England left to ponder missed chances, no-balls and selection

Andrew McGlashan09-Dec-2021Midway through the opening session of the second day, TV cameras panned to the Gabba nets. Running in were 1,156 Test wickets with James Anderson and Stuart Broad relieved from drinks duty to prepare themselves, you would presume, to be unleashed with the pink ball in Adelaide.In the middle of the ground there was an absorbing contest between David Warner and the pace bowlers England had selected for this opening Test. Warner had already had a life in what would be a charmed innings when he was bowled on 17 by a Ben Stokes no-ball.Warner’s final score, 94, was one run fewer than he managed through the entire 2019 Ashes when Broad was his nemesis. Whether Broad would have got him earlier in this innings no one knows – although surely Warner was happy to not see him at the top of his mark – but England’s incumbent quicks certainly created enough opportunities to claim the wicket.This time, however, it was Warner’s day even though he would fall short of a 25th Test hundred.In the 2019 Ashes, ESPNcricinfo’s data recorded that Warner played 64 false shots among his 10 dismissals – so on average 6.4 per dismissal – whereas on the second day in Brisbane in played 30 false shots, the last of which was spooning a catch to mid-off. On one hand that is a reminder of how extraordinary the previous series was, and the brilliance of Broad, and on other the fine lines that batters tread between success and failure. “Sometimes you just nick everything,” is a phrase you often hear from a batter.Warner had not played first-class since last March and in his two Test matches against India last season he was virtually batting on one leg having been rushed back with a groin injury to patch up the top order. So this was his first Test innings without a physical hindrance since he flayed New Zealand and Pakistan during the 2019-2020 season.David Warner acknowledges the ovation for his half-century•CA/Cricket Australia/Getty ImagesHe was troubled by Mark Wood’s pace and Ollie Robinson’s nibble but played and missed rather than nicking it. Sometimes Wood was just too quick and Warner did not always seem in control of his movements. Stokes found Warner’s edge with his second ball but it evaded the cordon, although as later replays would confirm it was also a no-ball as part of a large picture of missed overstepping highlighted by the absence of no-ball technology.Another edge against Robinson went along the ground and Chris Woakes produced a lifting delivery which was unplayable. Warner had scrapped to 32 off 76 balls during the first session when he twice deposited Jack Leach for six in what was a clear statement of how Australia plan to approach England’s spinners in this series – Marnus Labuschagne and Travis Head would do considerable damage on a chastening day for Leach.When Warner’s edge was found and it carried against Robinson, on 48, shortly after lunch the catch burst through the hands of Rory Burns at second slip to continue a forgettable two days.Further evidence that fortune was with Warner came on 60 when he clipped the ball to Haseeb Hameed at short leg and instinctively set off for a run before realising Hameed had the ball. As he turned to get back into his crease he slipped, lost the bat and was left scrambling outside of the crease only for Hameed’s shy to missWarner went to tea six runs short of a century but did not progress any further when he lobbed a catch to mid-off during a period where England briefly brought themselves back into the contest through Wood and Robinson.On another day, like those he had two years ago in England, this could have been a very different story for Warner. He’ll just hope he hasn’t used up his fortune in his first innings.

Even if you believed Kohli-cam to be the most egregious example of a team game being turned into a personality cult, you might just find yourself missing it

Karthik Krishnaswamy16-Jan-20222:06

Is Rishabh Pant a dark horse to be India’s next Test captain?

They were thirty-sixed in Adelaide, and there was no Virat Kohli for the rest of the series. How did India cope? Rather well, as it turned out.Back spasms ruled Kohli out in Johannesburg, and a younger, quieter stand-in oversaw an unexpected defeat during which, in some eyes, India’s efforts on the field lacked the full-time captain’s energy and aggression. Kohli returned in Cape Town and poured his energy and aggression onto every blade of grass and into the stump mic. India lost in more or less the same way.Captains get far more credit for victory and far more blame for defeat than they ever deserve. They are as good as their teams happen to be, and Kohli’s results across formats are the best of any full-time India captain because he led India’s best-ever team. It’s as simple as that.Well, almost as simple.Related

• Ricky Ponting: Virat Kohli was passionate about continuing as India's Test match captain

• Ravi Shastri not reading much into India's twin losses: 'How can the standard go down suddenly?'

• Bumrah: 'Don't think anyone is in a weird space' with changes in captaincy and coaching staff

• Talking points: Spotlight on Kohli the batter, Rahul's slot, and India's bowling combination

• Kohli resigns as Test captain: Rohit 'shocked', tributes from colleagues pour in

Go back to Kohli’s first-ever Test as captain. Not yet full-time captain, he made – or was involved in making – two decisions that immediately spelled out what his captaincy would be like, and how it would be different from anything that came before.He dropped R Ashwin and played the debutant Karn Sharma, in the belief that wristspin would bring quicker wickets than fingerspin on Australian pitches. Then, on the final afternoon, Kohli kept playing his shots and going after an outlandish fourth-innings target even after India had lost every other recognised batter, this when he had already scored hundreds in both innings and had the chance to pull down shutters and try to bat out a draw.Australia scored at five-and-a-half runs an over against Karn’s legspin over their two innings, and he never played Test cricket again. And Kohli’s willingness to risk defeat in the pursuit of victory ended up in defeat.Seemingly impulsive selections and the preference for the outright aggressive option remained a marked tendency during Kohli’s early years as captain. St Lucia 2016 was a case in point, when India left out Cheteshwar Pujara and M Vijay and brought in Rohit Sharma for his freer-scoring style, which they perhaps desired with the forecast suggesting that significant time would be lost to rain. India won despite an entire day getting washed out, as it transpired, even if Rohit didn’t make a hugely significant contribution to the result.It wasn’t the first or last time Pujara found himself out of the XI following a short stretch of poor form. Ajinkya Rahane would experience this too, during the South Africa tour of 2017-18. It would seem an irony, then, that the last year of Kohli’s captaincy would feature an unwavering belief in Pujara and Rahane despite both experiencing far longer streaks of even leaner form.This reflected, possibly, a tempering of Kohli’s early impulsiveness. Or it perhaps just reflected a greater belief in his two middle-order comrades after they had both proven their ability multiple times in difficult situations, and a recognition that their low averages over a prolonged period may have had as much to do with the bowlers and conditions India were facing, Test match after Test match, as any drop in their ability. Kohli’s returns over the same period were hardly any better.Kohli’s early trigger-happiness, then, may have simply been a consequence of having a younger and less experienced core group of players. As they grew older and more settled in the side, they may simply have become harder to displace. It’s a natural cycle that all teams go through.Shami, Bumrah, Ishant – the pace bowling riches that flourished under Kohli get a doff of his hat•Getty ImagesThe other quality Kohli showed in his Adelaide captaincy debut, however, never changed, and he always remained willing to risk defeat in the pursuit of Test wins. That quality would come to define his captaincy.Nowhere was this more evident than in his consistent use of five-bowler combinations. His predecessor MS Dhoni had also been keen on it, but the fifth bowler was usually someone in the mould of Stuart Binny or Ravindra Jadeja, who in the early stage of his Test career was viewed as a batting allrounder, even if that aspect of his game took longer to live up to its potential than his bowling.In contrast, Kohli played five genuine bowlers in his first two Tests after that 2014-15 Australia tour, when the post-Dhoni era began in full earnest. In Fatullah, he picked three fast bowlers – Ishant Sharma, Varun Aaron and Umesh Yadav – and two spinners – Ashwin and Harbhajan Singh – and if a one-off Test against Bangladesh seems like the easiest assignment for a brave selection, he went in with two fast bowlers – Ishant and Aaron – and three spinners – Ashwin, Harbhajan and Amit Mishra – in India’s next Test in Galle. All five were bowlers first, and for all his ability with the bat, Ashwin had never batted above No. 8 before those two Tests. And with Dhoni no longer in the side, the five bowlers were batting below Wriddhiman Saha, whose batting ability was at that stage largely unproven.It didn’t quite come off in Galle – even though it took a freak innings from Dinesh Chandimal to turn what looked like an inevitable Sri Lanka defeat into an unexpected win – and India tempered their approach as they came back to win the series, with Binny recalled as a hedge-your-bets allrounder. But Kohli had shown his willingness to sacrifice batting depth to heighten India’s chances of picking up 20 wickets, and it would remain a feature of his captaincy.It was fitting then, with Jadeja – now a genuine batting allrounder overseas – out injured, that Kohli’s last Test as captain featured five out-and-out bowlers, with Ashwin and Shardul Thakur making up a hit-or-miss combination of lower-order batters at Nos. 7 and 8.But how much was this down to Kohli, and how much down to Ravi Shastri, in both his stints as head coach? Five bowlers was also a feature of Anil Kumble’s brief and highly successful tenure, during which Ashwin often batted at No. 6. With Kohli out injured for the decider of a tense home series against Australia in Dharamsala, Kumble and the stand-in captain Ajinkya Rahane chose to give the wristspinner Kuldeep Yadav a debut rather than pick a like-for-like middle-order batter.And when Rahane stood in after 36 all out, India brought in Jadeja as a second spinner at the MCG rather than replace Kohli with a specialist batter.Kohli, Shastri, Kumble, Rahane and even Rahul Dravid, then, all seemed to share the same vision as far as picking five bowlers was concerned. And you can see why. It was a sound idea, and India had the players to make it work.In a sense, Kohli was lucky to take over the captaincy when the bulk of those players, particularly a promising group of bowlers, were all just beginning to mature at the Test level. Ashwin, Jadeja, Ishant, Umesh and Mohammed Shami had experienced most of their growing pains under Dhoni.You could argue, however, that Kohli and Shastri laid down the fitness standards that drove those bowlers to become the best versions of themselves. Over the course of their tenures, the fast bowlers went from being able to deliver one spell of high intensity during a day’s play and then losing steam, to being able to come back with the same intensity over multiple spells. Bharat Arun must take some of the credit for their upskilling as well.Ishant exemplified the extent of growth that was possible in this regime. He had averaged 37.30 in 61 Tests until the end of 2014. Since the start of 2015 – which is when Kohli became full-time captain – he has averaged 25.01 over 44 Tests, pitching the ball significantly fuller and closer to off stump than he used to, and rediscovering his inswinger.And as the incumbents became more threatening bowlers, newcomers came in looking like they had already played 20 Tests. One of them, Jasprit Bumrah, was both a once-in-a-generation genius and a product of the BCCI’s system, having been recognised as a prospect as far back as his stint at the National Cricket Academy in 2013, when he began building up the fitness he needed to ensure his body could withstand the demands of his unorthodox action. The other, Mohammed Siraj, was an even clearer product of a smoothly-paved talent pathway, having performed brilliantly on multiple India A tours before making his Test debut.As with everything else, Kohli may have only had a limited role to play in the rise of those two bowlers. But it’s not a knock on his captaincy. It’s just a reminder that a team’s success is the culmination of a number of processes overseen by a number of skilled decision-makers, of which the captain is only one. It’s probably healthier anyway when less power is concentrated in one pair of hands, even if – at the peak of his powers as batter and captain – it seemed as if Kohli was Indian cricket’s biggest power centre.Virat Kohli arrives at India’s training session•BCCIThe aura around Kohli’s captaincy, in truth, was much larger than the actual scope of his role, and this was simply a reflection of how aggressively personality-driven cricket’s marketing and packaging has become. Even Sachin Tendulkar didn’t have a dedicated camera following his every movement to ensure that the producer could bring you every pump of his fist and every raise of his eyebrow. And as the camera sought Kohli out, Kohli played up to it, a symbiotic relationship that filled our screens with frenzied send-offs, fingers on lips to quieten the opposition’s fans, and hands cupped around ears to raise the volume of India’s fans.This, of course, is who Kohli is, even if it’s a hyperreal version of him. Even if that on-field personality’s contribution to India’s results was negligible, it’s the part of his captaincy that will be remembered most fondly – or, if you fall on that side of the divide, with the most distaste. It’s possible that he’ll remain just as expressive when he is no longer captain, but it’s likely that Kohli-cam will play a smaller role in our lives, leaving you with curiously mixed emotions. Even if you believed Kohli-cam to be the most egregious example of a team game being turned into a personality cult, you might just find yourself missing it.

Autobiography provides insight into defining traits of England’s new MD

Matt Roller18-Apr-2022Rob Key was appointed as the ECB’s new managing director of men’s cricket on Sunday. A leading broadcaster for Sky Sports since his retirement from the professional game, Key has often been forthright in his opinions about English cricket and his new role casts a different light on his previous takes.As well as Sky podcasts and columns for the , Key brought out an autobiography two years ago, titled . He told ESPNcricinfo at the time that it contained “a few tales, and a few views on the good things and the bad things” about the game, but with several big decisions due over the next two months, some excerpts now read like Key’s own manifesto.CoachingKey has often been cynical about the value of coaches, to the extent that one chapter of his book is called ‘A Coach is What You Get to the Ground In’. He hinted earlier this year that he believes England should split the role in two: a Test coach and a white-ball coach.”Essentially, there are three types of coaches,” he wrote. “Those who have a positive influence, those who have a negative influence, and those who are neutral. While many coaches would like to see themselves as a positive influence, the truth is, such people are actually few and far between.”Key sees a major difference between coaches at county and international level, suggesting that Peter Moores struggled with the step-up because he failed to take into account that “he was dealing with elite players”. “An international coach is more of a manager,” he writes. “They don’t actually have to do much. In fact, they are better off doing nothing.”Australian coachesKey’s own career was influenced by Neil ‘Noddy’ Holder, the batting coach who encouraged him to keep his backlift high, and John Inverarity, who coached him at Kent. Do not be surprised if he hires an Australian as England’s coach.”Aussie coaches, with their ‘can do’ attitude, certainly offer a refreshing and powerful input,” he wrote. “They have the ability to set off little explosions in your head. When the fog clears, you see everything with absolute clarity.”Steve Harmison, Rob Key and Andrew Flintoff played significant roles in England’s 2004 series win against West Indies•Getty ImagesCaptain-coach relationshipKey will need to ensure that his new Test captain and coach do not clash. “[There is] one absolute truth about the captaincy/coach dynamic,” he wrote. “It’s imperative they’re on the same page.”He details the failings of England’s Ashes tour in 2006-07, and the shortcomings of Duncan Fletcher’s relationship with Andrew Flintoff. “[Flintoff] would still end up trying his very best to make sure that that partnership worked,” he writes. “The question is whether he had any give or take coming back to him.”I know how important co-operative thinking is,” he continued. “As Kent captain, I found Graham Ford a great coach to work with… we had a joint focus on taking the team forward. Because of our shared attitude to betterment, we never really had a clash.”Test captaincyKey was highly critical of Joe Root’s captaincy during England’s Ashes defeat and Ben Stokes is the early favourite to replace him. While some have raised parallels with Flintoff’s ill-fated stint as captain, Key’s own view of his close friend’s time in charge suggests that will not put him off.Related

England have found three good men; they need another two

Shastri: 'In India there is always jealousy and people willing you to fail'

Graham Ford emerges as key contender as England's new Test coach

English cricket desperately needs leaders with a vision for the game

Darren Gough 'surprised' by criticism Joe Root faced towards end of captaincy

“Fred was a better England captain than he – and many others – ever thought,” Key wrote. “The circumstances were tough… he simply couldn’t have picked a worse time to be captain of England. The team had gone from the perfect balance of 2005 to Saj Mahmood batting at number eight. It was always going to be 5-0. They were throwing stones at bazookas.”He is full of praise for Stokes, too, who would fit Key’s idea that a captain should be an inspirational figure. “Since the nightclub incident in Bristol, Ben Stokes has put so much into his game,” he said. “He trains so hard – harder than anyone around him, by a distance. Great talent delivers a focus. It did so for Fred in 2005 and is doing the same now for Stokes. Without the hardship, neither would have reached those incredible high points.”White-ball captaincyKey’s relationship with Eoin Morgan dates back to 2009, when he was captaining England Lions on a tour to New Zealand. “What I found was a cricketer who never missed a trick,” he wrote. “When the coaches asked who should be vice-captain, straight away I said Morgs. I saw somebody who wasn’t willing just to say what people wanted him to say.” They are unlikely to clash too much.Style of playKey favours an attacking style of play in Test cricket, which could spell bad news for Alex Lees, Rory Burns and Dom Sibley. “We accuse people of playing too many shots but as a batsman your only currency in the game is runs,” he wrote. “For some reason, we seem to be happier if people are out blocking.”I admire Trevor Bayliss because is a believer in positive cricket. His view is that it’s possible to defend positively as well as attack. That means committing to the shots, having purpose. Is scoring 10 in a hundred balls all right? I don’t know if it is.”Often players get blamed for losing their wicket by using an attacking mindset, as if they never get out while playing defensively. When Jason Roy was opening in the Test team… pundits were saying there are no good old-fashioned openers anymore. The fact is, we had already tried ten openers, most of whom were exactly that.”Rob Key captained Kent in their promotion-winning season in 2009•Getty ImagesCounty cricketPerhaps Key’s biggest challenge will be leading the ECB’s high-performance review into the domestic game. He has previously outlined a draft schedule for the English season featuring a one-day competition in April, a ‘best of the rest’ first-class tournament running parallel to the Hundred, and three divisions of six teams in the Championship.In , it seems he views the county game through the prism of England’s Test team, rather than something valuable in its own right. “Four-day cricket as a business is completely bankrupt,” Key wrote. “It makes no money and costs a hell of a lot to put on. Compared to other formats, it simply makes zero financial sense.”Championship cricket really has only one card up its sleeve. The TV rights for the game are linked to Test cricket, and Test cricket can only survive so long as there is a production line of players from the Championship.”County cricket exists only because of the money from Test cricket, the England Test team only because of the Championship conveyor belt. They are the ultimate odd couple: worlds apart, but unable to get divorced because they are so utterly reliant on each other.”

The ball is the fundamental unit of cricket, and with Warne, each one was a universe of possibilities

Osman Samiuddin10-Mar-2022If Shane Warne never took another wicket after Mike Gatting’s, he would still live on. Not in as many minds, and certainly not as rich a figure, but a ball like that has its own life. It does not go forgotten. The reason it endures and that it was so instantaneously acclaimed is for what it did in the milliseconds of its existence, the mad physics around it, but also because it was legspin as a platonic ideal.This is, of course, a truism. How else do all the great deliveries become great if not by doing something great? But that ball speaks to a fundamental often overlooked in cricket, which is that, broken down, the game is only the sum of the self-contained vignettes each of its individual deliveries represents. Only when stitched together do we then have a match, unto a series, unto a career. Each ball is a world by itself, of limitations and possibilities, and when you walked into the world of a Shane Warne delivery, you walked into a world with no limitations, where possibilities abounded. In this world the ball could, and did, behave in ways unlike any before Warne existed.Think of the circumstances leading to that ball. It was Warne’s first in a Test in England. Hardly anyone at Old Trafford that day would have seen him before. They might have heard of a new blond leggie who had helped win a Test in Colombo and run through West Indies, but few would’ve seen him. Then, without warning, he did .Related

There's a Warne-shaped hole in this Ashes

Legspinners look back at Shane Warne's ball of the century: 'That delivery will always be the pinnacle'

Facing Warne: the magic, the theatre, and the whole shebang

Shane Warne: the showman who could do hard graft

Shane Warne's greatest hits

And if he could do that, then what couldn’t he do every time he walked up to bowl?In the days since his passing, scouring YouTube for his best moments has been a comfort. Quite likely this has been a universal response. A connoisseur will argue that 90-second videos of only wickets falling is to miss the point of Warne. That experiencing Warne without what Gideon Haigh calls the pageant of Warne is to know of Warne but not to feel Warne.That theatre essential. That walk back to his mark, the occasional pause to fix the field or to let doubts fester in the batter, to make them think something is amiss when nothing is. Then the amble in, so utterly lacking in foreboding it was as if Jaws was coming to shore to the title music of . Then there were the traps, with ball but also with manner. The appeals, the gradual massaging of an umpire into his decision; the bluff of the oohs and aahs and smirks and sneers when he beat a bat, but especially when he found the middle of one. As much as Warne’s wickets, everything before and around them is the eulogy.But these videos make two points, the first a complementary one, that these grand and elaborate ploys and plots needed denouements to match and Warne delivered them with truly freakish quality and consistency. But second, that even as one-off deliveries that may never be bowled again, with no build-up or backstory or history, that only ever exist in bite-sized social media clips, these deliveries work. And how.Look back and weep: MSK Prasad is bemused at what has befallen him in Adelaide in 1999•Hamish Blair/Getty ImagesNot long after Gatting at Old Trafford, Warne would bowl Graham Gooch behind his legs at Edgbaston, coming in round the wicket. It is less iconic but notable because it became a leitmotif in the Warne canon: which other bowler, before or since, has bowled as many batters around their legs as Warne?In a way this dismissal is a legspinner’s ultimate flex. Sneaking in behind a batter is peak deception. And to do it, the ball must do what all leggies are supposed to make it do: spin leg to off and preferably big. The conceit is in treating the batter as if he is not there as an opponent: he’s there as a marker, an obstacle around which to find the best route to the stumps. The calibration needs to be so precise, it’s unfathomable: the angle, the spot where it must land, the degree of turn, all so that it misses pads, bat, and backside. In this instance the angles are even more outrageous because Warne, unusually, runs in from between the umpire and stumps.There’s an over to Craig McMillan that is priceless for how Warne sets his trap (Adam Gilchrist’s cackling provides an assist). But the wicket ball is an absolute WTF for the lengths to which McMillan has gone to prevent being bowled behind his legs. Ultimately, as he bat-pads to short leg, he appears to be playing a forward-defensive to a delivery bowled by the square-leg umpire.In no other sport is there an obvious equivalent to what is happening here. A fleeting kinship with football’s nutmeg? There’s greater consequence and a more acute geometry here, as when Warne famously nutmegged Basit Ali. Typical Warne that the tease – chatting with Ian Healy about whether to have pasta or Mexican for dinner (as if he wanted anything other than pizza) to stretch out the tension of the day’s last ball – is as sweet.Something of this mode, of the wrong-way-round-rightness, is elicited by the epic Roberto Carlos free kick against France in 1997. Carlos eschewed the obvious angle for his left foot by swerving the ball like an outswinger round the outside of the defensive wall, rather than curling it like an inswinger round the other side. That free kick was a one-off: Warne did it repeatedly.The best of the genre isn’t strictly of the genre. Poor MSK Prasad receives a Warne delivery from the wicket that doesn’t drift as much as get caught in a late and sudden patch of violent turbulence, pushing the ball down and to the leg side.A quandary. Prasad has taken leg-stump guard and instinct is telling him to pad this away. Training and tradition are telling him to get real, because balls delivered from there are not padded away. That’s not how cricket works. From flight, fight or freeze, Prasad chooses the last.Even as the ball then hits the stumps behind him and Healy is starting to celebrate, Prasad is unmoved, staring at the spot the ball landed on – around a sixth-leg-stump line. How did it land there, his mind is failing to process, and where has it gone, it is asking. And how did it get spun the ball. Somebody who had never seen cricket could watch a big legbreak from Warne and understand immediately it was an elite athletic feat, sexy and dangerous, compelling and superior, unique and evolutionary. A single Warne legbreak was the game’s gateway drug.As time passed that spectacle became rarer, though not extinct. The most vivid occasions were against left-handers, where, because Warne was at them from round the wicket, and that TV cameras mess up depth perception, some of those balls looked like they were breaking at right angles.Like with Andrew Strauss at Edgbaston, which nearly made it as the ‘s ball of the (21st) century. It would have done, probably, had Strauss not appeared as discombobulated as Prasad had been. Granted, Strauss did not freeze, but in displaying the worst footwork since Elaine Benes hit the dance floor, he tarred the delivery a smidge with his own cluelessness.Not that better positioning helped, as Shivnarine Chanderpaul once discovered at the SCG. He understood the ball’s intentions from the line, so preposterously far outside off that Chanderpaul would need a visa to play it. He knew this was going to spit back into him. Having figured out the length and leaned forward, he changed plans and nimbly shifted his weight on to his back foot. Until this moment – 71 off 67 balls – Chanderpaul’s plans against Warne had worked. Until ball 68, when Mike Tyson’s famous musing about plans came to mind: “Everybody has a plan until they get hit.” Or bowled by Shane Warne.This was a central truth about Warne. Not only did he always have a ball that punched through the opponent’s plans, he had one that punched through his own. As when he pulled off a near-exact replica of the Chanderpaul delivery in bowling Saeed Anwar in Hobart three years later.Like Chanderpaul, Anwar was set. Like Chanderpaul, Anwar knew as soon as the ball left Warne’s hand what it was going to do. Like Chanderpaul, he half stepped out but smartly leaned back, with aspirations to cut. Like Chanderpaul, those aspirations were swiftly turned to crud. Like Chanderpaul, he was bowled. Unlike Chanderpaul, this was the one time Anwar looked inelegant with bat in hand.Hobart heist: in 1999, Saeed Anwar was bowled by one that torpedoed in at a right angle almost, after pitching way outside off•Getty ImagesThere’s an even more cartoonish quality to this ball, an unreal defying of natural laws. For starters, it breaks the width of the Thames to hit leg stump. And ordinarily, when a ball lands on a pitch, it loses speed. This is science and we all signed up to science to understand how the world works. All except this ball. This ball springs off the pitch faster than it landed, so fast that it doesn’t hit leg stump, it knocks it clean out of the ground. A ball produced by a spinner, with the consequence of one produced by a fast bowler.What elevates this ball, though, is Richie Benaud. Prior to it, there’s a commentary preamble from Mark Taylor about the plans Warne might be working on against Anwar. Those plans are binned as Warne switches to round the wicket and bowls this ball. Only Benaud can process and articulate: “Whatever Warne was planning, he has suddenly produced a ball entirely different from the others he has bowled and it has ripped back.”Which is to say, whatever else you had been watching, or not, whatever Warne plan you might have intuited, however much you knew about the game, if you watched this one ball, then you saw everything you needed to and you didn’t need to know anything else.Except this last thing: the flipper. In later years when Warne stopped bowling it, he started relying on the bastardised slider. Not the legbreak that didn’t turn – let’s call that the bluffer – which did for poor Ian Bell at Lord’s and fooled even Benaud. The real slider got Andrew Flintoff later that same innings.Neither was a patch on the flipper, which seemed a hellish delivery to bowl, let alone bowl well. The flipper, Warne would explain, required the ball to be released from an actual snap of the fingers, which was difficult but totally apt because it was presaging magic. Unlike Warne’s big, showy legbreak, this was proper illusion. Batters saw that Warne had dragged it down, except he hadn’t. Batters saw a long hop, or one short enough to cut or pull, except it wasn’t. Batters saw it go straight and it did, except straight never felt so pretzelian.It would be cruel to pick any of Daryll Cullinan’s malfunctions; candy from kids Benaud said of one. It would also be impossible to pick just one. The one that got Richie Richardson, the world’s introduction to it? Cullinan one, two or three? Ian Bishop, ’96 World Cup, a place in the final on the line? Let’s go Alec Stewart, usually such an expert judge and executor of the cut, getting it so wrong at the Gabba. Not as short as he saw, not the legbreak he saw, not as slow as he saw.The flipper also didn’t care for science, such was its acceleration on landing. This question sounds wrong, but it isn’t: has a ball ever beaten batters for pace so comprehensively and so consistently as Warne’s flipper?Nothing does justice to the world of Shane Warne – to the world of a single Warne delivery – as watching these deliveries again the last week has made clear. Maybe they bring some succour. Maybe from them we see that even if Warne had lived long beyond last Friday, these deliveries could not be bowled again by anyone other than him. That even if he is now no longer of this world, we live on gratefully, eternally in his world. Rest in Peace, King.

In Sharjah in 2020, Tewatia produced some of the most unbelievable hitting after surviving Bishnoi. In Mumbai, it happened again

Sidharth Monga28-Mar-2022Rahul Tewatia has shown his utility as a T20 player, but his fate seems to be forever used as a common noun thanks to that Sharjah game two IPLs ago. “Can he do Tewatia?” is often asked when a batter gets off to a desperately slow start in a difficult chase.That indeed was a once-in-a-lifetime turnaround after Tewatia had been 8 off 19, apparently sucking the life out of an exciting chase. He ended up with 53 off 31 that night, providing a counter argument against “retiring out” in T20s. Having said that, not even Tewatia will believe that can be repeated.At Wankhede, in his first match for a new franchise, albeit in a smaller chase, Tewatia found himself in a bit of a similar situation. The opposition captain was the same, KL Rahul. Tewatia was 6 off 10. The requirement was now 68 off the last five. Most importantly, Tewatia’s nemesis was the same: Ravi Bishnoi, who was the main reason Tewatia struggled on that night in Sharjah.Related

• Who is Ayush Badoni? (and where has he been hiding?)

• Archive: Tewatia and the romance of the struggle

• Shami and Tewatia star as Gujarat Titans win battle of new teams

Bishnoi hardly ever spins the ball back in to the left-hand batter. Tewatia was wise to that fact in Sharjah too, which was apparent from how he kept looking to hit long-off and wide long-off, but he couldn’t adjust to the angle and the pace. After missing out on drives down the ground, Tewatia tried the slogs and the sweeps. It didn’t work. Then he tried that reverse-sweep, and his execution was not great. Eventually he managed to hit one six by running down at Bishnoi, but it was clear he couldn’t let Bishnoi dominate him again.Before getting to Bishnoi, though, Tewatia took a toll on Deepak Hooda’s non-turning offbreaks by targeting the shorter leg-side boundary. Now it was Tewatia against Bishnoi, already beaten outside off by the one that keeps going away, one off three the head-to-head. But there were a couple of things in Tewatia’s favour in Mumbai. One, Bishnoi had a wet ball to contend with, and two, he was bowling only his fourth over at the death in his IPL career.This was the first match that Tewatia was facing Bishnoi since that Sharjah game. He knew he couldn’t afford a repeat. Fairy-tales don’t happen again and again. This time he pulled out the reverse-sweep the first ball of the 17th over. It is a shot he sparingly plays. He played it seven times in the 2020 IPL, and four times in 2021. And yet he absolutely nailed it, which suggests he must have worked harder on that shot just for this kind of bowling.”Bishnoi bowled what he has been bowling to me, but after that reverse-sweep he was forced to think,” Tewatia told after the match. “He tried to use the bigger leg-side boundary, but I kept playing my shots.”That one six and the lure of the big boundary made Bishnoi veer from what had troubled Tewatia in the past. He even bowled one wide down the leg side. This innings was no common noun. This was not Tewatia. This was just a smart lower-order batter using whatever he has at his disposal to see through a chase. He will want more such innings to be associated with his name before he is done.

He did struggle at the start but went on to navigate his path smartly, scoring a match-winning 81

Hemant Brar13-Jun-20220:52

Klaasen: ‘I knew we needed to target spinners’

Shreyas Iyer faced 35 balls and still couldn’t figure out a way to score runs on this particular Cuttack pitch. The new ball was moving around. Some of the deliveries kept low as well. Iyer tried to attack but wasn’t successful. Then he tried to time the ball but that too proved futile.His struggle ended only when he edged a legcutter behind the stumps. His 40 was the highest score in India’s 148 for 6.Related

• Resourceful South Africa look to seal series with two to play

• Shreyas Iyer: Our plan is to attack 'even if we keep losing wickets'

• Klaasen's explosive 81 gives South Africa 2-0 lead

• Hardik returns having 'won battles against my own self'

• Ugly is beautiful for Pretorius the batter as he gets going

On the same pitch, Heinrich Klaasen, the man who caught Iyer, smashed 81 off just 46 balls. The next best for South Africa was Temba Bavuma’s 35, which took 30 balls.To many, including Dale Steyn, it looked like Klaasen was batting on a different pitch. But even Klaasen said after the game it wasn’t that easy. So how did he cruise on a pitch where everyone else seemed to be scraping?To say Klaasen didn’t struggle at all would be a lie. He was on 4 off 12 balls at one stage, but he navigated his path smartly. Apart from that, he also had a couple of other things going for him.When he came out to bat, South Africa were in a spot of bother at 29 for 3 in the sixth over. But the silver lining was that Bhuvneshwar Kumar, the only Indian bowler who looked threatening on the night and picked up those three wickets, was already into his third over.At the end of eight overs, South Africa were 36 for 3 and needed another 113 from 12 overs at a rate of 9.41. But Klaasen’s onslaught brought the equation down to 60 required from eight overs at a comfortable 7.50 runs per over.His best shot, arguably, still came against a seamer. In the 14th over, Hardik Pandya bowled one full on the off stump. It wasn’t easy to get under it and find the elevation but with a whip of the bottom hand, Klaasen sent it sailing over long-on. Two overs later, he killed the contest by hitting Chahal for two more sixes.What Klaasen’s innings also did was it allowed Bavuma to play the anchor’s role. The two added 64 off 41 balls for the fourth wicket. Klaasen’s contribution in that was 49.Then Klaasen and David Miller forged 51 off 28 balls for the fifth wicket. There too Klaasen was the dominant partner, scoring 32 off 17 balls. Given the small target, those two stands were all South Africa needed.This knock comes at a crucial juncture in Klaasen’s career. Before Sunday, Klaasen last played international cricket at the 2021 T20 World Cup. Since then, he has been dropped from the ODI side, and earlier this year, he also lost his central contract. He wouldn’t have played here either had Quinton de Kock not injured his wrist.”It’s a blessing from above that this innings came at this time for me in my career,” Klaasen said after the game. “That puts me on the map ahead of international cricket. So hopefully this will just prolong my career a little bit longer.”

Signings of Pollard, Narine adds experience to depth as county seeks to emulate 2003 title

Matt Roller08-Jun-2022The Kia Oval is described as ‘The Home of T20 Cricket’ on advertisements around South London, a strapline which nods not only to the strong crowds that the Vitality Blast attracts in Kennington but also to Surrey’s status as the first county to truly embrace the format.They were the Twenty20 Cup’s inaugural champions back in 2003, and reached Finals Day in each of the first four seasons. It feels like an anomaly that they have only reached the knockout stages four times in the last 15 years, a bizarrely poor record for a club with such deep resources.This year, in the competition’s 20th season, they look set to put that right. Along with Lancashire, they are one of two unbeaten teams in the country, with four wins and a no-result from their first five games, and the depth of their squad is unrivalled. Even with Ollie Pope and Ben Foakes away on Test duty, Rory Burns and Gus Atkinson cannot get in the side while Jordan Clark and Dan Moriarty have played only once each.Back in the early years, Ali Brown starred with the bat and Nayan Doshi with the ball, but there were contributions throughout a dynamic, versatile squad, with Adam Hollioake, Rikki Clarke and Azhar Mahmood all used as genuine allrounders. The current side bears more than a passing resemblance: in home games against Gloucestershire and Hampshire last week, their side featured eight bowling options and had so much batting depth that Jamie Smith – the talented young wicketkeeper-batter – was due to come in at No. 9.It is a substantial turnaround from their fifth-placed finish last year which saw them miss out on the quarter-finals. They used 21 players last season with availability presenting major issues and while England’s ODI series in the Netherlands will see them lose Sam Curran, Jason Roy and Reece Topley, they look significantly better-equipped to cope this time around.Curran has been the star man to date as both their leading run-scorer and wicket-taker while filling two crucial roles in the side: he has taken the new ball, nipping the ball around in helpful early-summer conditions, and has batted at No. 3 with complete licence to go hard, evidenced by a strike rate of 170.31 when facing spin.Kieron Pollard and Sunil Narine are Surrey’s T20 overseas players•Getty Images for Surrey CCCBut the biggest impact has been the addition of three Caribbean-born players with over 1,250 T20 appearances between them: Chris Jordan, who returned to his old club over the winter as T20 captain after nine seasons with Sussex, and two undisputed legends of the shorter formats in Sunil Narine and Kieron Pollard, long-time Trinidad and West Indies team-mates.Narine, playing county cricket for the first time, has started remarkably. His 16 overs to date have cost 76 runs including only three boundaries, with teams simply looking to play him out; in the win against Hampshire last week, he hit 52 off 23 balls from No. 6, including 22 off 5 against Mason Crane’s legspin.Pollard has been quieter, with two brief innings, one wicket and a superb catch his only contribution to the scoreboard and a minor knee injury limiting his involvement. But when he has played, his impact as a senior player has been obvious, in regular discussion with bowlers from mid-on and with his partners while batting.

What a catch from @KieronPollard55

The celebration isn't too bad either #Blast22 pic.twitter.com/NlAB3G0m68

— Vitality Blast (@VitalityBlast) June 2, 2022