had an unparalleled ability to pummel opposition bowling attacks at the death: he produced a series of extraordinary performances in the 1999 World Cup, when he scored 281 runs for only twice dismissed, and scored at over 70% more than the average during the last ten overs of an innings.
The origin story of Klusener’s astounding tournament lay in an ankle injury he received a year earlier, rendering him unable to bowl and forcing him to return home from a tour of England. This meant that, rather than split his practice time between batting and bowling, Klusener could divert himself entirely to one skill. And, rather than train his batting as normal, Klusener trained for the very specific challenges of batting at the death in a way no player had done before.
Klusener set the bowling machine to bowl in ‘the slot’: either low full tosses or half-volleys, the deliveries that he faced at the end of the innings, when fast bowlers attempted yorkers and erred fractionally. Then Klusener would hit them – again and again and again. ‘It was 500, 600 balls a day in that area, and just hitting them as hard as I could and as straight as possible,’ he recalled. Klusener was also among the first to embrace range hitting: practising hitting sixes from the middle, so he knew exactly what he needed to do to clear the ropes.
‘It’s not just about going and hoping to hit sixes. You have to be clever about how you’re going to do it.’ His method was ‘a combination of power and technique – using your body as much as possible, trying to get your whole body into a shot instead of just hitting with your arms. I worked out that – pretty much like a golf swing – it takes your hips and your core and your shoulders and arms all working at the same time. And that was kind of my theory: if I could hit the ball as I would a golf drive, then that would be the optimum, instead of just hitting with your hands. Hitting a six is, I always say, for me it’s a brutal thing. It’s not a pretty thing. And that was something that I tried to do, hit that ball with my whole body.’
It was a harbinger of what was possible with systematic focus on how to hit sixes and embracing new training methods.
Klusener was also a bowler and fulfilled the role of an all-rounder for South Africa. Finishers being all-rounders was a common theme in the world game – something that perhaps emboldened them with the bat. Assuming two roles for the team meant players were less concerned about losing their wicket and inoculated them from fear that they would be dropped after a couple of low scores, meaning they attacked harder with bat in hand. Of the ten players with the highest strike rate in T20 seven were all-rounders and one was a wicketkeeper.
Although T20 intensified the demands on batsmen and asked them to elevate their boundary hitting, batting at the end of the innings in the early years of the format remained as much about the mind as it was about skill.
T20 exacerbated the psychological challenge faced by the finisher. The shots may have looked spectacular but what was going on inside the minds of those batsmen was also remarkable. ‘It is all about calculation,’ said Hodge. In mere seconds batsmen batting at the death would compute a dazzling array of considerations that enabled them to then play the shots they did with such confidence. ‘Making good decisions under pressure separates the standout finishers from the batters who win you the odd game,’ said Ryan ten Doeschate, who excelled in the role for the Netherlands, Kolkata Knight Riders and Essex. ‘I get excited by the challenge and the chance to find a solution to the equation at hand . . . It’s a bit about managing risk, so if Rashid Khan or Jasprit Bumrah had one over left you might accept a low-risk seven off that over.’
At the centre of these calculations was of course the basic runs and balls equation. It was from this that everything followed. While a team may require, say 40 off 24 balls, a single batsmen will never face all 24 of those deliveries. So the first challenge was breaking it down by batsman.
‘I worked on how many balls I thought I could face,’ said Hodge. ‘If you went in with four overs to go and there’s access to 24 balls, the likelihood is that you’re only going to face 12 or somewhere around that figure and it is about working out how much impact you can have in that period.’
Then it was about breaking those balls down according to which bowler might bowl them and who represented a weak link. ‘Which bowlers of those 12 balls could you actually target a lot harder than someone else? So a more specific match-up that gives you the likelihood that you’ll actually get success more than others.’
For Hodge this was based on self-assessment and understanding his opponents. ‘It was an educated calculation about which bowler I would take down. So when you’re looking at Jasprit Bumrah and Mitchell McClenaghan finishing off the innings and you’ve got 24 balls from those two, the likelihood of taking down Bumrah is slim. So you go
a lot harder against McClenaghan.’
As data analysis played an increasingly prominent role in the game, these match-ups would be informed and guided by team analysts and the management. Rajasthan Royals specifically deployed Hodge as a pace power hitter after analysis in 2012 showed he scored at a strike rate of 157 against the quicker bowlers and just 115 against spin. ‘I actually could have gone harder against spinners but in my own calculations I thought the risk was higher,’ said Hodge, who backed himself to make up ground against the quicks.
Beyond these macro-considerations, batsmen calculated how to manage risk and execute their skills within specific overs and against certain bowlers. Central to this was reading the field and interpreting where it meant the bowler would bowl. With only five fielders permitted outside the 30-yard circle, the location of these boundary riders represented major giveaways as to what lengths and lines the bowler would target. These clues might take young players time to process but for someone such as Hodge it was hardwired. ‘You’ve computed it a number of times. That’s where experience comes into it a little bit and reading the play.’
Batsmen also considered boundary sizes: Northamptonshire, who reached three finals in England’s T20 Blast in four years from 2013 to 2016 despite having one of the lowest budgets in county cricket, bought a measuring wheel from local builders, which they used to measure boundary dimensions at grounds, informing which sides of the ground their batsmen targeted. Generally targeting the leg side boundary when it was shorter was considered optimal – ideally, when hitting with the breeze too.
Managing the strike and reading the field was important when the batsman was partnered with a weak lower order player. ‘Having a peripheral sense of where exactly the fielders are is important, mainly for running between the wickets when you don’t get a boundary,’ said ten Doeschate. ‘I’ll pick areas for every type of ball I’m expecting – like hitting hard behind square if he bounces me, hit inside third man if he gives me width. So it’s very important to know where fielders are and where the better fielders are.’