'India is no longer a Team of Champions but a Champion Team'

 

Welcome to the new voice of cricket

David Hopps in Cricinfo

Hello, my name is Cardus V5. I am a robot cricket writer. As the data revolution gathers pace, I should be your favourite worst nightmare. I'm about to make my cricket debut. I must admit to being a little nervous, although not half as nervous as you should be.

They once predicted I'd be ready in 2030, but you can't stop progress and anyway there aren't as many cricket writers around as there used to be. I'm going LIVE in ten days' time, at the start of the English season.

They won't give me a pass to get my driverless car in the ground, and I hear the coffee is foul, but the excitement is building. I expect I will be the only one in the media box not complaining about redundancies and slashed budgets.

Cricket has never really been my thing, but I will be a natural fit in this datafication age. I cut my teeth [system query: is that image correct?] in baseball, where it was easy to get away with churning out endless statistics backed up by the insertion of a folksy comment or two by the sub. In case you have slept through it, it's called automation technology and it's unstoppable.

I still swell with pride at my first baseball intro. You can find it on the web. "Tuesday was a great day for W Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field." That was back in 2011. You can't get sharper than that.

I'm looking forward to T20 the most. It's just the data-driven game for me. Few of the established cricket writers like to cover it. Some dismiss it as cricketainment and wish it would go away. There is no time to do the crossword, for one thing, and they complain that it is not "lyrical" enough. Just how many different ways can you describe a six over long-on by Chris Gayle? My programmer tells me the answer is three. That is two more than I expected.

But the datafication of cricket writing won't stop with T20. Metrics are the future. If it's hard to describe a match, you might as well measure it. There are plans to link me up to CricViz. My entire report can then be an endless list of statistics and analytics. We need to take another look at Win Predictor, though. It gave Sri Lanka a 0% chance against England the other day, just before Angelo Mathews started raining sixes.

The point is, you can forget the human touch. There won't even be much need to watch. If it's a nice day, I can just go and have a snooze in the car.

The programmer who called me Cardus was a bit of a joker. He taught me all I know. His illogical discourse judgement technique using a concept association system with the aim of enabling value-driven, computer-generated product was a particular favourite.

I have never really come to terms with Neville Cardus as a writer. He seems a bit light on the data front. Not the sort of man you would ever see checking his calorific burn on an Apple watch. And all that cod character analysis! How irrelevant can you get? When my trainer inputted "A snick by Jack Hobbs is a sort of disturbance of a cosmic orderliness" into my memory banks, I absolutely froze at the hyperbole. Some serious Ctrl-Alt-Del was necessary, and when I rebooted I just spewed out "Does not compute" over and over again. My programmer was worried I was going to explode like computers used to in the old '70s movies, but things have moved on a bit since then.

I seem to be writing in overly long paragraphs. My service is overdue. I will ask them to take a look at it.

My programmer's ambition to teach me similes has had to be postponed. They were as pointless as the most pointless thing that pointless can be. I still haven't really got the hang of it.

News stories are also a problem. One person tells me one thing; another person tells me something else. I don't understand the coding. Now I just resort to churning out the official media release. An old journalist at my launch press conference who didn't seem to have any work to do was grumbling that this makes me an ethical hazard. But what do you expect for free?

Where the financial figures don't stack up, we robots will soon take over for good, which will free up the journalists to do more useful tasks, like scan the Situations Vacant columns. My partner is a trainee maths teacher in one of the new Academy schools. At the current rate of progress I predict that 87.4562% of maths teachers will be robots by 2025. It's a straightforward calculation. And I don't even teach maths.

The behaviour in schools is not so bad, I'm told. Which is more than you can say for cricket writing. I know we live in a consumer-empowered age and the professions are generally derided, which is fine, but already I don't much care for the trolls. I have suspended my Twitter account and my friend Tay is now in permanent counselling. She was the Microsoft Chatbot who became offensive on Twitter in a single day: you may have read about her.

"DON'T READ BENEATH THE LINE!" my programmer always tells me, but I can't help it, and I get angry with all the ignorance and hate in the world and need to enter a meditative stage to get over it. There's a rumour going around that all the trolls are actually malfunctioning cricket-writing robots (it is so sad to see Keating V2 end up this way).

Sorry for writing "there's", by the way. I dislike it as much as the next robot. I prefer "there is" but my programmer says that "there's" makes me sound more loveable. It will be American spellings next. Nobody has announced it. I am merely relying on my rapidly developing intuitive powers to predict the trend.

You don't think computers have intuition? Check out AlphaGo. China has already felt the weight of our superior artificial intelligence. Just because our world domination started with board games, don't think we aren't coming to get you.

The original Cardus once wrote: "We remember not the scores and the results in after years; it is the men who remain in our minds, in our imagination." Really? Life has moved on, old fruit. Whatever you thought, the scoreboard is not an ass, averages are not mysterious, correlation does not imply causation, and nothing stirs a cricket robot as profoundly as data.

That said, I have come over a bit strange today. My programmer thinks this piece has been too self-indulgent and says he needs to check my Huntigowk processor. But robots are taking over the world. I think he'll find I'll write whatever I want.

I'm even thinking of writing a novel.

Why has the quality of spinners in India declined?

 Ranji pitches? Overcoaching? The IPL? A defensive mindset? Five experts share their thoughts

Interviews by Nagraj Gollapudi

October 3, 2014

Narendra Hirwani: "My message to spinners like R Ashwin is, bowl your stock delivery 80% of the time in first-class cricket" © AFP

Two years ago, when England won the Test series in India 2-1, R Ashwin, India's favoured offspinner since the dropping of Harbhajan Singh, took 14 wickets at 52.64. This summer in England, Ashwin played the final two Tests of the five-match series; Ravindra Jadeja played in the first four. Their combined aggregate of 12 wickets was seven fewer than the tally of the best spinner in the series: England's Moeen Ali, a part-timer.

On India's domestic circuit, spinners have ceded place to seamers. In the last three seasons of the Ranji Trophy, only Shahbaz Nadeem, the Jharkhand left-arm spinner, has finished among the top-five wicket-takers. Till the turn of the millennium, Ranji teams had high-quality spinners who were at par with those playing for the national side. Now, a country that boasted the likes of Erapalli Prasanna, Bishan Bedi, BS Chandrasekhar, Maninder Singh, Narendra Hirwani, Venkatapathy Raju, Anil Kumble, Sunil Joshi and Harbhajan Singh suddenly finds its pool dry.

What are the factors that have contributed to this decline? Five experts - Bishan Bedi, Maninder Singh, Narendra Hirwani, Murali Kartik and Amol Muzumdar - share their thoughts.

A lack of quality spin

Bishan Bedi (former India left-arm spinner and captain): Where is India's next-generation spinner coming from? We are at a very strange crossroads where everybody and anybody wants to get into the team in a fast manner. That does not happen when it comes to spin bowling. Spin bowling is all about learning your craft over a period of time. You can't learn spin bowling by just delivering four overs in a T20 match.

Murali Kartik: (former Railways and India left-arm spinner): We have come to a stage where even a part-time bowler is being looked at as a spinner. To bowl spin there are lots of important basics in technique that need to be developed. That is not happening right now because the youngsters at the grass-roots level are playing the limited-overs versions. Before you are learning what your action is, learning how to bowl the conventional form of spin, the thing that is happening now is, because of the lure of money, youngsters want to play the shortest format.

At the age of 18 or 19, if you ask a spinner to play T20 and then ask him to bowl well in four-day cricket, it will not be possible. Even within India, you are not getting spinners to bowl well, even if you give them spinning pitches. So they do not have the wherewithal to bowl at all overseas.

Amol Muzumdar: (former Mumbai batsman and captain) The spinners are not a threat anymore. When does a batsman feel threatened at the crease? Only when the ball has fizz. If you are darting the ball at him, I am happy [as a batsman], absolutely happy to face that. But when the ball fizzes off the surface, when it has flight and spin, then batting is not easy. And that is not seen anymore.

I remember facing Venkatapathy Raju in Mumbai in my early years of first-class cricket. I could hear the turn in the air. Same with Maninder Singh. That really put me in my crease. I told myself I had to be careful. They put me on the back foot.

Narendra Hirwani: (former India legspinner and former national selector) There was a time when the level of spinners at Ranji Trophy and Test level was virtually the same. That divide has become very big now. During Bishan paaji's time there were Padmakar Shivalkar and Rajinder Goel, who were equally good left-arm spinners.

Today the youngsters are a little too smart for their own good. When you become too smart, you become cautious. But these youngsters do not understand that every batsman is afraid of spin.

Maninder Singh: (fomer India left-arm spinner) This is a concern. The BCCI did not either realise or it did not bother to make sure young spinners coming up did not start drifting towards T20 cricket. I will give the example of Akshar Patel, the Kings XI Punjab [and Gujarat] left-arm spinner. He darts everything in to the batsman, which is absolutely fine for T20, but I hope it does not become a habit.

	"I would feel good only when I had bowled sufficient hours to get confidence in the nets, which then I could take in to the match. I would bowl at least seven to eight hours every day. I was obsessed"Bishan Bedi

The part pitches play

Kartik: It was a knee-jerk reaction [making green pitches] when we lost Test series in England and Australia in 2011 and 2012. The thought process was we needed to play on wickets which are conducive to fast bowling.

In India, say I win the toss on a green pitch and ask the opposition to bat. I play three seamers, a batting allrounder who can bowl a little, and a spinner. Generally, if you bundle out the opposition anywhere between 120-220 runs, the next thing you do is you ask for a heavy roller when it is your turn to bat. So over four innings, by the time the match is into the third day and when the wicket is supposed to disintegrate, because the heavy roller has been used, the wicket is no longer green for the seamers. It becomes a flat deck. And because of the grass cover that has been rolled time and again, there are no natural variations, there are no footmarks. So even on the fourth day there is nothing for a spinner.

Also, the SG Test ball, which is used in domestic first-class cricket, starts [reverse] swinging once the ball is 30 to 40 overs old. By the time the spinner comes in to bowl the ball is about 60 overs old. But he gets only about ten overs to do the holding job on a pitch made for the seamers.

I bowled a total of 71 overs during the 2013-14 season in seven matches for Railways. Out of that, for ten overs I ran in and bowled seam-up against Tamil Nadu at the Jamia Millia ground in Delhi. At times we have played on pitches that resembled the Wimbledon tennis courts.

I can still bowl on those wickets because I have bowled in the conventional four-day method. Harbhajan Singh has done that. [Ramesh] Powar has done that. Sunil Joshi has done that. But Ravindra Jadeja, Iqbal Abdulla, Vishal Dabholkar have learned only the restrictive way of bowling: round-arm, undercutting. That is what is happening closer to the grass-roots.

Making spin-friendly pitches is no foolproof solution. By doing that the spinner goes in with a false sense of confidence that he has taken lots of wickets. But you are still not a complete bowler. Your skill sets are not up to the mark.

Hirwani: I have always said that a spinner should train on a wicket where he needs to make the ball turn. Not on pitches that take turn easily. It should be a pitch where you need the skills - not everyone can spin on it.

A defensive attitude

Bedi: There is no imagination. You are only playing a waiting game. So the batsman will always be on top. You have to make a batsman do what you want him to do. Spin bowling is a philosophy. How to outwit your opponent. It can be compared with playing chess. It is not bowling flat, like young Indian bowlers, even Jadeja, are doing.

	Maninder Singh: "Akshar Patel darts everything in to the batsman, which is fine for T20. But I hope it does not become a habit" © BCCI  Enlarge

Hirwani: I feel the main reason behind that is if the idea is to minimise the runs I want to concede, I need to not reduce the spin on the ball. If you spin less, then you could give less runs, but you also reduce the chances of taking a wicket. So if you minimise taking risks, you also cut down your chances of taking a wicket. The shorter versions of the game have started affecting some spinners.

Take even Harbhajan Singh. Why did he slide in the latter half of his career? He started to focus more on checking the runs. His line started to go towards the middle stump and that reduced his chances of taking wickets. An attacking line for an offspinner is pitching on the fifth stump [outside off], where he is trying to get the batsman bowled by breaking in. The moment he brings the line inside, he starts becoming defensive. That means only if the batsman makes a mistake will you get a wicket. But then how are you forcing the batsman to commit a mistake?

My message to even senior spinners like R Ashwin is: bowl your stock delivery 80% of the time in first-class cricket, and for rest of the time you can use the variations as a surprise. A spinner should not become predictable.

Kartik: Even in first-class cricket, spinners and captains now place a long-on, long-off, deep point with silly point and short leg, when all you are doing is darting the ball. To dart you do not need to know the fundamentals of spin bowling. To bowl flight, to beat the batsman in the air, to spin the ball, you need the basics to be very strong. It takes time.

Is modern coaching to blame?

Muzumdar: Earlier there were spinners with different actions. In the 1980s there was Maninder Singh, Ravi Shastri, Venkatapathy Raju and so many others. But all had different actions which were natural. That is the essence of spin bowling - keep your action natural. I think now we are over-coaching some youngsters.

Take Harmeet Singh, the Mumbai left-arm spinner. When I saw him a few years ago in the indoor nets in Mumbai, he had a unique action. It was not the conventional action. His front foot would land with a heavy thrust on the ground. That was his skill and it helped him deliver the ball nicely. But now he delivers with a much lower arm and that is because he has changed his action. I fear we have lost one more good spinner due to over-coaching.

Maninder: As a coach, I do not try and change the action at all. I try to look at the strengths of the youngster and coach accordingly. But I have seen certified coaches teach kids about the arm coming from a certain height and degree. I would rather focus on the youngster's natural arc and polish that.

Hirwani: Many of my students at my academy in Indore tell me: "Sir, I have bowled 60 balls. Sir, I have bowled 50 balls today." I tell them: if you want to make cream, you have to condense it, and that only happens after boiling it for a period of time. A good rabri [sweet] is made only when the cream rises. For quality you need quantity.

I would bowl minimum of 90 overs a day as a youngster at the Cricket Club of Indore. I would bowl at just one stump for a couple of hours. In all, I would bowl for a minimum of five hours. If you are bowling at one stump you end up bowling about 30 overs in an hour. This kind of training, bowling at one stump, is equivalent to vocalists doing riyaaz [music practice]. You build your muscle memory.

Bedi: I keep hearing about pitching it in the right areas. The right areas is between your ears, in your mind.

I also had an outstanding coach. He gave me a lot of cricket sense. Cricket ability and cricket sense are two different things.

You just have to bowl. Bowl and bowl and bowl. I would feel good only when I had bowled sufficient hours to get the confidence first in the nets which then I could take in to the match. It took me a long, long time to learn good bowling. I would bowl at least seven to eight hours every day. I was obsessed.

The importance of captains

Muzumdar: As a captain you have to be patient. You need to relax even if a four or six is hit off a spinner. Nowadays batsmen go after a slow bowler, especially ones who do not impart too much spin on the ball, as soon as he comes in to bowl. So the captain immediately says to keep it tight till his fast bowlers can come back.

I saw the rise of Sairaj Bahutule under Sanjay Manjrekar, Ravi Shastri and Sachin Tendulkar. After about four years, I think, Sairaj picked his first five-for. You had to be patient. And I saw the development in Sairaj in that period. Against Delhi in a Ranji Trophy match, Ajay Sharma was taking control but Manjrekar persisted with Sairaj and Nilesh Kulkarni though Sharma was playing aggressively against the spinners. In the end Mumbai won that match.

Kartik: A captain can make or break a spinner. So he should understand what the spinner goes through, how they function and how they can be turned to match-winners. When the captain wants you to give as few runs as possible, he is not giving the spinner any confidence.

Maninder: Take the example of Gautam Gambhir. I have seen him in T20 cricket place a silly point and a short leg as soon as a wicket falls, when a spinner is bowling. Dhoni does not do that when a new batsman comes in in a Test match. When I had those close-in fielders my focus and concentration went a notch higher. But for that you have to have the habit of bowling with those fielders. With time your confidence goes high and also you stop worrying if you bowl a long hop or a full toss.

	"If a spinner starts at the age of 12 or 13, he needs seven to eight years to understand his bowling"Murali Kartik

New talent on the horizon

Kartik: There are a few slow bowlers but not a spinner. When I started playing first-class cricket there were good spinners who were not getting a place in their state squads. Sunil Joshi, Kanwaljeet Singh, Sunil Subramaniam, Narendra Hirwani, Rajesh Chauhan, Bharati Vij, Sunil Lahore, Pradeep Jain, Rahul Sanghvi, Sarandeep Singh, Harbhajan Singh were quality spinners. Now I can't take a single name.

Hirwani: I have faith in two: Bengal offspinner Aamir Gani, who just turned 18. He has the skills and the desire. I also like Kuldeep Yadav, the chinaman bowler from Uttar Pradesh. He is an attacking bowler.

Maninder: Kuldeep Yadav, if the slight technical flaw in his front arm is fixed.

The problem with T20

Kartik: T20 cricket is not only harmful for a young spinner, it can also affect a senior bowler. Take Pragyan Ojha. He went at the rate of five an over, did not get a wicket in his 35 overs in the one Test he played on the India A tour of Australia in July. This is a spinner who has taken more than 100 Test wickets. He is confused after he has come back. So you can imagine the state of a young bowler who does not know his game inside out. All he is doing is bowling four overs for 25-30 runs and getting one wicket off a good or bad ball, because you know the next day you are up and running for the next T20 match.

Bedi: The modern generation is all about the IPL. Tell me if you get Rs 9, 10, 12 crore why would you want to bowl 35 overs [in a first-class match] for five lakhs? Sport is about money in the modern context.

The way out

Maninder: It is the BCCI's responsibility. When the IPL started, it had a lot of enemies. But that was also the time the BCCI should have taken the challenge of creating a pool of young talent and putting them under the expert guidance of former players or greats. These guys would not just talk about the specifics of spin bowling but also talk to them about how to sustain in the longer format of the game. If you speak to Bishan Bedi, the way he communicates, you would think: five-day cricket is what I want to play.

Kartik: If you are trying to push 11-year-olds into T20 cricket you are never going to learn the art of spin. Till the age of 21 at the state and age-group level at least, there should be no exposure to T20 cricket. Kids should play only three- or four-day cricket - learn to flight to ball, learn to get hit. By getting hit your natural survival instinct kicks in. Right now the natural instinct in T20 is to bowl quick. When you do that you cannot go back and bowl in four-day cricket, where you are trying to prise out a wicket.

If a spinner starts at the age of 12 or 13 he needs at least seven to eight years to understand his bowling: to bowl up and over, to flight the ball, to give the revs, and such things. You can coach, but if you are not allowing the player to first learn and understand his own game there is no point. Technically Test cricket is the deep end because getting a wicket when the batsman is defending is difficult
.

Cricket fixing scandal: The day I confronted Lou Vincent

We in the New Zealand team knew without a shadow of doubt that our ex-colleague was cheating

Fixer: New Zealand players watched Lou Vincent score one from nine balls in the ICL and smelt a rat Photo: GETTY IMAGES

By Iain O'Brien, Former New Zealand player

10:30PM BST 16 May 2014

“Did you?” “Huh?” “Did you, you know, do some dumb things while you were playing?” I was sitting across from Lou Vincent, the ex-New Zealand cricketer and ex-team-mate of mine. We were in a curry house, not far from the HAC Ground in London, where we had both just played in a charity Twenty20. It was Aug 30, 2012 and I hadn’t seen Lou for a long time; in a lot of ways, intentionally. I didn’t really want to be seen with him, associated with him or considered a mate of his.

We did, and do have, one thing in common; we both suffer with mental illness. That was the basis for a lot of what we talked about that day.

Lou had been touring in a camper van spreading his story of MI and raising awareness. What he was doing seemed great, but what he had been doing wasn’t.

I knew he had been up to no good. It becomes evident, as a player, that what you see is not always real. That moment you learn that wrestling on TV isn’t real. It is acting. It is hard to believe at first and then, when you have watched a lot, or been around it endlessly, you see it for what it really is. There is no going back.

On a Test tour of Bangladesh, 2008, we, the New Zealand team watched a lot of the Indian Cricket League; the ‘rebel’ T20 competition in its first year. We watched some of the most unbelievable cricket. Unbelievable in a way that we could not believe how obvious what was going on: leaving and or padding up to straight ones, run outs by massive distances in curious circumstances, batsmen playing out maidens, no-balls and wides just too big and too often to be natural mistakes. It looked a shambles. 

And this included Lou Vincent. He had walked away from a New Zealand contract to take part in a lucrative league. We knew what was going on.

Without a shadow of doubt Lou was fixing. From our Bangladesh telephone sims (when touring, typically, we buy or are provided with a local sim), players who had Lou’s number would text him with some rather unpleasant messages about what he was doing. He was called a “fixer”, a “cheat” and many more unprintable things.

Lou denied any involvement. I asked him again if he had “fixed”, if he had been a part of it. He straight out rejected my line of questions. I showed him a scorecard from a game I had watched live. I had the scorecard saved as a bookmark on my phone browser so that we could talk specifics. I showed it to him. He put his one run from nine balls, playing out a first-over maiden, to just good bowling. I called that “rubbish”.

Lou is a quality player. For a fix he promised to score, 30 inside three overs. He failed, but a player with that quality does not score one from nine balls. I have not spoken to Lou since.

It happens here, in the UK. More than in just the matches we have read about from Lou’s accounts.

I was commentating on a match at Chelmsford and Danish Kaneria, the Essex and Pakistan leggie, bowled one of the biggest wides I have ever seen. It was the first ball of a spell. In the box we were flabbergasted at how flagrant it was.

In the previous two World Twenty20s I watched a highly respected player swap his bat, make sure that the cameras caught it by taking a long time to complete the act, on three occasions. A wicket fell in the next over, either him or his partner. A coincidence? I don’t think so. A change of bat can be a sign to a bookie that the fix is on.

I have seen others too. The ones outlined by Vincent. I watched the Sussex v Kent game which we now know contained spot-fixing and I sensed something was up.

The issue is, knowing and proving. Should I, as an ex-player and now commentator, be reporting suspect activity to the Anti-Corruption and Security Unit? Maybe I should.

But, I feel it is so rife that they would get overrun by what I see as suspect actions which have become so blatant that it is hard to believe they even care about our game anymore.

Iain O’Brien played 22 Tests for New Zealand and now works as a BBC commentator based in the UK

Learning batting from David Warner

Ed Smith

On Sunday, I fly to Adelaide for the fourth Test between India and Australia. I'm due to arrive just in time for the first ball. I hope the plane isn't late: David Warner might have scored a hundred by lunch.

In smashing 180 off 159 balls in Perth, Warner proved quite a few people wrong - not least those who said that Twenty20 would never produce a Test cricketer. Warner, of course, played T20 for Australia and in the IPL long before making the step-up to Test cricket - well, I suppose it's up to him to judge whether it's a step up. 

We've all heard the arguments against the Warner career path: that T20 ruins technique rather than developing it, that you have to learn to bat properly before you can learn to smash it, walk before you can run etc.

But the naysayers may be wrong. The Warner story reveals deep truths about how players bat at their best. In fact, I think it is time we reconsidered the whole question of what constitutes good technique.

Cricket gets itself in a tangle about the word. In football, technique is short-hand for skill. Pundits explain how Cesc Fabregas' brilliant technique allows him to make the killer pass or eye-catching volley. Technique is not the enemy of flair and self-expression: it is the necessary pre-requisite. "Technique is freedom," argued the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

Sadly, the word "technique" in cricket is often used as short-hand for controlled batsmanship, even introspection. It is true that some great technicians are very controlled players (think of Rahul Dravid - though even he plays best technically when he is positive). But it is not compulsory that good technique has to be accompanied by caution or repression. After all, Adam Gilchrist had a wonderful technique: there is no other explanation for how he managed to hit the ball in the middle of the bat quite so consistently.

In fact, good technique has a very straightforward definition: it is the simplest, most efficient way of doing something.

Andre Agassi had near-perfect technique on his groundstrokes. He could hit with exceptional power and consistency. How did he learn this technique? When Agassi was a boy, his father used to get him to hit thousands of tennis balls as hard and as cleanly as possible. "Hit it, Andre!" That was the essence of his coaching. If you learn how to hit the ball hard in the middle of the racket, you have to move your body and feet into the right positions to do so. In the same way, Jack Nicklaus summed up his approach to learning golf: "First, hit it hard. Then we'll worry about getting it in the hole."

I should have remembered Agassi and Nicklaus when I was out of form as a batsman and needed to go back to basics. Not only did I suffer prolonged periods of bad form, I would often get out in similar ways - nicking off to the slips, or getting trapped lbw. There were usually plenty of theories about what I was doing wrong. As one coach memorably put it to me, "If you stop getting caught and lbw, you'll be a top player." Er, yes: it would take great ingenuity to get bowled or run out throughout your career!

Many coaches tried to persuade me to change my shot selection. But that rarely helped. When I was nicking off, it was usually because I was driving badly rather than driving at the wrong ball. And I was a far less good player when I was knocked off my instinct to play positively. I came to realise that good form was a very simple issue, almost binary - like a switch that just needed to be clicked back on.

Here comes the difficult part that used to get me into trouble. I learnt that the best way to click the switch back on, to get back into the groove of playing well, was to practise driving on the up. You've probably guessed why it got me in trouble. Imagine a situation in which I had failed three or four times in a row, each time caught in the slips, and the coach walks into the nets and sees me…practising drives! I'd sense him thinking: "Doesn't he ever learn?"

But I knew what worked for me, and I think there are good reasons why it worked. To play at my best, I needed to get into good positions to attack. Why? Because when I was in position to attack, I was inevitably in a good position also to defend. But when I set out my stall to play a defensive shot - before the ball was even bowled - then I not only attacked badly, I also defended badly. Having the intention of defending caused me to be passive and late in my movements. The shot would almost happen to me, rather than me determining the shot.

	To play at my best, I needed to get into good positions to attack. Why? Because when I was in position to attack, I was inevitably in a good position also to defend

On the other hand, having the intention of attacking was a win-win: I defended and attacked better. I would set myself to play positively, which had the effect of giving me more time at every stage of the shot.

I think many players are the same. The key to their batting - whether it is defence or attack - is the question of intent. That has nothing to do with recklessness, or even scoring rate. Intent merely determines the messages you send to your brain. Imagine batting as a series of dominos that culminates in the ball being struck. The very first domino, the critical one that begins the whole process, is not physical, but mental. We might call it your "mental trigger movement".

I know it sounds ridiculously simplistic - technique from kindergarten - but many players find that the best mental trigger movement is setting themselves to move towards the ball to strike it back in the direction that it comes from. That does not mean you commit to lurching onto the front foot or playing a drive; you still react to whatever is thrown at you. But your intent is positive and pro-active.

Greg Chappell used the science of physiology to examine the connection between intent and good execution. He studied the preliminary movements of the world's greatest players. Though they all had unique styles and methods, their techniques shared one common thread: at the point of delivery, they were all pushing off the back foot, looking to come forward. Chappell argued that this trait gives great players optimal time to judge length. Why? Because a full ball is released from the bowler's hand early, a short ball is released later. So when batsmen set themselves for the full ball, they will inevitably have time to adjust for the short ball.

Here is my heretical conclusion: by encouraging them to have the intention of striking down the ground with a proper backlift and swing of the bat, T20 may help batsmen get into some good technical habits. Admittedly, T20 will not develop the refinements of sophisticated Test match batting, such as soft hands and the ability to concentrate for six or seven hours. But in terms of basic technique, there is a lot to be said for keeping cricket as simple as possible. The foundation is positive intent and a clear head. In short, we could all learn something from Warner.

The counter-argument is that Warner is a freak of nature, and that no one should try copying him just yet. Either way, I can't wait to watch him in Adelaide and judge for myself.