Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  ‘T20 they’ve seen it – I like that, three weeks’ work. That fits well with me wanting to socialise in between and they gravitate towards it a lot more and it’s having an impact on batting in the longer forms of the game but I’m not complaining. The guys are excellent at it. I think really to sum it up, each generation in the Windies has built on the previous T20 marketers – led by Pollard, Bravo, Narine, Badree, who were at the forefront – because it sits so well with our athleticism and attention spans.’

  ***

  The West Indies squad gathered in Dubai at the end of February 2016 in turmoil. The relationship between the players and the board had disintegrated so much that the players had considered pulling out of the looming T20 World Cup. In an age of teams preparing for T20 ever more meticulously, the West Indies had only played two T20 internationals in the previous year – the fewest of any side in the tournament.

  Yet they still retained a belief that they would thrive in India. ‘Marlon Samuels doesn’t talk very much,’ recalled Phil Simmons, then the West Indies coach. ‘I remember early on, in the camp in Dubai, we had a chat as a team. He said: “Gents, let’s go and take what’s ours.”’

  Shortly afterwards, on the eve of their opening game in the tournament, Dwayne Bravo even dared to compare the current side with esteemed teams of yore. ‘The way the West Indies goes about its T20 game, the manner in which we like to dominate the format, is much how we dominated Tests in the 1980s . . . We see it as our baby.’

  The West Indies weren’t just damaged by their relations with the board. They also suffered from missing Kieron Pollard and Sunil Narine, two T20 greats, from the tournament. And while Chris Gayle eviscerated England with a century in the opening game, he only contributed 13 runs in the remainder of the tournament.

  Ordinarily, players of such calibre being absent or out of form would have been debilitating. Yet, while most countries had two or three power hitters, the West Indies had almost a squad’s worth.

  Omitted from the original squad, Lendl Simmons, another Trinidadian – and Phil’s nephew – landed in Mumbai two days before the semi-final against India. He had already thrived on the ground in the IPL, and was the top run-scorer for Mumbai in their IPL victory in 2015.

  At the start of his innings, Simmons had a confrontation with Virat Kohli. ‘When he fielded, he said something to me, and I said to myself, “I’m going to show you you’re not the only good batsman,”’ Simmons said, believing that Kohli kept throwing the ball to his end to try to get under his skin. ‘That’s the way he is. He’s very arrogant, he’s very aggressive when he fields, and when he bats as well. He’s just a very aggressive person.’

  The feud ‘really urged me to bat the way I did – to show him that he’s not the only one who can do it,’ Simmons said. ‘When India chase, one of their top batsmen bats deep – that was my role, batting in the middle overs, especially because I play spin well. I knew they didn’t have any good death bowlers, so with Russell, Bravo and Sammy to come once we passed the middle overs, those guys could always come out and finish.’ Russell marmalised India’s death bowlers, after Simmons – who made 82 not out, abetted by twice being caught off no-balls – had set up the Mumbai heist.

  ‘I had some chances going my way, but such is life: every cricketer has his day and you just need to cash in when it is your day.’ This distilled the West Indies’ approach to T20 innings building: with so many players capable of playing in such an ebullient way, they avoided over-dependency on any individual, and liberated each other to attack.

  The West Indies had shown themselves not just a better T20 team than their opponents, but a radically different one. India’s approach was built upon minimising dot balls and maximising twos; Ajinkya Rahane was recalled to the side to provide solidity and did exactly that, taking 35 balls over 40 runs as opener, setting up India’s 192 for 2, but the West Indies recognised that it was under par.

  Before the semi-final, the West Indies’ data analysis found that the pull shot was the most effective shot at the Wankhede Stadium. These findings led the West Indies to focus on bowling full, outside off stump and take the pace off the ball to cut off India’s supply of boundaries. While India’s total was ostensibly imposing, the West Indies realised this was not the case on such a high-scoring ground.

  It showed the shrewdness of the West Indies’ bowling attack – an easily overlooked, but indispensable, component of their success. This had the adaptability to suit all conditions but, with a preponderance of spinners and bowlers adept at bowling slower balls, was particularly well suited to conditions in Asia, where the 2012, 2014 and 2016 T20 World Cups were all played. Across these three tournaments, West Indies ranked among the three most frugal sides during the first six overs and the middle overs, and in the final five overs they were the very best. Here, perhaps, was another legacy of Caribbean windball and grassroots culture: bowlers were uniquely prepared to maintain a semblance of order amid all the bedlam at the death of the innings.

  When it was their turn to bat at the Wankhede, in defiance of all received wisdom, the West Indies’ batsmen played out 50 dot balls to India’s 27. They made up for it by hitting 146 runs in boundaries to India’s 92, with 11 sixes to India’s four. These exposed how India had overvalued wickets, and left their batting resources unused.

  As balls whizzed off Caribbean bats like fireworks set off into the night sky it reflected a batting approach that prioritised strike rate over average. ‘It’s calypso cricket,’ Lendl Simmons said. ‘It’s because of the way we play our cricket – we are aggressive, very sprightly and that’s how we are . . . T20 is right up our alley.’

  ***

  In a preview of the 2016 T20 World Cup, the English commentator Mark Nicholas denigrated the West Indies’ chances. ‘West Indies are short of brains but have IPL history in their ranks,’ he wrote for ESPNcricinfo.

  ‘That comment really set us off,’ captain Darren Sammy said before the final. ‘It’s really emotional, for somebody whom I respect and have a good rapport with generally, to describe our team – who two [four] years ago were world champions – as guys with no brains. That’s really out of order.’

  Nicholas’s words illustrated how the West Indies’ shrewd thinking was widely overlooked. While their extraordinary capacity to hit boundaries created the seductive impression that their success was simply a triumph of raw talent, that obscured the deep planning underpinning the team.

  ‘T20 is such a fast game that it needs sharp thinking. In Test cricket you come off at lunchtime and you talk to the players,’ explained head coach Phil Simmons. ‘You have to be a lot more precise because you have no time for adjustments. In Test matches you assess by sessions; in one-day cricket you assess by overs; in T20 now you assess by balls. Every ball is an event. Every ball, you have to assess what is the situation for the next ball.’

  In 2015, the Caribbean Premier League enlisted the analyst Gaurav Sundararaman, who had previously worked for IPL teams, to be a consultant for all franchises in the competition, providing data for teams who requested it. The Barbados Tridents coach Desmond Haynes, a leading member of the great West Indies team during the 1980s, was particularly enthusiastic. ‘Desmond Haynes was the man who backed me. He’s a big believer in data and analytics.’ Haynes used Sundararaman’s findings to inform strategies, like uncovering that all the sixes in St Kitts tended to be hit in one direction, leading to spinners only bowling from one end. Barbados reached the final.

  During the CPL, Sundararaman met Phil Simmons, who was also taken by his work. At Simmons’s suggestion, the West Indies hired Sundararaman for the T20 World Cup in 2016.

  Every day during the tournament, Simmons would chat to Sundararaman. They discussed ‘match-ups’ – the best and worst player v player combinations between West Indians and the teams they were playing – the ground characteristics, a par score and second-guessed what the opposition would do, and how best to counteract it.

  ‘He was a very good
help in going through the opposition and things that we could try on different grounds. The thing about data is it’s how you use it. Our players used it very well,’ Simmons reflected. ‘The main thing is to assess the opposition and know that we as a team know where their strengths are and where they want to score their runs and where they will bowl to us. The second part is you can look back and see what we’ve done in the past games and how people bowl to us, helping us to see what we needed to improve on.’

  Data informed the West Indies’ decisions during the tournament. They knew that South Africa struggled against spin, so played an extra spinner and used Chris Gayle’s off spin for three overs against their left-handers; the West Indies spinners bowled ten overs in this match. Andre Russell’s poor economy rate at the death led to him bowling earlier in the innings. When batting, Russell was told to anticipate the slower ball, which had dismissed him 15 times in T20 in 2015; he did so spectacularly during the epic semi-final run chase against India. They also opened with a spinner, Samuel Badree, in every match; spinners are consistently more economical than quicks in the opening overs.

  While Simmons acted as a funnel for the data – telling the players only what was really important and actionable information – some players used data particularly extensively. ‘What needed to be shared they took it on board and used it well.

  ‘Everybody’s different. I have some players who live by it and now they have it on their phones – you could put all the data to their phones and they would sit at it and look at it at night. You have some players who just back their talent and come up on the day and say, “I’m going to bowl wide yorkers and bumpers and it’s going to go how it goes.”’

  One player who looked at data on his phone was the belligerent all-rounder Carlos Brathwaite. ‘Obviously you do your homework, you set your plans, and you try to think of what plans they have for you and how you would counter-attack that.’

  Simmons found analysis especially useful for their bowlers. ‘It’s got to the stage where bowlers look at batsmen – he always moves on the first ball, or he always goes deep in his crease after three dot balls.’

  ‘We just looked at the data for the grounds and tried to match it to the wickets and what the pitch looked like to work out a par score,’ Simmons recalled. ‘I think 187 or something was the par score for the Wankhede so we had no issues with that. In the dressing room we said they need to score 210 for us to be in trouble. So we were very calm.’

  Paradoxically, perhaps the biggest triumph of data lay in six hitting. As teams were seldom bowled out in T20, embracing a higher degree of batting risk – by trying to hit more sixes – was prudent. The West Indies recognised how batting brutality could render dot balls or sharper running irrelevant. The six trumped all else.

  ‘People say we don’t rotate our strike well – we will talk about that,’ Sammy said before the final in 2016. ‘But first thing is you have to stop us from hitting boundaries. That has been difficult for oppositions once we get in that swing.

  ‘I think since the inception of T20, you’ve seen West Indies is a boundary-hitting team so that’s no surprise for me.

  ‘We built a big-hitting team with the players that we had. Because of the way we played we had to score more boundaries than the other teams,’ Phil Simmons explained. ‘We have always been known to be boundary hitters and we knew that we had boundary hitters down to number eight.

  ‘In the grounds in India especially where we played the semi-finals, we backed our strength which is boundary hitting . . . At the beginning we decided that we were good at chasing because when we batted first there was a lot of pressure on us to go big early on. But when we chased we could do that later on because of our ability to hit boundaries – with the likes of Russell, Sammy and Bravo lower down, we had a lot of firepower so we just nailed it on that we were going to chase as much as we could.’

  The team were unconcerned about allowing far more dot balls than their opponents. ‘We didn’t worry about it too much because we knew we could make it up. If Chris Gayle plays out 20 dots in 60 balls he’d still have 100.’ For the West Indies, Simmons said, ‘The T20 game has made ten an over for the last six or ten overs a walk in the park now.’

  The trade-off inherent in the West Indies’ batting style – accepting a high number of dot balls, reasoning that the number of boundaries would more than make up for it – is ‘a high risk and high reward approach. They’re very rare players,’ said Sundararaman. ‘They don’t worry too much about wickets. They were able to hit sixes. The way T20 has evolved, if you’re not able to hit sixes, you’re not in the game.’

  Shortly after their semi-final victory, coach Simmons tweeted: ‘Awesome display by this group [of] men with no brains, imagine if we had some’.

  What came together in the tournament, he said, was ‘the want, the desire, the experience and the knowledge that this is the way we have to play.’

  ***

  In the final at Eden Gardens, Gayle was out to his second ball, and Simmons to his very first. In a game that oscillated as wildly as a classic Test match, Samuels played magnificently, evoking his match-winning innings in the 2012 final, driven by a feud with Ben Stokes. During Samuels’s 85, Simmons kept being reminded of his words in Dubai before the tournament: ‘It stays in my mind, just that statement from him.’

  But Samuels was lacking for support. Enter another replacement in the squad – Brathwaite, who arrived at the crease with the sum total of 25 international T20 runs in his entire career, and with some guffawing at his new £420,000 IPL contract. From only his fourth ball Brathwaite demonstrated he had finesse to match his power when he scooped a ball from David Willey for four.

  Six balls later, in the cauldron of a steamy Eden Gardens, England had 19 to defend from the final over, entrusted to regular death bowler Ben Stokes.

  ‘We are standing at the end of Stokes’s mark talking about the three balls that he can bowl,’ England captain Eoin Morgan recalled of the conversation they had before Stokes’s first delivery. ‘So with the field that was set he could bowl a straight yorker, wide slower ball or a bouncer. And he bowled really well at the death throughout the whole tournament and he went to start with a yorker.’

  Stokes ‘was just thinking about me, what I wanted to do,’ he later told the Daily Telegraph. ‘I knew if I got six yorkers in the blockhole they were only going to get eight or nine runs maximum and we would win.’

  As he prepared to face the final over, Brathwaite ‘was numb. It was a state that I’ve only reached a couple times since . . . I had a clear mindset, I just watched the ball and allowed my instincts to react.’

  Stokes missed his first yorker by a fair way, and Brathwaite swatted it over the fine leg boundary for six.

  ‘It can happen to any bowler,’ Morgan said. ‘So once that happens, we are at the end of his mark and we talk about what he is going to bowl next and you can always tell a bowler is in the right space when he says, no, that’s my fault I need to get it right. I’ll go again. And that’s nice and you run away and watch again.

  ‘And the second ball wasn’t that bad a ball, it was a great shot.’ Stokes had missed his yorker again, but only fractionally this time and Brathwaite – with a perfect swing of the bat – dispatched it over wide long on for six. ‘And then you meet before the third and then it’s 12 off two [in this over] and so they need seven off four. So it was a matter of trying to take a wicket then so we took his length back and went into the wicket. And that didn’t work out and he hit it out of the ground again.’

  With the West Indies’ analysts, Brathwaite had been planning for this moment for weeks, going back to before the opening group match with England. ‘We knew Ben Stokes and Chris Jordan bowled very good yorkers – sometimes straight, sometimes wide – and in that situation it was about repeating that again. So I knew the long boundary was to the leg side, and if he did bowl a yorker it would be straight, or the plan would be into the wicket.’

  A milli
metre too short here; a millimetre too wide there. It was enough for Brathwaite to plunder four imperious strokes that were beautiful in their brutality.

  Three of the four sixes smoked off Brathwaite’s bat were to the leg side. Deliberately targeting the longer boundary: it was a novel approach that epitomised the audacity of the West Indies’ T20 cricket.

  EPILOGUE

  32 PREDICTIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF T20

  For all its evolution since 2003, T20 still has a very long way to go. The tumult of the early years of the IPL has given way to acceptance of T20’s place. This has precipitated a rise in advanced thinking around the format that has represented the beginning of a strategic and technical revolution. Yet the speed and efficiency of change is only going to accelerate in the years ahead, as teams, management, coaches, players, the media and fans become more familiar with the game and its subtleties – and the financial incentives to win increase. All the while, there will continue to be innovation off the pitch in how the sport is structured. Here are 32 predictions for the years ahead.

  Greater specialisation in formats

  As understanding of T20 deepens it will become increasingly acknowledged that T20 and Test cricket are so different that they are essentially different sports. Although there are still 22 players on a 22-yard pitch with six stumps and a leather ball, the offensive and defensive players are inverted.

  As awareness of these differences becomes increasingly apparent and as the game – particularly T20, still in its nascent years – continues to evolve, the gulf is likely to widen. Very few players will be able to master the skills required to succeed in both Tests and T20. The ODI format, meanwhile, is likely to represent the middle ground.