The wild animal of batting

Jarrod Kimber in Cricinfo

There are batsmen you can explain, whose magic you can unravel. Virender Sehwag was not one of them


Sehwag: an experience that grabs you © Getty Images



There is a flash. It's up and over a bunch of slips, maybe a gully, and a third man. The ball just disappears up, out of sight, before dropping over the rope. The third man is puffing hard, but this wasn't for him. There is a frustrated, faceless bowler, an unspecified ground and a generic captain rubbing his forehead.

As it happens you can hear whispers of the batsman being compared to Sachin. But that is unfair. This is something different.

There are some things that shouldn't be explained. Maybe that's why we don't get Victor Trumper. We search for answers, facts, numbers and reasons. For some people that doen't work; you have to see them, feel them. They are part of a time and place you don't get. You are not meant to understand what they stood for, just know that it was something special through all the witnesses.

Yet, even when you weren't there, you had no context, no visuals, no memories, no experience; he could still move you. Sometimes it was the actual numbers alone. Just starting at a scorecard, there was an experience of him that just grabs you. The man who wore no number, could with a simple 200 out of 330, give you a sudden rush of blood, that slight, magical dizzy feel of something you can't quite explain.

There are some who say he only makes runs on Asian flat tracks. It feels like abusing a painter for preferring to use canvas instead of wanting to paint a live shark. What he created with the flat tracks was unlike what anyone else would, or could. There were times when he scored that it felt like Asia had been created just so he would have this stage.

There is a flash over the leg side. It's a drop-kick, a pick-up, a smack. The bowler is just an extra, a vessel. The ball goes over a rope, a fence, some spectators, a hill. It hits a scoreboard. Maybe it goes over it. Maybe it disappears into the distance. Maybe it explodes the scoreboard like you see in them Hollywood baseball films. The whole thing happened like it was preordained, like it was supposed to happen that way, and that time, for some secret reason.

He just stands there. Looking generally disinterested. People around the world are yelling, jumping, screaming, laughing. Mouths are wide open, jaws are on the floor. But he doesn't react that way. He almost never does.

There is a flash outside off. The bat has missed the ball. Yet the same general look of disinterest and calmness he has after a boundary follows a play and miss. Other days he uses the same smile after his best shot, or his worst.

Playing and missing is supposed to be a test of who you are as a human being. Do you believe in luck, do you believe in hard work, do you believe in faith? In his case, none of these applied. As to whether the ball went into a scoreboard, into a crowd, onto a roof, or safely nestled in the keeper's gloves, it was gone. Finished. That moment, that euphoria, that danger, doesn't matter anymore. The greatest legcutter, the sexiest doosra, or a mystery ball fired from a cannon, it doesn't matter. It could be a long hop. A full toss. It just goes past him. When you bowled to him, you weren't bowling to a batsman; you were bowling to a belief system.

There was comfort in his madness. Others have stopped, slowed, changed, restricted, just to survive, to thrive, to score all that they could score. Not him. Maybe he just couldn't slow down, couldn't hold back. He was what he was, a wild animal of batting.

There is a flash through point. It seems to exist on his bat and at the boundary at the same time. It was a cut but could have been a drive. They all went the same way, just as fast. Before the commentator has had time to react, the bowler has placed his hands on his head or the crowd is fully out of their chairs, the ball's journey has been completed.

Maybe it's Chennai. Maybe it's Melbourne. Maybe it's Lahore. Maybe it's Galle. Maybe It's Steyn. Maybe it's Ahktar. Maybe it's McGrath. Maybe it's Murali. It's all too quick. He's already moved on.

There are people who say he is just a slogger. That's a misunderstanding of slogging. Sloggers throw the bat recklessly without a method or a base. They always run out of luck, out of time, are found out. This was Zen slogging. He has a slogger's energy, a batsman's eye, and a tranquil mind. It's an odd combination. It shouldn't work. It didn't always.

But when it did, the innings was something that changed things. He could, when applied correctly, change the future. At other times, it was as if he could predict it. And if he didn't change the future of batting, he, at the very least, foretold it.

There are batsmen you can explain. You can unravel their magic; paint it for others to see. But he was above explanation. You couldn't unravel what he did, you simply had to reclassify it. His batting wasn't from the manual. It wasn't like the others.

If anything, it was a self-help manual, a religious text, wrapped up in cover drives. A road map for better living was right there in the middle of the ground. Play your shots, forget your mistakes, forget your success, keep playing your shots. Believe. Sehwagology.

There is a flash back past the bowler. There is someone, somewhere, stating that it is impossible to play that shot, from that ball. Someone else, somewhere else, is comparing him to another batsman. There is another someone, somewhere online, typing out their theory on his flaws. But at the ground their words get drowned out in applause - not applause, a cacophony of screaming.

There is a flash. A sudden burst of bright light. A brief display of joy. A moment. An instant. Virender Sehwag.

Life as a batsman

Simon Barnes in Cricinfo

Batting is about death. And life of course. It's all about how useful - how good - a life you lead before you die. You are surrounded by pitfalls and bayed about by enemies, but the good person will come through adversity to triumph. And the less good person won't.

That life-and-death metaphor gives cricket its USP: its own particular force and vividness. Cricket - red-ball cricket in particular - is all about the little death of dismissal. Every great innings takes place in the shadow of fallibility. That, in the end, is what cricket means.

Batsmen, writes Simon Hughes, "are walking the tightrope between success and failure. One minuscule error and they're toast. Terminé. Caput."

Hughes has always brought an original mind to the interpretation of cricket. He invented the concept of The Analyst for Channel Four in Britain, and now he tries to analyse batsmanship in his latest, highly enjoyable book, Who Wants to be a Batsman? He calls on his experience of more than 200 first-class innings, and his career-long struggle to add a decent batting CV to the deceptively fast arm he possessed as a bowler.

He returns to the infinitely fragile nature of every batsman's experience. "In tennis, if you lose 6-0 6-0 and haven't returned a single ball, you will have still served a few yourself. You have contributed something to the match. In football, unless you score an own goal with the last kick of the game, you have got time to atone for any mistake you might have made. Hell, even if you have shanked every drive into the bushes on the golf course, there is always hope that you will nail one down the middle on the eighteenth…

"But nought in cricket. What has that achieved?"

Cricketers cherish the notion that a bowler can bowl a bad ball that's whacked for six and get a wicket next ball, but one error - one tiny, measly error - from the batsman and he's gone.

A batsman needs to combine rampant egomania with the selflessness of a Zen monk, and to hold the two things in perfect balance

But it's not necessarily true. And even if it were, it wouldn't be unique in sport. Batsmen make mistakes and survive. Very few batsmen reach three figures without a play-and-miss or a false shot. Perhaps every century is a demonstration of how much the batsman has got away with.

Joe Root made a major error in the first Test of the recent Ashes series. He should have been out for nought and gone back to the pavilion asking himself what he had achieved. But Brad Haddin dropped the chance, Root made a century, England won and Root was the hero.

In other words, and contrary to standard wisdom, there is a margin for error in batting. The top players are better at coping with it, and above all, better at cashing in when matters beyond their control happen to work in their favour.

The routine humiliation of dismissal is not unique to cricket. There are quite a few sports in which your participation can be over before the finish - and long before you're ready to give up. Sonny Liston failed to complete either of his two fights against Muhammad Ali: quitting on his stool in the first and knocked out in the second.

In all jumping competitions in the horsey world your participation can end prematurely with an involuntary dismount. I have watched the Grand National favourite fall at the first fence. I have experienced a public crash-landing or two myself, as it happens, and believe me, it hurts more than being clean bowled - about which, too, I know in more detail than I would wish.

In sports more dangerous than cricket every competitor knows that participation could end with the assistance of a stretcher. In some sports real deaths happen more often than they do in cricket. Let's have a moment of silence for Phillip Hughes at this point - but we should also recall that in 1999 five people were killed in the equestrian sport of eventing.

Back to the pavilion before facing a ball: Usain Bolt is disqualified in the final of the World Athletics Championships © AFP

In track and field, errors are savagely punished, and sometimes it's worse than getting out first ball. It's like being sent back to the pavvy for taking guard wrong. You're out without running a single stride of the race. Terminé. Caput. It happened to Usain Bolt in the final of the World Championships in 2011.

So I dispute the self-pitying notion of all batsmen (and ex-batsmen in the commentary box) who tell us that batting is a uniquely fragile sporting discipline. It just feels like that when you're out there.

That doesn't mean that a batsman is not in a unique position, and that it's not fraught with psychological problems of all kinds. It's just that cricketers - tied up in the intricacies of a single sport - tend not to identify the uniquely troubling aspect of batsmanship. It's the twin load of responsibility. When you fail as a batsman you have not one but two reasons to feel bad. You have lost a contest against another individual - and you have also let down your colleagues. You have failed yourself andyou have failed your team.

That's a hefty burden to bear. Of course there's an essence of that in all team sports - it's rather the point of them. But in most team sports you are operating with others. A goalkeeper in football is not as isolated as he looks: he's in constant dialogue with his central defenders, and his distribution of the ball is a core skill.

A batsman is as lonely as a golfer or a tennis player - but he's also working for other people. In some competitions they make tennis players and golfers shoulder a batsman's twin responsibilities: the Ryder Cup, Solheim Cup, Davis Cup and Fed Cup. Often you see great players unable to cope with a secondary responsibility: Tiger Woods never got the hang of it.

A great batsman must be like a top Ryder Cup golfer, not once every two years but in every single innings. He must - like Colin Montgomerie - find inspiration in this double responsibility. Woods goes straight back to strokeplay golf; for a batsman there is no other game.

If you fail as a batsman, you must deal with your personal inadequacies. Graham Gooch began his Test career with a pair. Repeated failure will cost you your place in the team. Your career will suffer. So will your sense of self-worth. But failure will also cost your team. You will fail to contribute. You will stop feeling like a part of the whole. You will lose matches and even if no one says anything, you know what you've done and what you haven't done.

Every great innings takes place in the shadow of fallibility. That, in the end, is what cricket means

It's the double whammy that's unique to batsmanship. That extends to cricket's bastard sister, baseball; the difference here is that baseball is weighted towards the pitcher and a dismissal is a relatively trivial matter; it's a run that's a big deal. All the same, the batter and the batsman share a double burden .

It follows, then, that again and again Simon Hughes goes back to the mental side of things. He offers "Ten Wanna Be Batsman Rules": of these, eight are mental. One is semi-facetious (this is "Yozzer" writing after all) and rule eight is "play at the Oval." The only physical tip is "Keep the head still."

It's almost as if every batsman had the same amount of physical ability, and that the only difference between good and great was mental posture. That's clearly not true: David Gower, Brian Lara and Kevin Pietersen clearly had something extra. But they also had mental ability: they could put errors behind them, didn't get sucked into the wrong sort of confrontation, knew how to pace an innings, understood when to stick and when to twist.

In cricket you often see a player of (comparatively) limited physical ability playing any number of match-winning innings because of a great mental attitude. Alastair Cook is a classic example of this type.

A player with a lesser degree of pure talent never takes success for granted. He is naturally disposed to make the most of every let-off. Thus you can turn an apparent disadvantage into an advantage. That's one of the most fascinating things about sport - and it's very cricket.

Batting is about shame and guilt: the shame of personal failure and the guilt at playing a part in team failure. It's also about escaping from - or being inspired by - these two things to find individual and corporate glory. You must sink yourself into the common cause without losing your sense of individuality.

A batsman needs to combine rampant egomania with the selflessness of a Zen monk, and to hold the two things in perfect balance. Unsurprising, then, that excellence is a rare thing - and that we value it so highly when we find it.

Rahul Dravid and Sanjay Manjrekar on Batting

S Dinakar in The Hindu

Rahul Dravid.


Batting legend Rahul Dravid shared his thoughts on India’s troubles with spin and the dynamics of technique in an exclusive conversation with The Hindu.

Here is the first part of excerpts from the interview.



Q. Indian batting has become increasingly vulnerable to spinners over the last few years.

Playing spin was one of our big strengths. What can happen is that when you are with an international team you are not getting to play a lot of spin bowling in matches. Perhaps the pitches in India have changed.



Q. Does it boil down to the use of feet?

Good footwork certainly helps, but different players can play spin differently. Even in the team that I played, Laxman for example, would use his feet, but not that much. He had great reach and used the depth of the crease well. He didn’t have a sweep shot, but had a great on-drive.

Sehwag used his feet against spin a lot more than some of us.

Ganguly stepped down to the left-arm spinner whenever he could.

It always helps to have a sweep shot.



Q. The present day batsmen are playing too many shots too early against spin?

You need to be a bit more patient against spin. People now want to dominate the spinner from the beginning.

Sometimes we need to give the ball the respect it deserves.



Q. Batsmen rarely come across worthy spinners in domestic cricket these days.

You still have the odd good spinner in domestic cricket, but the numbers have dipped. The top four spinners are good but we had a lot more spinners in the domestic scene then.

Maybe, domestically, our batsmen are not getting exposed to quality spin bowling. Wickets have improved in India too. I have played on some absolute turners.



Q. International line-ups have become increasingly vulnerable on pitches doing a bit.

You are seeing a lot of results in Tests. People are playing more aggressively.

The flip side of that is, sometimes, on tricky wickets where there is seam and swing or turn, you get found out.

Generally, very rarely do you get seaming or turning wickets in international cricket these days. Most wickets are flat.

If you see a difficult wicket, you should have a certain level of personal pride to perform. If you have that you will practice for it.

To succeed in any form of the game, your game has to be built around your defence. It then expands from there.



Q. Do you believe the cash-rich T20 format has taken the cricketers’ focus away from Tests?

To be a successful Test cricketer was our primary focus then. Now you can easily make a living without being a Test cricketer. Maybe the incentive is not there anymore.

Then it boils down to personal pride, getting satisfaction in succeeding in all and the most difficult of conditions.



Q. What, in your mind, is good footwork?

Good footwork is being able to pick the length of the ball early, get to it as quickly as possible and get yourself into a good position. Good footwork is really about using the depth of the crease when you need to go back, and getting a good stride forward when you need to go forward.

You need to ensure that you are not stuck in the crease.



Q. As we saw with the Aussies in England recently, batsmen are increasingly vulnerable on or outside the off-stump.

The key is being balanced and knowing your head position. You need to be going towards the ball than across the wicket. The body weight is going down the wicket than across the wicket.

Once your head starts falling over and goes across the wicket, you lose [sense of] where your off-stump is. Your head has to be in the right position to know where your off-stump is.



Q. Sunil Gavaskar recently spoke about the alignment of right eye with the off-stump.

I thought that was a brilliant technical suggestion. If you are balanced, with your right eye guiding where your off-stump is, then there is a good chance that you go down the wicket, the weight is going towards the ball, and your head is still and in a good position. Anything outside the right eye-line you could leave.

But if you are going across the stumps, your right eye actually loses where your off-stump is. And you end up playing balls that are wide outside the off-stump.



Q. Do you believe the wide and excessive back-lifts are an issue too?

Typically, you want the bat to come from second slip, swing around and come down straight.

Hashim Amla picks up his bat, almost towards gully, but when it comes down it does so really straight. That’s what really matters.

The ideal way to pick it up will be between first and second slip. But there are cases of people who pick it up slightly wider but are able to align it straight.

I used to pick it up a lot wider than first or second slip, but generally I was able to get into good positions to bring the willow straighter.

When I was not playing well, that was an area that bothered me. If I wasn’t able to get the timing right of bringing the bat down, then balls, especially those coming back in, got me bowled or lbw, which happened towards the end of my career.

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Sanjay Manjrekar on Playing Spin (from Cricinfo)



I think batsmen around the world are not playing spin too well these days.

We have seen it in the Ashes, seen Sri Lankan batsmen struggle against the legspin of Yasir Shah, and now India disintegrate against Rangana Herath to lose a Test match that was firmly in their grasp. All this is suggestive of the fact that international batsmen are not playing spin too well at the moment.

The focus is so much on playing pace and seam well that it seems there is no headspace left for them to try to be adept at spin too. Before India went to England last summer, how many of their batsmen tried to hone their skills against offspin? I am sure James Anderson and Stuart Broad would have been on their minds, not Moeen Ali. No wonder Moeen ended up getting 19 wickets in that series.

Historically, Indian batsmen have tended to take spin lightly. You just have to watch them bat in the nets - they bat with caution and respect against fast bowlers, but when they see a spinner come in to bowl they dance down the pitch to hit the ball for a six. They are not fussed if they miss a few; they basically look to have fun against the spinners before they put their heads down and get serious against the fast bowlers.

Then, in a tense match situation, when the ball is turning square and the batsman sees four fielders around the bat, dancing down the pitch and hitting the ball into the stands is not an option any more, but they do not know what to do instead. Now the batsman has to do something he has never done before: try and defend the spinner from the crease and make sure the ball rolls safely along the ground off the defensive bat, away from the close-in catchers.

This is a highly specialised skill, to defend confidently against the spinning ball, using only the bat, with catchers hovering four feet away. (With the DRS and umpires willing to give batsmen out lbw on the front foot, thrusting the pad at the ball is not an option any more, as it used to be in my time.)

It is a skill no one practises enough these days, and that is why you see a Rohit Sharma in defence planting his front foot on leg stump, to a turning ball from Herath that has pitched on middle and off stump.

The other critical defensive technique that has practically vanished from the game is a batsman trying to play a good-length ball and then letting it go at the very last minute, when he realises it has changed direction and is not going to hit the stumps any more. It's amazing to see how many batsmen get out - to seamers and spinners alike - while playing defensive shots to balls that are going to miss the stumps.

Mind you, in my time too, spinners were treated no differently in the nets. The advantage we had, though, was that we still played a decent amount of domestic first-class cricket as international players, so our skills against spin had not become dormant. But I remember, every time I came home to domestic cricket after travelling the world playing international cricket, it took some time getting used to playing spin well again.

In the first innings in Galle it was evident that the Indian batsmen were treating the Sri Lankan spinners with respect - they did not want to make the same mistakes they made against Moeen. But their defensive game against spinners is far from perfect.



VVS Laxman set a worthy example of how to play on a pitch that takes turn: by scoring more off the back foot than off the front © Getty Images

Every time an Indian batsman decides to get on to the front foot to defend against spin, I cringe. They leave far too much distance between the bat and the spot where the ball has pitched. This is a recipe for disaster on a turning pitch. By leaving this space between the bat and the spot where the ball has pitched, you are allowing the ball to spin and bounce or straighten. You are giving the ball the space to behave mischievously. This is how Ajinkya Rahane got out in the first innings and Virat Kohli in the second - two big wickets.

The golden rule of playing spin is judging the length early, and then, when choosing to play on the front foot, getting right on top of the ball to smother its spin and whatever venom it carries.

If you think you can't reach the pitch of the ball with the front foot, go right back in the crease and watch the ball closely off the pitch. In fact, on turning pitches you should look to score more off the back foot than off the front, just as VVS Laxman used to do. When you are on the back foot, because the ball is turning so much, you get the width to play the cut and the pull or play it away for a single safely. Catchers around the bat are placed there mostly for errors arising out of front-foot defensive shots.

With all good intentions, domestic pitches have changed in India. There is more grass on the pitches now, and spinners don't rule the roost any more. The flip side is, this means less good practice against spin for Indian domestic batsmen. KL Rahul, very much a recent product of Indian domestic cricket, looked far more assured against pace than he did against spin in Galle. That is telling.

The fact is quite simple: your chances of surviving against spin increase if you practise for hours in the nets what you need to do in the match.

An ode to Gower

Rob Steen in Cricinfo

Exquisitely flawless, the former England captain was the Rembrandt of batting: all touch, timing and subtle depth; and never better than 30 years ago


David Gower: poise, fragility and ineffable beauty © Getty Images



"I found it strange that the 2005 team all found themselves with MBEs in the next Honours List. If I had been given an award every time England won the Ashes during my career, I would be in the House of Lords."

Tongue may have been caressing cheek with customary aplomb, but that isn't the sort of sound bite one associates with David Gower, being largely bereft of understatement and peppered with self-assertiveness. You can find it in Sex & Drugs & Rebel Tours, Dave Tossell's latest erudite, immaculately titled romp through the occasional ups and persistently numbing downs of Team England over the final quarter of the 20th century, a gruelling, gripping, excruciating slice of comical, angst-ridden soap opera - call it tailenders - that proved a handy weapon in the bitterly unscrupulous tabloid circulation wars.

David Ivon Gower doesn't do snide. Nor does he do haughty or sneery. Everything he did with a bat in his hands oozed natural elegance; honed through thousands of net hours at King's School Canterbury but still an extension of self. No world-class athlete this column has ever met has tried less to impress, or been so self-effacing, or rubbed so few up the wrong way. No sporting hero turned commentary-boxer has spent less time recounting past glories or waxing nostalgic. And no competitive artist has better embodied the spirit of that fabulous (if possibly mythical) Cary Grant one-liner: "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant - even I want to be Cary Grant."

Is there any more fitting coincidence than the fact that Gower rhymes not only with flower but power? On this topic more than any other, frankly, this column is resolutely and hopelessly myopic. Its adoration is so ardent that it agreed to be Gower's first biographer, even though a giggle-a-page autobiography, expertly ghosted by his soul brother Martin Johnson, had already sold by the juggernaut.

Two years later, less fortunately for subject than author, there was more to say. Hounded into premature retirement by those who vindicate Charlie Skinner's acidic adage in The Newsroom- "Hell hath no fury like the second-rate" - Gower deserved a more robust defence as well as a less restrained celebration. The most stinging volleys of righteous abuse were saved for Graham Gooch, the captain and friend whose own career Gower had once preserved with such compassion.

Just once during a meeting at his Hampshire home did the mood dip below exceedingly pleasant - when the interviewer, anxious to temper the idolatry with some journalistic dispassion, accused him of mental laziness. Cue a rambling but sound counter theory that made it easy to understand why he had gravitated towards a legal career, even if it did find him more or less pleading guilty as charged.

Few upper lips have been sturdier. He certainly appeared far more willing to forgive Gooch than his biographer was.


****


Imagine a gallery of cricketers as artists. David Warner as Jackson Pollock - the epitome of bold subversion, Mr Couldn't Give A Toss. Pietersen as Dali: a galling, irrepressible, un-ignorable minor genius. Tendulkar as Michelangelo, all smooth lines and sacred overtones. Warne as Picasso, all new tricks and piss-takes. Murali as Van Gogh, a sorcerer, earthy and soulful. For Gower, read Rembrandt, all touch, timing and subtle depth.

Gower cast spells like no other. Whenever he was on TV, so desperate was Tim Rice, the wordsmith behind Jesus Christ Superstar, to see his idol succeed, and so fearful that he might not, that he hid behind the settee. During his illustrious reign as editor of Wisden, Matthew Engel cited Gower's 72 in Perth in 1982 as the finest knock he'd ever seen, "an exquisite, flawless diamond". Knowing Matthew as this column does, it is as certain as it can be that this was the only time he has ever uttered or written the word "flawless" and not preceded it with "not" or "hardly".

Never, though, was Gower quite so exquisitely flawless as he was 30 summers ago. That the memories still glow can be attributed in good part to the fact that we sporty Poms were in such dire need of reasons to be cheerful. May 1985 had scored a horrifying hat-trick.

On the 11th, a blaze erupted in a wooden stand at Bradford City's Valley Parade, killing 56 spectators; many Yorkshiremen still blame the club's late owner for arson - a series of such "accidents" had befallen a number of his other business concerns - but the roots of the tragedy were embedded in the national game's contempt for its customers. At Wembley a week later, Manchester United's Kevin Moran become the first player to be sent off in an FA Cup final, for a so-called "professional foul", denying Everton a likely lead that would have decided the game in the regulation 90 minutes; Norman Whiteside's perversely wondrous extra-time strike ensured the sinner emerged a victor. Then, 11 days later, came the nadir of f***ball hooliganism, aka "the English disease": at a dilapidated stadium in Belgium, blatantly unfit for purpose, a horde of boozed-up Liverpool fans charged their Juventus counterparts, a wall collapsed and 39 died.



Gower, seen here with wife Thorunn, was at his mesmerising best against the Australians in 1985 © PA Photos

Summer brought balm. Not only did England reclaim the Ashes, they did so with style and vigour. Best of all, the man who sheepishly hoisted the replica urn between right thumb and forefinger on the Oval balcony harvested 732 runs - still the most by an England captain in a series against Australia, not to mention the most by any Pom in an Ashes debate at home. The second movie this column ever saw was Summer Magic, a Disneyfied yarn whose allure lay wholly in another blonde bombshell, Hayley Mills; here, more than two decades later, was the sequel. Vince Lombardi could go to hell: good guys really could come first.

Tanya Aldred was luckier than most: she broke her cricketing virginity that heady, often dizzying summer. "Delicate David - my father's hero became his children's hero too," she reflected in The New Ball Volume 4. "His batting was of a vintage so lipsmackingly tasty that even a Formula 1 driver would be loath to spray it around. Flick of the wrist - four. Eighty-nine of them in total. Stressed-out executives should be forced to watch videos of each one, every morning before work."

Awe sprang not so much due to those innately, inexpressibly handsome strokes as the serenity and stillness at their core. Here he was, captain of his country, facing the ancient enemy, and betraying not so much as a hint of a glimmer of anxiety (it helped, admittedly, that Allan Border's party was approximately the third-puniest ever to land in England). If Bradman was the white Headley, Gower was the white Sobers, in temperament and movement if not versatility. The miracle was that he was loved by so many who would normally be infuriated by one so resistant to emotion or visible effort. The vulnerability had much to do with it; the vulnerability that comes with performing on the highest wire of excellence, forever swaying between sublime and negligent.

As if poise, fragility, humility and ineffable beauty weren't enough, Gower offered something even more precious: dignity. "At least I've had a couple of years," he said shortly after the first of his two sackings as England captain, in the wake of India's maiden Lord's Test win in 1986. To his credit, marvelled Frank Keating in the Guardian, "he has not changed a jot since the selectors appointed him two years ago. He remains a laid-back charming goldielocks with a touch of genius at the crease, no histrionics or tantrums in the field, and an ambassadorial approach to the world." Having kept Ian Botham onside and succeeded where Mike Brearley failed by getting the best from Phil Edmonds, he'd have been just the chap to keep KP inside the tent.


The key to that constancy was not the diffidence or arrogance perceived by some but that acute sense of proportion. Sure, he loved the game, the cameraderie as much as the challenges, but winning was never everything. Who else could have had the brass balls to announce to the media, after a bad day against Border's vengeful side at Lord's in 1989, that he was off to the theatre? That he returned on the Monday to make a silkily defiant century, however fruitless, spoke of a will immeasurably stronger than commonly assumed. "It felt like the captain versus the press," he recalled. "In a sense it was quite good fun."

Ultimately his greatest asset was courage. The courage not to be cowed by Dennis Lillee, Malcolm Marshall, Wasim Akram or even Fleet Street's snarliest. The courage to attack in situations calling for grim defence and sobriety. The courage - notwithstanding those early efforts at de-elocution - to be posh during the heyday of inverted snobbery. The courage to be both man apart and man out of time. The courage, above all, to stay true to himself in the face of envy and ridicule.

That's why, 30 years on from his sunniest summer, at a time when there are hardly any reasons to be cheerful about so many of the elements that allegedly made Britain great, this column feels compelled to entreat its Queen: please, ma'am, do the decent thing when you finalise next month's Birthday Honours List and send your foremost sporting ambassador a text informing him he is going to be the first Englishman to be knighted exclusively for his on-field contributions since you tapped Len Hutton on the shoulders in 1956. Having approved yet another bloody Tory government, it's the very least you owe us.

The beast that is batting

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

There was no crueller moment at the end of the Barbados Test than the few seconds that the camera spent on Jonathan Trott. In Bridgetown, the floodlights were on and the twilight was coming, followed by the dark. For Trott something more than a match was over, and it showed in his face. "Sadder still to watch it die, than never to have known it…" as someone once wrote.

A few summers ago I had the chance to talk to a man who had worked closely with England at Loughborough. The conversation got on to Trott and his debut against Australia in the final Ashes Test of 2009. There had been some debate over his selection. There was a last-minute swell of emotion behind a romantic recall for Mark Ramprakash, who was coming towards the end of his great sunburst of runs in the county game. Trott, averaging 97 for the season himself, won the call, and, "as he walked to bat," said the guy I was talking to, "I knew that there was no one that I'd rather see going out there."

Trott made 41 and 119. He had a habit of scoring runs on debut - 245 for Warwickshire 2nds, 134 for the 1st team - and by the summer of 2011, when he made a double-hundred against Sri Lanka in Cardiff, he was established at number three and his average was approaching 67. He was a curio, a gem, a rapidly emerging cult hero. Trott was a batsman whose idiosyncrasies showed. Along with a practice regime that was quickly becoming legendary, his batting had the ritualistic edge that externalised some of the mental processes required to score heavily against the world's best bowlers. Each delivery faced, even those with the most banal outcome - a leave, a defensive push - brought a long routine of walking and scratching and scraping at the crease. Here was a mind that sought to impose order and control on the unpredictability and ever-present danger of batting.

His game was similarly risk-averse, his scoring areas clearly defined and stuck to, his shot selection pragmatic and appropriate. Once set, he sought simply to carry on. His mental landscape appeared entirely different to those of players like Pietersen or Ponting, who needed the challenge to escalate as they batted, and who would escalate it themselves if the bowlers wouldn't, taking risks, provoking conflict that ratcheted up the stakes.

"I play cricket to be effective and I have my things I do to get myself ready for battle. Maybe it can mess with their over rate or whatever, but it's just what I do and I won't be changing it," Trott said in 2009 after the South Africans grew frustrated with the time he was taking between deliveries. 

The mental and physical sides of batting are two halves of a whole. It is a tenuous way to make a living and the stresses and scars can be incremental. They affect everyone differently. When batting defines your professional life, when it becomes a part of who you are, then its vulnerabilities are obvious. Trott's departure from the tour of Australia was never going to be easy to recover from, because the foundations of his batting, the toughness he had built up over a long period, were so savagely undermined, along with his sense of self.

As Trott tried to rebuild with Warwickshire and then the Lions, Alastair Cook also fought for his career. Yet there was always the sense with Cook that he was primarily battling a physical, technical issue, a flaw in his game that he could overcome. It had a psychological element, of course, and doubt must have played its role through his long drought, but it never seemed quite as hurtful as Trott's difficulties. At the same time Stuart Broad was struck a very painful and frightening blow that has put his batting into reverse. Broad is not dependent on the bat for a living, and yet the decline is ominous and clear.

All three are at different points on a spectrum that shows just how implacably hard batting can be. It is a brave occupation, and the brilliance of the very best sometimes obscures how difficult it is, even for those blessed with the greatest of gifts.

Jonathan Trott's difficulties have been associated with the short ball, and that strikes at the very heart of the psychology of batting. It is about many things, but failing courage isn't really one of them. Trott has never been more courageous than when he walked out for the second innings in Barbados, having been bounced out in the first. It was moving because, in all probability, he knew that it would be the last time that he did it. He went anyway, and he exits the battle with honour, taken out on his shield.

My favourite quote in cricket comes from Viv Richards, when he was asked how he'd like to be remembered. "With the bat, I was a soldier…" he said.

That's beautiful and true, and we must salute all of those who understand its meaning.

The secret to performing at your peak? Deciding which of the voices in your head is talking sense

Ed Smith in The New Statesman

As a batsman in the middle of an innings, alone with my thoughts at the batting crease, a silent but urgent conversation would play out inside my head. There were two voices. The first belonged to the player, the actor on the stage, the participant. The second voice was that of a coach, mentor or critic. This observer might advise “me” to be bolder, to assert myself, to be less cautious. Another time, the voice would say the opposite: “You’re losing too much control – rein things in, be more wary.”

Both voices, of course, belonged to me. But they seemed entirely distinct, quite removed from one another, one belonging to the realm of action and the second to the sphere of reflection. One person played the shots; another called the shots.

On good days, this division of labour was co-operative. When the balance between instinct and removed self-criticism felt right, the two voices got along well. At other times the critical voice was too strong and overbearing. He needed to be sent packing, his notebook chucked away.

So there were two dimensions to this conversation that required careful attention. The first was the efficacy and wisdom of the critical advice: was the critic sending the right technical or tactical messages? After all, coaches have bad days, too. The second question was whether this was the right time to be taking advice at all. Because there are moments when you are far better off trusting your own competitiveness and instinct.

A few times in my career the internal voices turned into spoken words, and the opposition fielder at short-leg would look at me in astonishment as I said something like, “Shut up! Just play! Watch the ball! That’s all you need to do!” From my perspective, it was just a small domestic disagreement in my head, nothing more. But to the outside world it looked very eccentric – or plain mad.

So I was delighted to learn the other week that I keep good company. In a sparkling interview with Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show, Mark Rylance described how the actor on the stage, just like the batsman at the crease, has a conversation going on inside his own head:

“When you play in front of people – it may be the same for sports players, too – you have a kind of coach in your head who is monitoring whether (in my case) the passes and the different things I’m doing with the ball – if the ball is the story – whether they are real and natural and believable. You have a little voice saying, ‘Wait, wait, now; quickly, quickly, now.’ Or: ‘Too much, too much.’ And sometimes it’s too strong and you have to banish it from the stage.”

That was my experience of sport, perfectly captured by an actor.

I sometimes feel that all modes of performance – music, drama, sport – are merely variations on a theme, different expressions of the same underlying experience. The play may look different, but the stage on which the actors stand is universal.

Ten years ago, I made a series for Radio 3 called Peak Performance, in which I interviewed young classical musicians and explored the parallels between playing sport and playing music. “Acting, music, cricket – the final vocational choice was partly just chance,” the guitarist Craig Ogden told me. “If I hadn’t become a musician, I’m sure I would have done something else that put me on a stage in front of an audience.”

On The South Bank Show (24 February, Sky Arts 1), viewers watched Rylance watch himself playing Henry V. As the Rylance of today pulled on his glasses, the Rylance of the late 1990s began his version of Henry’s St Crispin’s Day speech before Agincourt. Here the critic and the performer were not sharing the stage at the same moment. Instead, they were separated by years of ex­perience and perspective. It was like watching an artist in his studio poring over his early works.

Before I’d had the chance guiltily to suppress my first reaction (“He wasn’t quite as good back then”), Rylance himself said just that. “I hadn’t yet learned to use my voice properly”: that was his assessment of his younger self. The ease and depth of his voice today, which helped make his portrayal of Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall so compelling, hadn’t developed fully.

So, what changed? Mastery of technique, the refinement of his craft, is surely only part of the story. There is also the question of Rylance the man: his intellectual curiosity and search for experience, his reluctance to play it safe or to repeat himself, his openness and risk-taking, his preference for the more difficult path. Because of Rylance’s temperament and his sensibility, both of his voices – the spoken voice and the coaching voice – are far more evolved than they were 15 years ago. The actor and the critic, the player and the coach, have grown up in tandem and, with age, the conversation has become more co-operative.

Here, alas, the arts generally leave sports behind. For although some lucky sportsmen may be permitted a second act, none (except in golf) gets to enjoy middle age. It’s all over by then.

So I finished watching Rylance’s South Bank Show interview pondering two parallel questions, about careers in which talent and temperament aren’t ideally matched. Which sportsmen would have been better suited, temperamentally, to a longer and more reflective race rather than the fast-forward time of professional sport? Conversely, which actors were fated to have a long-drawn-out career when a shorter one would have suited them far better?

Because although you can shape the words you tell yourself, and can even quell the voice in your head, you can’t do much about the stage you’re standing on.

Cricket: How to construct a one day chase

Michael Bevan in Cricinfo

All batsmen pursuing targets in ODIs are constructing a run chase but in different ways, while playing different roles.

My style was completely different to those of many other batsmen, particularly those higher up the order, but it suited my temperament, and I found a way to take the pressure off myself in highly charged situations. I believe there is no right or wrong way that batsmen need to adhere to to be consistently successful.

Playing to your strengths is of utmost importance in chasing and scoring runs in one-day cricket. There are many moments in a chase where a batsman feels compelled to try something different because of the pressure. Most batsmen prefer to try something different than to test their game and stay till the end. Committing to playing your way gives you two things: the best opportunity to score big runs and the opportunity to understand what you need to do to improve if it doesn't work out.

Taking the pressure off yourself is a paramount skill required by any batsman seriously considering being a successful run-chaser. You need to find ways to keep it simple and focus on achievable targets. Sometimes if you focus too much on the trouble you are in or look too far ahead, it can sap your confidence and make it tougher to help your team.

I found having small, achievable goals that I knew I could reach - such as a reasonable strike rate for the first 30 balls, or setting targets per over - helped. Rather than winning the match for my team, my ultimate goal was just to be there at the end, win, lose or draw. I never knew I could win the match but I knew I could be there at the end, and it's amazing how often you have an opportunity to win the match if you are there at the end.

Minimising risk by targeting the right bowlers, choosing the right delivery to hit and having a plan B helps batsmen score 50-plus, develop consistency, and ensure game plans work towards applying pressure on opposition attacks.

Andy Bichel liked to take charge of a chase © Getty Images

A key part of my game to keep things simple and reduce risk was to only have one boundary option for each bowler. This I would choose based on my strengths, pitch conditions, field placements and the match situation. If the ball didn't pitch in the right area I would remain patient and try to rotate strike until it came along. The downside to this approach is that sometimes you miss out on opportunities or a quicker scoring rate, and of course, once the rate gets above 7 or so, you need to make a move regardless.

Finally, my success as a No. 6 batsman was largely determined by the quality and batting abilities of the lower order. Without these guys, nothing is achievable. A clear focus for me in batting with the tail was to help them feel comfortable and clear about our approach to winning the match. Honest feedback as to how they were going also helped. Every tailender had a different approach and a different personality, so it was important for me to work at their speed and on their level. There was no point in me being very regimented and structured in a mid-pitch discussion with Brett Lee, who was a carefree guy who didn't like plans and preferred to stay in the moment. Andy Bichel, for instance, really liked to take charge, so I would give him the space and opportunity to do this and let him drive the partnership.

Chasing runs can be intimidating at times but understanding the fundamentals can help increase your chances of success.

How I broke my game and then fixed it again

When your feet and hands talk to each other, the runs start to flow © Getty Images

I recently stumbled upon a short but wonderful five-minute video on a camouflaging octopus. Its climax featured it changing its colour and texture to make it look like the surrounding coral.

It provoked thoughts about my own evolution and the impact our environment has on our behaviours. Slowly I started to piece the narrative of my cricket growth together. More specifically, how my own batting had changed and shifted, sometimes subconsciously, other times deliberately, to adapt to various conditions around the country and the world. I realised that what I occasionally thought was right was, in fact, inhibiting my game. Imagine the octopus camouflaged as coral in the middle of the Sahara.

Growing up, I had always tapped my bat in a relaxed and rhythmic manner at the crease. My batting was natural and flowing, and though I had no knowledge of its benefits, my "technique" allowed me to score freely around the ground. Of course I still had deficiencies - some days it felt like I had magnets in my front pad and the ball was made of iron - but I was learning about the game. I enjoyed the feeling of being able to hit the ball where I wanted by simply picking up my bat, moving my foot to where I thought it was going to bounce and swinging. If I wanted to hit the ball a fraction later, on top of the bounce, my hands would allow for a change in bat speed, as they were moving as required and in sync with my feet.

I enjoyed being an aggressive opening batsman with a good defence. I got caught at long-on too often off the spinners in the exuberance of youth, but it always felt like my risk-taking was calculated. My batting lacked consistency, but when it was on, it was on. I thought I understood my game, my limitations, but in hindsight I understood the feeling of rhythmical batting and that the hunger to score runs relied on a clear mind and the reliance on a manageable routine. That was about it. I played the game generally with a smile - scoring runs is fun after all. Writing about it now makes it sound like it was too good to be true.

The first significant evolution came when I entered professional cricket at 21. I had always played the pull shot, but I quickly realised playing the short ball at 140kph was a different proposition. Ducking and weaving became my modus operandi. In the modern era, no one escapes trial by video, and word spread to not let the kid drive. "Push him back, he won't hurt you unless you feed the cut." Run-scoring slowed and my ribs were generally bruised.

	I loved the challenge of opening the batting, but my enjoyment of my own batting started to wane. I found it hard to appreciate the days I did score runs. I always felt like the handbrake was on

The following pre-season, I vowed to stay one step ahead of the opposition by finding my pull shot afresh: if played efficiently and selectively, it would force the bowlers to pitch it up and allow me to play my favoured drives. For months I practised facing tennis balls out of a bowling machine at abnormally fast speeds. I found by holding my bat off the ground, as high as the top of my pad, I got a little head start. Time I thought, was what I needed.

The second ball of the season was a bouncer from Andy Bichel, and out of pure instinct I pulled it over square leg. I could see a look of bemusement in his eye as he growled an expletive. With this slight camouflage I had adapted to my new professional environment. Not to say it was perfect. Some days my hands would drift from my back hip and I would slice across the ball, but I told myself you have to give something to get something, and it generally felt like the trade-off had been a fair one.

The second major adaptation in my technique came after spending 12 months in Tasmania. Our home wicket was a seaming monster and driving on it a very risky proposition. Fielders would be loaded behind the wicket, licking their lips, ready to lap up any half-mistake. Batting was hard work but I loved it. You had to grind, play the ball late and cautiously, and be prepared to be in at tea to get a big first-innings score.

With a big red cross against the drive, I started to hold my bat up higher off the ground, like a baseballer at the mound in what proved a highly effective position to cut and pull. It was also a great position to just drop the bat into the line of the ball for a forward defence. The bat would generally come down at one pace. It was certainly repeatable and it felt little could go wrong. It took the variation out of batting. Risk-free almost, but with no risk comes little reward. Ironically, due to the plane of the swing, it also helped my one-day cricket "slog" over cow corner, and with the emergence of the BBL, it felt like a decent technique to apply across formats.

I would hide the deficiency of not being able to drive with any power by practising with a sawed-off bat, ensuring I got low into my drives to compensate for not having a swing at the ball, as well as having an overly wide stance. My footwork relied on a heavy forward commitment that was the only way to create any power down the ground. If in sync it still felt good, but flowing batting was rarely the order of the day. I was hard to get out but rarely dominant. Batting had become mechanical and success relied on the mental strength of resistance: defend, don't get out for long enough and you will walk off with some well-grafted runs. I had found a method that generally worked in my environment and I was going to stick to it.

The first person who alerted me to the dangers of my new technique was Greg Chappell - a natural maestro and modern great of the game. You would think he had decent credentials for me to value his opinion and perhaps heed his advice. I politely declined. I had just scored my first hundred for Australia A and was feeling pretty good about my game. I would prove him wrong, I thought. Despite my bubble being limited, it was comfortably consistent. I kept telling myself, "It's not how but how many." Looking back, I was being stubborn, as though it was just another hurdle to overcome, another challenge to rise to.

	Cowan and Warner's partnership was based on Warner's ability to attack effectively and Cowan's ability to not get out too cheaply © BCCI  Enlarge

The height of my bat admittedly fluctuated depending on whom I was playing and where and how I was feeling, but slowly and surely I started to resemble a caricature of myself. My stance got wider, my hands slowly slipping further ahead of my back hip. As a job, I loved the challenge of opening the batting, but my enjoyment of my own batting started to wane. I found it hard to appreciate the days I did score runs. I always felt like the handbrake was on. I struggled to watch footage of myself. I wanted to change, but it is either a courageous or incredibly stupid man who would do this in the middle of a series or season. The stakes had become too high.

By this stage, I was acting it all out on the brightly lit stage of international cricket. The game at this level felt largely mental. I knew my limitations and I was prepared to not swim outside the flags, so to speak. I found myself exhausted by the time I had ground my way to 30 or so, and would eventually get out having put little pressure on the bowler. My opening partnership success with David Warner was forged on his innate ability to smack it around and my ability to not get out too cheaply more often than not. I was a ball de-shiner. Or so it felt. His tank was full of premium unleaded to my diesel. Some days we got there just the same, but he would often roar like an F1 to my farm tractor.

An Australian legend of a different kind was the next to try and help, offering the advice that I would find freedom if I narrowed my stance and tapped my bat. This time it was coming from a friend. Justin Langer's words, unlike Chappell's, felt fatherly. He had spent hours with me honing my game and was invested. I went out and batted for him every time I crossed the rope. He mentioned it once in the West Indies during a rain break, but he also knew of the difficulties of changing the recipe on demand. He mentioned it again last season as it became more and more clear that my camouflage had worn off and I was a sitting duck to the predatory bowlers around the country.

And so to the present and the latest adaptation: the winter of 2014 saw my first "off season" in three years. Finally an opportunity to not just fine-tune but rebuild the car from scratch. The game as a travelling professional is now a 12-month gig, which in itself has its drawbacks when you're trying to make improvements to your game. It only feels like you are picking up little gains, and directing more attention towards competing week in, week out. There is little time to step back, take stock and go about putting the parts backs together.

I set about finding my 20-year-old self who had made the game so simple. I started to tap the bat and pick it up only when it was required. Within ten minutes I felt like a bird released from its cage. The ball started to fly purely off the face of the willow as it is meant to - with little effort and an ease that only comes when your feet and hands are talking to each other like loving siblings. That is not to say this guarantees more runs, but I feel like at least I am giving myself the best chance.

	I set about finding my 20-year-old self who had made the game so simple. I started to tap the bat and pick it up only when it was required. Within ten minutes I felt like a bird released from a cage

Having made the change, and enjoying the freedom it is providing, it seems that history is also on my side - a shot of the top 15 Australian run scorers in Test and first-class cricket recently appeared on our change-room wall. The photos were taken as the bowler was in his delivery stride. All but one batsman has his bat touching the ground. Admittedly most then move their bat upwards as the ball is leaving the hand, ready to pounce.

Imitation, they say, is the greatest form of flattery. For years Australians would mock English batting techniques as structured and complicated, and yet we have a generation of Australian cricketers replicating their styles. Cricket on television is an important medium for skill development, but also turns the players into imitators. Trying to bat like your favourite player is akin to a teenage girl wanting to dress like Kim Kardashian. Perhaps in their formative years of the mid-2000s - years that saw such English dominance (think Cook, Pietersen and Bell at their best) - youngsters jumped ship on the "Australian way" and imitated those succeeding at the time.

Finding your way as a young professional brings you up against the ultimate paradox. You may try to find consistency to ensure a lengthy career in a tough but financially rewarding environment by minimising risk and simply "surviving", but this will no doubt diminish your ability to put pressure on the bowlers. The more pressure the bowler feels, the more likely they are going to serve up more run-scoring balls and fewer wicket-taking ones. Even in this day and age of travelling batting coaches, analysts, mentors and batting gurus, the journey to find improvement and how you want to play is self-driven. Effective coaching is as much about leading the horse to the trough and allowing self-discovery, as arousing its interest in a drink.

The tide, though, it seems, is turning. I have seen Adam Voges in recent seasons - perhaps at the suggestion of Langer - go back to his natural best, George Bailey and Tim Paine, both fine players and as naturally gifted as they come, too have returned to tapping their bats in recent weeks and months.

Writing about my own batting seems a little self-indulgent, but the motive is simply to illuminate my journey and self-discovery in what has been a ten-year batting evolution. Perhaps if just one young cricketer retains his naturalness then the self-indulgence will be worthwhile.

Ed Cowan is a top-order batsman with Tasmania and Australia.

Batting on bouncy pitches: The secret behind Vijay's success

The Indian opener does not play the horizontal-bat shots, but he has a good record in Australia regardless

Aakash Chopra in Cricinfo

December 31, 2014

 

The best way to play the short ball? Get out of the way © Getty Images

Get lighter bats, bat in the nets against bowling machines or with wet tennis balls on concrete, and practise the horizontal-bat shots. These were a few bits of advice that came my way before I embarked on the tour to Australia in 2003.

We had all heard about how tough it was to bat on the harder, bouncier, faster Australian pitches, and of how important it was to mould one's game for the conditions. Cover drives and flicks off the legs were my lifeblood on Indian pitches, but these shots are useless down under, I was told.

While you cannot undervalue the importance of horizontal-bat shots against Australian fast bowlers in Perth or at the Gabba, it's a fallacy to think that players who don't have an attacking game off the back foot are doomed. M Vijay is a good example of how a solid defensive technique off the back foot, knowledge of where your off stump is, and the ability to transfer weight onto the front foot can do the job just as well, if not better. Vijay has scored over 200 runs against pace in the first two Tests of this series without much square-cutting, hooking or pulling.

Vijay v pace

	Runs	Balls	% of runs	% of balls	Wickets	S/R
Front foot	243	433	89.3	74.8	2	56.12
Back foot	29	146	10.7	25.2	2	19.86

Vijay's head when the bowler releases the ball is in line with the top of the off stump. That gives him a fair judgement of which balls are to be left alone and which are to be played. He has left alone about 34% (the highest percentage for any active international batsman today) of the balls he has faced in Test cricket since 2011. Most of these are deliveries bowled in the channel outside off. If you regularly allow the ball to go through to the wicketkeeper, bowlers will have to come closer to the stumps in search of the elusive outside edge, which works in your favour. Vijay is old-fashioned in the way he leaves a lot of balls alone and then punishes the full balls that are close to him.

In addition to leaving a lot of balls alone outside off, he leaves alone almost everything directed at his head. In his last three overseas series he has left 96% of all bouncers bowled to him, and hasn't played a single pull, hook or uppercut. It's possible to not attempt attacking shots against bouncers while being comfortable against them. If you find yourself in a tangle while leaving the ball, a lot of bouncers will come your way. Vijay is exceptional in being able to stay out of harm's way by ducking or swaying away. It doesn't come as a surprise that he isn't peppered with short-pitched stuff as much as some other Indian batsmen are.

Since Vijay scores a lot of runs off the front foot, you might be inclined to think that he commits himself on to the front foot and so has a long stride forward. That's not the case, and it is exactly why he is successful, for if you commit yourself on the front foot too early and too much, you can't get back in time, and you become suspect against deliveries that are short of a good length and bounce steeply. Vijay has a short front-foot stride but he has acquired the expertise to wait for the ball to come to him and to then transfer his weight a fraction before the ball arrives. A lot of players with short front-foot strides tend to reach out to the ball with their hands, but Vijay doesn't.

The success of this method also largely depends on the length and line most bowlers bowl in international cricket - full and outside off, for that's what the slip cordon is designed for. Not many batsmen get out nicking to the slip cordon off the back foot, even in places like Australia and South Africa, because it's relatively easier to deal with extra bounce and sideways movement when the ball is short, with the extra time you get at the crease. It's the fuller balls that draw you forward and lure you into playing false shots that end up finding the outside edge to the cordon behind. Don't they say that a half-volley in Feroz Shah Kotla is a half-volley in Perth?

When touring Australia or South Africa it's important to have a solid back-foot game, defensive or offensive. It's equally important to remember that you will be getting out mostly off the front foot, so you shouldn't be abandoning your front-foot skills.

The subtle adjustment that one must make is to stand a little taller and have high hands on the bat, so that the ball isn't hitting higher on the bat than it does elsewhere. A lot of players from the subcontinent have low hands and tend to stay lower to deal with the low bounce back home, and that results in not timing the ball well overseas. Vijay has ticked that box too. He stands tall, plays the ball on the rise, and most importantly, plays it close to his body and under his eyes.