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| Jonny Bairstow Ducks in both innings @ Motera |
India just beat England in the Motera test in under two days. What happened?
Having watched replays and commentaries over the weekend (because the live cricket is over), my takeaway is that bad batting happened.
Digging a little deeper…
Joe Root gave us the most cogent explanation for why the pink ball used in Ahmedabad behaved differently from the traditional red ball.
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| "Deadly" Derek Underwood Would have loved bowling at Motera |
How did good batsmen counter
this variation? With classic traditional technique.
Traditional batting technique
was meant to deal with uncertainty. Well-schooled batsmen got right down to the
pitch of the ball, got low, “smelt” the ball, kept their bat just in front
of their front pad, played with a straight bat, through the line, into the V, smothered the spin on a good length, and scored big off long-hops
that sat up to be thumped or half-volleys that never got the chance to deviate.
Cutting off the stumps, sweeping on a length, hitting against the spin and
playing from the crease - all behaviours that assume low uncertainty - were all
considered bad batting.
A classically correct English batsman
of an earlier generation, like Dennis Amiss, might have batted for hours at
Motera. Sunny Gavaskar’s 96 against Pakistan in Bangalore was made in much more
challenging conditions. Karnataka’s Brijesh Patel (long considered a better
player of spin than even GR Vishwanath), or Tamil Nadu purists like V
Sivaramakrishnan and TE Srinivasan would have been equipped to deal with the
variation in both pace and speed. VVS Laxman, India’s fourth innings hero on so
many occasions, would have done fine.
Today’s batsmen, our
sixer-hitting reverse-sweeping galacticos, don’t seem to be equipped with these
traditional virtues. Look at the way the top order batters got themselves out.
Kohli, Rahane and Foakes were
out trying to cut length balls on the stumps. Anybody who has played Kumble
could have told them that when the ball is turning just a bit and hurrying on
to the stumps, playing horizontal bat shots is suicide.
Rohit Sharma and Jonny
Bairstow were out sweeping for the length despite the line. Root was out LBW
twice, rooted to his crease instead of either getting fully forward or back.
Pant was out driving through the line of a ball that was just short of a drivable
length. Shubman Gill was out trying to pull a short ball from well outside off.
WTF?!
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| Rohit Sharma was in charge, until he threw it away |
It would be nice if our galacticos also learnt traditional
batting, to supplement their sixer-hitting heroics.
There were also a surprisingly
large number of good batters who missed straight balls. Zak Crawley (who played
beautifully in the first innings) was bowled off the first ball he faced from
Axar in the second. Pujara and Washington Sundar clean missed ordinary looking
length balls from Leach and Root. This looks like batters aren’t sighting the pink
ball, especially when they’re new to the crease.
That is not surprising. It
takes literally years spent out in the middle for an international batter to
train his vision to sight a cricket ball that’s dancing around in space. This
training is cognitive more than optical. “Seeing the ball like a football” is a
cognitive reality. It’s totally natural if a new colour tricks the eye/ mind,
if it is harder to see a pink ball, and therefore impossible to “see the ball like a
football”.
So where’s this going? What next?
I think the Motera test is an argument for playing more pink ball cricket at
the junior, domestic and limited over levels.
The ECB has mandated that each
first-class county plays at least one pink ball game per year. If that doesn’t seem like
a lot, here in India I don’t think any Ranji Trophy games use a pink ball. Without
that experience, the next generation of players will also have to discover the pink
ball only when they reach the international level.
If Root’s insight – that there
is more uncertainty in the path of a pink ball than in either a red or white
ball - is true, I especially like the idea of pink ball cricket in limited
overs games. Test cricket is in perfectly good health (refer Brisbane 2021). Limited
overs cricket needs to shift its balance of power to favour bowlers. Pink
ball games might be a good way to do so.
Finally, from a purely parochial,
partisan viewpoint, one positive thing that the “minefield” at Motera has resulted
in is that the Poms are whingeing again.
Steve Waugh’s invincibles
realised that the only way to beat India in India was by enforcing a strict
no-whingeing rule. This was the discipline that enabled them to come back from
the miracle of Kolkata in 2001, to conquer the final frontier in 2004.
During the first Chennai test
I was a little worried that Root’s team had learnt from Waugh’s success, that
they had trained their minds to enjoy playing in India. But now, with all the whingeing about the wicket, the umpires, the bio-bubble, the rotation policy, their Asian
spinner Moeen Ali “choosing” to go home, etcetera, it feels a bit like the
wheels are coming of the English bus.
England will now play the fourth
and final test with both a series win and/ or a spot in the WTC finals out of
reach. Are they proud enough to play with passion and purpose, in
unquestionably tough conditions, when there is nothing except pride at stake? Or in other words, do they have the relentless intensity of Lloyd's Windies, Waugh's Aussies or Kohli's Indians? Let’s
see.
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| The England Leadership Team Do they have the hunger to fight on in the fourth test? |
