On the other hand

Or why it may not be a bad idea to reverse your bat grip


SB TANG in Cricinfo


One summer's day, some 34 years ago, seven-year-oldMike Hussey was at home in the beachside Perth suburb of Mullaloo doing what he always did on a morning in the last week of December: watching the Boxing Day Test on TV. After seeing his hero Allan Border take Australia to the brink of a famous victory, only to fall an agonising three runs short, Hussey went out into his backyard and did something that few Australian cricketers have done before or since: he changed hands, permanently.

Hussey is naturally right-handed. He writes right-handed, plays tennis right-handed, brushes his teeth right-handed, picks up a spoon right-handed, and throws and bowls with his right arm. When he first picked up a cricket bat, he picked it up right-handed. But on that fateful sunny morning he decided to try batting left-handed, like Border, and ended up sticking with it for the rest of his life.

In so doing, Hussey may well have inadvertently bequeathed himself a natural technical advantage, for if there is one thing that the two main schools of batsmanship that exist in Australia - the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) school and the native autodidactic school headed by Sir Donald Bradman and Greg Chappell - agree on, it is this: a grip with a firm top hand and loose bottom hand is optimal for good batsmanship.

Logically it is easier for a batsman who holds the bat with his naturally stronger hand as the top hand (and his naturally weaker hand as the bottom hand) to grip it with a firm top hand and a loose bottom hand. When Hussey switched to batting left-handed, his naturally stronger right hand became his top hand. That wasn't what motivated his change - he did it "purely" because he "wanted to be like Allan Border" - and even when he became a world-class batsman, Hussey was generally not conscious of "the dominance of one hand over another", except when batting at the death of a one-day or T20 game. It was then, he told the Cricket Monthly, that he took the firm top-hand, loose bottom-hand grip to its logical apotheosis:

"At the end of a one-day game or a T20 game, when you're looking to basically hit sixes every ball… I made a conscious effort to really loosen the grip of my bottom hand. So I'd basically just rest the bottom hand [on the bat] on one finger - my index finger - because I was finding that when I was looking to slog, even though my bottom left hand was my less [naturally] dominant hand, it was gripping the bat too hard and taking control of the bat too quickly and affecting my swing. I wasn't hitting through the line of the ball as well as I would have liked."

Greg Chappell, Cricket Australia's first full-time national talent manager, has a clear vision for how Australia can continue to nurture its distinctive style of cricket - aggressive, attacking and winning. A firm-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip - a trait that Bradman himself believed to be "of supreme importance when playing a forward defensive shot" - is part of that vision. "It is", says Chappell in a recent interview with the Cricket Monthly, "essential for good batsmanship".

Firstly, he explains, such a grip enables a batsman to obtain the optimal bat swing - a pendular motion that maximises his chances of hitting the ball in the middle of the sweet spot. A batsman with that grip "initiates" the movement of his bat with his top hand and relegates his bottom hand to "a secondary role in the initiation [process]" as "the fulcrum". This naturally encourages him to pick up his bat so that, in his backswing, it is pointing between first slip and gully. His bat will then naturally and automatically drop back down onto the line of the ball when he is executing a straight-bat shot. The bat will "be on line [with the ball] from the top of the backswing all the way through the intended shot".

Secondly, a firm-top-hand-loose bottom-hand grip helps a batsman to stay balanced, with his weight on the balls of his feet like a champion boxer ready to throw (or ride) a punch, able to "move forward or back" into the optimal position to play the ball and synchronise the movements of his entire body.

The MCC agrees with Chappell insofar as both its instructional books constantly emphasise the importance of playing with a strong top hand, a high front elbow and a loose bottom hand, especially when executing forward defensives and front-foot drives. The problem is that the MCC's two specific written injunctions regarding how to pick up and grip a bat make it inherently difficult for batsmen to use a strong-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip. The MCC instructs batsmen to pick up the bat so that "the back [knuckle-side] of [their top] left hand, if the bat is held upright, is fac[ing] somewhere between mid-off and extra cover" and the hands form, with the thumb and first finger of each, two aligned Vs whose central line runs "half-way between the outer edge of the bat and the splice".

Pick up a bat with that MCC-prescribed grip and attempt to play a straight drive, off drive or cover drive. You will find that that grip encourages you to push through the shot with a firm bottom hand that shuts your bat face towards the on side. That is certainly what a young Chappell - saddled with the MCC grip taught to him at the age of five by a local youth coach with a very English pedagogy - found. Even after making his Sheffield Shield debut at the age of 18, he scored "about three-quarters" of his runs through the on side, a limitation so acute that it was the subject of much sledging from his opponents (and team-mates). Chappell recalls, in his 2011 autobiography Fierce Focus, that his own captain at South Australia, Les Favell, said to him, "I hope you won't lose sight of the fact that there are two sides of the wicket".

The firm bottom-hand tendency created by this grip is exacerbated by the explicit written instructions issued by the MCC to kids in Cricket - How to Play: pick up a bat as if you are "gripping an axe" with two hands to chop some wood that is lying on the ground. This instruction would - according to sports scientists David Mann, Oliver Runswick and Peter Allen - typically encourage kids to pick up a bat with their dominant hand as the bottom hand on the handle. Logically, this would make them more likely to play with a strong bottom hand.

In England, the influence of the MCC's coaching scriptures has always been strong. This can be seen in the faithful reproduction of the MCC's two injunctions regarding a batsman's grip in coaching manuals authored by the likes of Geoff Boycott and Robin Smith. In Australia, the influence has generally been much weaker. Seven of Australia's top 15 Test run scorers - Neil Harvey, Matthew Hayden, Michael Clarke, Justin Langer, Mark Taylor, Mike Hussey and Adam Gilchrist - have gripped a cricket bat with their naturally dominant hand as their top hand, suggesting either a blissful ignorance or a deliberate contravention of the MCC's two injunctions.

Bradman certainly didn't use the MCC-prescribed grip. Instead, as he wrote in The Art of Cricket, he gripped the bat in a manner that felt "comfortable and natural" to him, forming with the thumb and first finger of each hand two aligned Vs whose central line ran through the splice line of the bat. This meant that when he played a forward defensive, the back of his top hand faced him (and its palm faced the bowler). This neutral grip made it easier to hold the bat with a firm, controlling top hand and a loose bottom hand. As Bradman explained, "it curbs any tendency to follow through [with a strong bottom hand when playing the forward defensive]".

And it was Bradman who, on a balmy, almost cloudless December morning in 1967, advised a 19-year-old Chappell to ditch the MCC grip in favour of the Bradman grip. Chappell heeded the advice for the rest of his long and illustrious career, during which he became renowned throughout the cricket world for his piercing straight drives and cover drives. That advice, acknowledged Chappell in Fierce Focus, "transformed my game".

The Cricket Monthly spoke to seven cricketers of varying ages, three of whom - 68-year-old Chappell, 27-year-old Tim Buszard and 23-year-old Kevin Tissera - are bottom-hand natural, and four of whom - 45-year-old Justin Langer, 41-year-old Hussey, 34-year-old Ed Cowanand 20-year-old Matt Renshaw - are top-hand natural.

For want of a well-established term, this article will refer to batsmen who grip a bat with their naturally dominant hand as their top hand as "top-hand natural" and those who grip a bat with their naturally dominant hand as their bottom hand as "bottom-hand natural".

None of those interviewed - not even Renshaw and Buszard, whose dads are cricket coaches - can recall being expressly directed on how to pick up and grip a bat when they first encountered one. Their earliest cricketing memories are of playing in their backyard, local park and/or beaches with their dads, siblings and mates, using whatever materials were available. For Hussey, those materials initially consisted of nothing more than "a couple of big sticks" as bats and "some little rocks" as balls.

"I certainly don't remember [being directed how to pick up and grip a cricket bat]," says Langer. "It was just a natural instinct [to pick up the bat left-handed]. I can't remember anyone coming out and saying, 'You should be a left-hander or a right-hander.'"

Like many Australian cricketers, Cowan learnt the game in his backyard and at the local park - conveniently located across the road from his family home - with his dad and two older brothers, and didn't encounter formal coaches until he was about 14. He is completely right-handed, but he bats left-handed and has always done so. As an uncoached kid he wasn't conscious of the technicalities of holding a bat; however, as a teenager, he met the late Peter Roebuck, whose coaching and mentorship would have a profound and positive impact on him.

Roebuck firmly believed in having a strong top hand and theorised that batsmen who bat with their naturally dominant hand as their top hand "have accidentally gained an advantage for themselves". He expressed that belief and theory not only in his unequivocal columns in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald but in his coaching sessions with the teenage Cowan, "consistently letting [him] know that he had an advantage he should be using". Cowan recalls: "Probably at 14, I realised it felt like I had an advantage because it was easier to craft a technique with my top hand being my [naturally] dominant hand."

Langer became aware earlier because, somewhat unusually for an Australian cricketer, he was exposed to coaching at a young age. "When I was… maybe eight or nine years old," he recalls, "my dad brought my first cricket coach around to the backyard and he taught me the basics of the game - his name was Bryn Martin and I still remember him. He used to come on Sunday mornings, talk about the basics and particularly about having a tight-top-hand-and-loose-bottom-hand grip, doing most of my batting through my top hand." That made perfect sense to Langer, who soon realised that that grip came "more naturally" to him because his naturally dominant right hand was his top hand on the bat.

Renshaw, Queensland's rising star, thinks that his small size and consequent lack of physical strength as a junior naturally encouraged him to play with a strong-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip because he "couldn't really play the big shots… with that bottom hand". He wasn't conscious of top-hand versus bottom-hand dominance as a kid, but is now of the opinion that his "top-hand dominance definitely helps" him to hit straight.

It should be noted that, although it is easier for top-hand natural batsmen to have a strong-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip, numerous great bottom-hand natural Australian Test batsmen - such as Bradman, Steve Waugh and Chappell - have possessed that grip too. Chappell is "a right-hander through and through" and "batted right-handed" with his naturally stronger right hand as his bottom hand, but, he explains: "I know in my batting my top hand [which was my naturally weaker left hand] was my dominant hand. We were fortunate that our father understood [the importance of having a dominant top hand and a very light bottom hand] and drilled that into us from a very early age."

Although, in Australia at least, top-hand natural batsmen are nothing new - Neil Harvey played his first Test, against India at the Adelaide Oval, in January 1948 - it appears that more and more of them are appearing at Test level across the globe. Sports scientists, led by Dr Florian Loffing at the University of Kassel in Germany, recently discovered, after examining every Test cricketer with a batting average of at least 30, that the proportion of them who are top-hand natural has been growing steadily over time: 0% of those who made their Test debut in the 1880s were top-hand natural; for those who made their Test debut this decade, the figure is 33%.

The issue was highlighted by a recent research article in Sports Medicine by Mann, Runswick and Allen. They studied a sample of 43 professional batsmen (who had played first-class and/or international cricket) and 93 amateur batsmen (with less than five years' experience) and found that 40% of those professional batsmen batted with their naturally dominant hand as their top hand, whereas only 9% of the amateur batsmen did so.

Some media reports seemed to suggest that the article concluded that there is a universally "right" batting grip (namely, the top-hand natural grip) and a universally "wrong" batting grip (namely, the bottom-hand natural grip). However, the research itself did not say that. Mann, a capable Australian club cricketer, told the Cricket Monthly that he would "be quite horrified" if the research was misinterpreted to suggest that there is a universally "right" and "wrong" batting stance. "My background is fully in skill acquisition, and I would be the strongest advocate of not using a 'one-size fits all' [technique]. I very much advocate needing to embrace what a player's own technique is, and to not change technique."

That being said, Mann believes that their research "suggests that there is actually an advantage to batting reverse-stance [that is, being top-hand natural] and it does provide a better chance of becoming a professional batsman". That hypothesis is supported by Chappell's postulation that "there is a very good chance" that top-hand natural batsmen have a natural technical advantage, "because it's probably more likely that they are going to use their top hand" in adopting a firm-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip.

Natural-hand dominance is unquestionably a salient factor in batsmanship. However, it is only one part of a much larger story. Every single cricketer and coach interviewed for this article underlined that batting is, in Chappell's words, "a whole body exercise". "Human beings", he explains, "are a lever system. The bat is the last lever in the chain." The legs "set up" the lever system and "what you want is a chain reaction where everything happens efficiently and effectively at the right time."

Trent Woodhill is a sports science graduate of the University of New South Wales and one of the most respected batting coaches in Australia, currently working with Melbourne Stars, Royal Challengers Bangalore, and David Warner. He expands the analysis of natural-side dominance to encompass the batsman's entire body, believing that most batsmen have a leg and a hip that they are naturally more comfortable hitting off. As a coach, he always tries to "work out where [an individual batsman's natural] dominance lies" so that he can help the batsman find the technique that's best for him.

Woodhill points out that Virat Kohli is, like Steve Waugh, a bottom-hand natural right-handed batsman who naturally prefers hitting off his back leg. This enables him to play outrageous shots, such as a back-foot square drive off a near yorker just outside off stump, directing the ball behind point with minimal foot movement. "As long as he transfers his weight through his dominant [back] foot," Woodhill says, "he can move his feet as little or as often as he likes."

By contrast Ricky Ponting, a bottom-hand natural right-handed batsman who naturally prefers hitting the ball off his front leg, "just in front of his left knee", could never play the squarish, back-foot drives and cuts that come so naturally to Kohli and Steve Waugh. But he could play other shots that they couldn't, such as the front-foot drive on the up through the covers, and his vicious trademark pull shot against balls that many other batsmen found too full to pull.

A batsman's naturally dominant hitting leg is not necessarily his naturally favoured kicking leg. Warner, Langer and Cowan kick a football with their right foot but are more comfortable hitting the ball off their back - left - foot. By contrast, Steve Smith, Hussey and Renshaw favour kicking a football with, and hitting a ball off, the same leg: their right.

Langer explains that he felt comfortable "pushing off his dominant [right kicking] leg to get back" to play his favourite cut and pull shots. Cowan thinks that his current-day preference for hitting off his back left foot is "just a product of first-class cricket. Even though I'm a front-foot player… [in that] I tell myself to go forward when the ball is released, I think that's so I can push back and play off my back [foot]." He adds that his ten-year-old uncoached self would have favoured hitting off his front foot.

This logic of interconnectedness applies with equal force to the hands themselves. Ian Renshaw, an expert in human movement and skill acquisition at Queensland University of Technology, who has worked extensively with CA as a consultant (and also happens to be Matt Renshaw's father), told the Cricket Monthlythat the batsman's two hands work as a unit. "It's not helpful to look at it as the hands working separately because they don't." Richard Clifton - Glenn Maxwell's personal coach - concurs: the hands "have to work together" as "one unit".

The clearest illustration of this is the straight drive for four or six. As Bradman explained in The Art of Cricket, "there should be a complete follow through" with the bottom hand snapping through fully to finish off the "full-blooded drive" so that, when the stroke is completed, the toe of the bat is pointing at the wicketkeeper's head. Ian Renshaw calls this the "Bradman finish".

Perhaps the finest exemplar of the Bradman finish today is Maxwell, who routinely drives fast bowlers for flat, straight sixes because, as Clifton explains, his top hand "pushes through" and his bottom hand "rips through", giving him both accuracy and power. Maxwell is, like Bradman, bottom-hand natural, which gives him an advantage over top-hand natural batsmen in this particular area - when playing front-foot drives, he finds it easier to rip his naturally stronger bottom hand through to achieve the Bradman finish.

Even the most ardent proponents of the strong-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip agree that the bottom hand comes into play for certain shots. As Bradman put it, "the left-hand [that is, the top hand] position must remain firm irrespective of the attempted stroke", but the strength of the bottom hand should vary depending on the shot being played. For example, the forward defensive should be played with a loose bottom hand, whereas the pull shot requires the bottom hand to "predominate" to complete the follow-through.

All four of the top-hand natural batsmen interviewed for this piece - Langer, Hussey, Cowan and Matt Renshaw - recall having good forward defensives as kids. Hussey was "not great" at whipping balls off his pads, and his sweep, pull and hook shots were "not dominant". Langer explains that, as a kid, "I wasn't a powerful hitter through the leg side because I wasn't as strong with my bottom hand" but "I used to use [my loose bottom hand] to control the ball through the leg side, to hit areas and gaps". So "instead of hitting a lot of balls through midwicket, I used to get a lot of balls down to fine leg". Even as a world-class Test batsman, who by the end of his career "swept everything" against spin, Langer found that, "instead of a hard sweep in front of square leg", his sweep shot was "more a lap shot" hit behind square leg. "I tend to just caress it through the leg side," Langer explains, "because I was more top-hand dominant."

Interestingly, despite being a top-hand natural batsman Cowan found that, as a kid, the shot that he played most easily and consistently was the bottom hand-dependent work off his pads. "I think," he says, "that that's a left-handed batsman thing" - junior right-arm bowlers tend to bowl a lot of balls at junior left-handed batsmen's pads - "rather than [a] top- or bottom-hand [thing]".

Cowan and Langer have always favoured pulling and cutting, shots that require their naturally weaker bottom hand to snap through. There are clear environmental and physiological reasons for that - because Cowan and Langer were small for their age, they tended to receive a lot of short balls and had to find a way to counter that; and since they were both naturally more comfortable hitting the ball off their back foot, the pull and hook shots became the natural solutions to that challenge.

Neither Cowan nor Matt Renshaw swept much when they were kids, and Renshaw found it difficult to whip balls off his pads. Even today, Renshaw reckons that his reverse sweep and his switch hit, which derive their power from his naturally stronger top hand, are better than his conventional sweep.

On a sunny Melbourne afternoon in early March, I chatted with the Victorian batsman Peter Handscomb over a coffee on Chapel Street. As we were wrapping up, he shared his thoughts on the next stage of batting's evolution - future generations of batsmen will routinely practise batting both left- and right-handed, and then, come game time, select whichever hand is optimal for a particular bowler.

Two weeks later, in Australia's opening game of the World T20 campaign, Handscomb's friend and Victoria team-mate Maxwell confronted a left-arm orthodox spinner, Mitchell Santner, bowling around the wicket on a slow, gripping pitch in Dharamsala. For the first three deliveries of the 15th over, Maxwell took guard right-handed, then switched to left-handed at around the time Santner jumped into his delivery stride. The left-handed Maxwell worked the first ball with a straight bat through midwicket for two, blocked the second ball (a yorker on off stump) and mishit a sweep off the third ball (a leg-stump full toss) to backward square leg for a single.

On air, Michael Slater was left scratching his head ("What is going on? Aw, again, well, as I said, I reckon he makes batting hard"), but his fellow commentator Tom Moody pointed out that there was an undeniable method to this seeming madness. "Maxwell's thinking, I'm assuming, that he's trying to hit with the spin… " Matt Renshaw didn't watch the game live, but when I explained the match scenario and pitch conditions, he was quick to say: "That would've been probably one of the best options at the time for him."

Thirty-four years earlier, when confronted in the Ranji Trophy by a left-arm orthodox spinner turning it square on a raging turner, Sunil Gavaskar switched to batting left-handed (while continuing to bat right-handed against the other bowlers). Incredibly, he compiled a patient, unbeaten 18 to secure a draw.

Unlike Gavaskar, though, Maxwell only batted left-handed for three balls. A week later, Woodhill - who works with Handscomb and Maxwell at Melbourne Stars - prophesied that, sooner or later "there will be that unique player… who will come out and bat left-handed when the left-arm spinner's on and then when the offspinner comes on, he'll bat right-handed".

Fast forward another three weeks and the scientist David Mann told me of his slightly different, but related, theorem:

"Wherever possible, it's good to actually be able to bat both ways for as long as possible. I mean, at some point you probably do need to specialise. But my initial observation in this whole area was actually of David Warner. So we used to play indoor cricket together when he was young and we would bat together… and he could bat equally well right- or left-handed. Even at that stage [when Warner was about 13 or 14 years old], it wasn't clear which he would actually end up preferring to do."

At least four current elite batsmen in Australia - Warner, Finch, Matt Renshaw and Maxwell - routinely practise batting the other way round. None of the 12 cricketers and coaches interviewed for this piece said they had noticed any Australian kids regularly practising batting both left- and right-handed. However, Hussey observed that thanks to batsmen like Warner and Maxwell, "I probably have noticed kids more often turn around and muck around with batting both left- and right-handed."

In Woodhill's opinion, one factor hindering the evolutionary step of batsmen regularly practising left- and right-handed is current protective equipment: "Right-handed gloves are so different to left-handed gloves, they just haven't got the same protection. And same with the thigh pads as well - small inner [back] thigh pad and a larger [front] one. So until gear is developed to be able to do both, there's a physical risk involved [in batting the other way round]." It came as little surprise when Clifton subsequently said that, as a teenager, Maxwell owned a left-handed thigh pad.

Both Matt Renshaw and Woodhill believe that, at some point in the future, batsmen will regularly switch hands. Indeed, from a broader historical perspective, it's surprising that it hasn't happened already. Highly proficient switch hitters have been part of Major League Baseball since at least the late 19th century, and prior to the 1990s, many of Australia's finest batsmen, from Victor Richardson to Harvey to Norm O'Neill to Bill Lawry to Ian Chappell to Greg Chappell to Border to Brad Hodge, spent their winters playing high-level baseball.

If the latest generation of Australian batsmen has a standard-bearer, it is the 20-year-old Renshaw, the fifth highest run scorer in last summer's Shield, runner-up for the Shield Player of the Season award, and the youngest batsman picked in this winter's Australia A squad. The left-handed Renshaw is, in many senses, a classical opener. He is patient and enjoys batting for long periods. He doesn't hold a Big Bash contract, is yet to make his List A debut for Queensland, and his season strike rate of 40.95 was the lowest of last summer's top ten Shield run scorers. Those facts are fairly well known.

What is less well known is that Renshaw has switch hit a six at Lord's, a shot that came as little surprise to those who know that he has been practising batting right-handed since he was a boy. "I can't really remember whether it was [my idea] or Dad's," he says. "I can just remember watching people play reverse sweeps and I thought that would be pretty cool. And so I started trying to bat right-handed."

He has had both the switch hit and the reverse sweep in his armoury since he was a teenager. Of the two, he is "more comfortable playing the reverse sweep because when you go for the switch hit, you have to swap everything and the bowler can change where he is going to bowl it". He'll only play the higher risk switch hit if there is a good reason to do so. He did it at Lord's because "it was an offspinner [bowling] to a short boundary on the off side".

Renshaw is yet to see any batsman do what Handscomb predicted that the next generation would do - change hands during a game to suit the bowler they're facing - but says, without skipping a beat, "I've definitely talked about it with Dad".

Batsmen should begin spin training at an early age

Ian Chappell in Cricinfo


Australia have been whitewashed by Sri Lanka and in the process surrendered their No. 1 Test ranking. That may be just the beginning of their nightmare, with a challenging 2017 tour of India hanging over the players' heads like a hangman's noose.

It has been suggested Australia are doing everything possible to address an ongoing weakness in spin-friendly conditions. Pitches are specifically prepared at the National Academy to replicate spinning conditions, and more youth tours are being undertaken to Asian countries. Both good ideas but they don't begin to address the underlying problem.

Learning to play spin bowling is not something you do in your twenties. Correct and decisive footwork has to be learned from an early age so it's ingrained by the late teens and you have the confidence to utilise these skills under any conditions.

When I was ten, I was given some important advice by my old coach Lynn Fuller. He told me: "Ian, it doesn't matter how good I am as a coach. I can't help you when you're out in the middle. The quicker you learn this game for yourself, the better off you'll be."

More specifically on playing spin bowling, he advised: "Better to be stumped by three yards than three inches. Don't think about the wicketkeeper when you leave your crease, otherwise you're thinking about missing the ball."

I saw Australian players in Sri Lanka stumped by what looked like millimetres. An adventurous advance drastically changes the length of a delivery in favour of the batsman; a tentative, minimal move forward only improves the bowler's chance of success. A good player of spin alters the bowler's length to his desire, and by doing so he can manipulate the field placings.

By achieving these objectives and putting the loose ball away, a good spinner can be frustrated. A slogged six or a reverse sweep doesn't unnerve a good spinner; the maximum hit means he's still bowling to the same batsman. What drives a spinner crazy is batsmen constantly rotating the strike, using quick, decisive footwork to manoeuvre the ball into gaps and take singles. Once the spinner is tearing his hair out, then the loose deliveries come, and that's when a batsman has to pick off the boundaries.

The young Sri Lankan batsman Kaushal Silva did this to perfection in the second innings in Colombo.

To achieve this in a long innings under difficult conditions is exacting; by the end of a marathon innings a batsman should be knackered both physically and mentally. One of the great challenges of playing good spinners in difficult conditions is the batsman pitting his brain against that of the bowler.

This is not easy to achieve but it's impossible if you haven't learned good footwork at a young age. If you have the confidence that is only provided by a solid foundation, you won't be panicked into playing low-percentage shots. And with a clear mind provided by that confidence, there's a realisation there are actually some advantages for the batsman when the ball is spinning sharply. The bowler has to pitch further outside the stumps to hit them, and with the ball coming at a sharper angle, it affords the batsman an opportunity to work it into a gap.

A coach hurriedly preparing a young player for a lucrative T20 contract is incompatible with the education required for a successful Test career. However, a young batsman who is given a complete grounding can capably handle any form of cricket.

Batsmen must have a plan, especially when facing good spinners, but it must be personally devised, not one prepared by a coach. Some of the Australian plans in Sri Lanka were based purely on survival. If a plan doesn't revolve around scoring runs in a reasonably secure manner, then it might as well be a map of the London tube system.

Learning to play good spinners in conditions that suit them is not a 40-minute lesson, it's a complete education, university included. If Australia don't already have batsmen skilled in the art, then chances are the Test tour of India will only add to their Asian nightmare.

Aakash Chopra - On opening batsmanship

Aakash Chopra in Cricinfo

The IPL is now nine seasons old. Having spent a few seasons in an IPL dressing room, I was soon convinced that T20 was here to stay, and second - a not-so-healthy upshot - that the format would seriously affect the growth of Test openers and spinners in particular. This because no other players are forced to change their basic game to suit the demands of the shortest format as much as Test openers and spinners.

A Test opener is a skeptic by nature. He is trained to distrust the ball till it reaches him. Early signs can be misleading; the ball might appear to be traveling in a straight line after the bowler releases it, but it's wrong for the batsman to assume that it will follow the same path till it reaches him. The new ball could move very late in the air or off the pitch, and so openers are hardwired to view it with suspicion. They are also trained not to commit early to a shot because that can leave them in a tangle. They're told to wait till the ball gets to them and play close to the body. Reaching out with the hands is a temptation a Test opener must guard against.

But in T20 cricket, an opener's role is to set the tone. Go really hard in the first six overs, which is when scoring is considered to be easiest. If you can't find the gaps, go aerial. If you can't go down straight, trust the bounce and go across. Don't get too close to the ball, as that will block the bat-swing. Stay away from the ball and use the arms and hands to reach out and hit. A spell of 12 balls without a boundary in the first six overs is considered to be pushing the team back. Patience might be a virtue in Tests; it's a liability in T20.

The same is true for the spinners. Flight, dip, guile and deception aren't the most sought after virtues in the world of T20. Instead, the focus is on keeping the trajectory low and bowling it a little quicker to discourage the batsmen from using their feet. Bounce is revered in Tests, but the lack of it is a boon in T20. We have seen spinners go extremely roundarm (remember Ravindra Jadeja in the IPL?) to prevent the batsman from getting under the bounce.

It takes a long time to master the art of bowling long spells to plot and plan dismissals in Test cricket - a tactic that's alien to T20 bowlers who are used to bowling four overs across two or more spells. You can't practise crossing the English Channel by spending 30 minutes in the swimming pool everyday. T20 cricket has challenged the fundamentals of spin bowling.

The reason I think middle-order batsmen and fast bowlers haven't been forced to change their game is because T20 hasn't demanded they do anything that they weren't already doing. A middle-order batsman in a Test side, as in a T20 game, is allowed to rotate the strike and play along the ground before accelerating the scoring. He does the same in Tests and ODIs, albeit later in the innings. The only adjustment he is called on to make is to shift gears a little sooner. That's easier to do than being asked to move from riding a bicycle to driving a sports car, as spinners and opening batsmen are.

Similarly, fast bowlers aren't pressed to do anything radically different either. Make the new ball swing, change lengths and pace regularly, and find the blockhole on demand. It's challenging for sure but not a skill-altering demand.

After weighing in these factors, it is only fair to assume that the next generation of spinners and openers for the longer format might take a lot longer to come to the fore, or worse, not do so at all. After all, why would somebody invest in the skill set required to play the longest format given the huge rewards on offer in the shortest format? Unless you just can't cut it in T20, leaving you with no choice whatsoever.

While the likes of David Warner and R Ashwin excel equally in both formats, it's worth noting that both honed their skills as youngsters when playing the longer format was still the way up. Also, both are aberrations and not the norm. Increasingly, Test teams are forced to pick specialists in these two departments.

KL Rahul comes across as the first to challenge my hypothesis, and perhaps he provides an insight into how cricketers of the future will be.

Things that look improbable now, both physically and mentally, could become reality in the near future. And Rahul's early success across formats offers proof. He was only 16 when the IPL started, in 2008, and his first-class debut came two years later, which makes him a wonderful case study.

Rahul is happy leaving the ball that is only a few inches outside the off stump in Tests, and equally adept at flaying anything wide. He puts in a long stride to get close to the ball and then lean into drives in the longer format, but in T20 he doesn't mind staying away from a ball pitched on the same length, the better to allow his hands to go through. Like a true Test opener, he is skeptical at the beginning of a Test innings, but he doesn't mind going down on one knee to scoop the first ball he faces in the shortest format.

He got out pulling from outside off in his debut Test match and since then he hasn't played that stroke early in his innings. By his own admission, he really enjoys playing the pull and hook to anything that is short. To shelve a shot that's dear to you in one format and play it in other formats shows discipline and patience. That's a virtue the new-age opener wasn't mastering, or so I thought.

Most importantly, a fifty or an eighty isn't enough for Rahul. In fact, save for one occasion, he has scored a century every time he has passed 50 in Tests. He has shown that if you train the mind as much as you train the body, it's indeed possible to find a game that's suited to Test cricket without compromising on success in other formats.

Over on the bowling side, we are still struggling to find spinners for the longer format. I won't be surprised if some boards decide to keep young spinners away from T20 cricket till a certain age, for it is widely accepted that the shortest format is affecting the development of young spinners.

Perhaps I'm taking Rahul's initial success too seriously. After all, he could be just like Warner, an aberration. But his style of play is reassuring and has given me hope. Maybe he's the first of the new breed of Test openers. Amen to that thought.

Coaching manual’s axe effect: When left is actually right

SURESH MENON in The Hindu


David Gower.


In Pakistan, Sadiq Mohammed turned to it to increase his chances of being picked for the side; in India, Sourav Ganguly converted so he could use his brother’s equipment; in Australia Mike Hussey was merely emulating his hero Allan Border.

These are all sound reasons for batting left-handed. But recent research has shown that there may be stronger scientific reasons than emotional or practical ones for the natural right-hander to bat left-handed.

It might seem illogical that batsmen should be classified according to the placement of their weaker hand or the use of the less dominant eye. The conventional right hander watches the approaching bowler with his left eye while the top hand, responsible for controlling and guiding the bat, is his weaker hand.

Gower’s logic

That elegant left-hander David Gower once said, “Both right-handers and left-handers have been horribly misnamed because the left-hander is really a right-hander and the right-hander is really a left-hander, if you work out which hand is doing most of the work. So from my point of view, my right arm is my strongest and therefore it’s the right hand, right eye and generally the right side which is doing all the work. Left-handers, as such, should be called right-handers.”

It is too late for that, of course!

It might be logical, though — but cricket is not a logical or natural sport like soccer is; it might even seem irrational, and that is part of its charm.

Gower’s position has recently been endorsed by science. Research in Amsterdam’s Vrije University suggests that a “reverse stance”, with the dominant hand on the top might be the most efficient way to bat, and successful international players use that technique. The paper is published in the journal Sport Medicine.

Professor Peter Allen who led the study said: “The ‘conventional’ way of holding a cricket bat has remained unchanged since the invention of the game. The first MCC coaching manual instructs batters to pick up a bat in the same manner they would pick up an axe.”

Besides Gower himself, Adam Gilchrist (who plays tennis right handed), Matthew Hayden, Kumar Sangakkara, Chris Gayle, David Warner, Ben Stokes are conventional left handers who are right-hand dominant, while the reverse is true in the case of batsmen like Michael Clarke and Inzamamul Haq. Sachin Tendulkar, uniquely, batted and bowled right-handed but signs autographs left-handed.

Left-handed batsmen benefit from being less common, with bowlers struggling to adapt. Left-handers play right-arm medium-pacers bowling across their bodies from round the wicket which feeds into their bread-and-butter strokes. The not-quite-glance, not-really-a-hook that left-handers play fine off their hips is unique to them. Both Gower and Lara played it exceptionally well.

Misnomer?

But did we really misname them, as Gower suggested? Coaches do tell their wards about the role of the top hand and the part played by the bottom hand in strokes such as the cut and pull. But few can explain why in that case, a batsman has to lead with his weaker side.

One possible explanation for the switch (if it is indeed that) may be that the drive being a stroke that calls for timing rather than power, the weaker top hand can handle that and leave the forcing strokes to the stronger hand. It is also easier for the bottom hand to manipulate the wrists when it needs to be rolled to keep the ball down.

In Right Hand, Left Hand, winner of the Aventis Prize for Science Books, Chris McManus says that around 10% of the population and perhaps 20% of top sportsmen are left-handed. He makes the point that left-handers have the advantage in asymmetric sports like baseball, where the right-handed batter has to run anti-clockwise towards first base after swinging and facing to his left.

Sometimes the asymmetries, he says, are subtle, as in badminton, where the feathers of the shuttlecock are arranged clockwise, making it go to the right, so smashes are not equally easy from left and right of the court. Sometimes, of course, the left-hander is at a total disadvantage, as in polo, where the mallet has to be held in the right hand on the right side of the horse, or in hockey, where the sticks are held right handed.

South Africa’s Graeme Pollock played tennis right-handed, but golf left-handed (he wrote with his right hand). Garry Sobers was left-handed in everything he did.

Indefinite conclusions

I don’t know what conclusions can be drawn from this. Perhaps the left-hander whose right hand is the stronger hand plays the top-hand shots like the drive better than most. And the one with the stronger left as bottom hand plays the shots square of the wicket better.

Coaching, cultural and visual biases may ultimately decide whether a child takes up his stance right-handed or left. From then on, familiarity and comfort dictate. As does pragmatism. The “dominant side” theory is usually a retrospective explanation.

The Effort behind his Effortless batting

V RAMNARAYAN in Cricinfo



David Gower worked very hard to master his technique against spin, following initial struggles © Getty Images



"Ï wish God hadn't made me so beautiful." The girl who uttered these words must have forever regretted them. She was one of the brighter students of Chennai's Presidency College during my own student years there, and this was her reaction to the catcalls and whistles that greeted her at the college gate every morning courtesy a gathering of louts inspired by the so-called heroes of the Tamil cinema of the day. Of course, her naïve response to their harassment only added to the ammunition of her tormentors.

David Ivon Gower, recently in Chennai to deliver the first KS Narayanan Oration, perhaps never had cause to regret his good looks, but I am not sure he was entirely happy with the media hype about the lazy elegance of his batting. He did hint during his interactions with Chennai's cricket enthusiasts that much effort went into his effortless batting.

I have this irritating habit of drawing parallels from other walks of life, especially the world of art, and I could not help remembering a lament of the late MS Subbulakshmi, one of the greatest Indian vocalists of our time. Though she was hurt by constantly being described as just a great voice, she rarely expressed her disappointment at it. She did sometimes drop her guard and confide in her closest associates, saying, "People always speak of my great voice and give me little credit for my technical prowess. They don't know how hard I must work to achieve my 'natural' voice.''

In Gower's case, while it was all very well to have fans and critics swoon over his left-hander's grace and the time he had to play his stylish shots, it must have been less pleasant when critics saw the very effortlessness of his successes as the irresponsibility that caused his failures.

In his informal conversations with cricket aficionados in Chennai, Gower did reveal a tinge of regret at how this so-called casualness was labelled the villain in English defeats in his time, though his wry sense of humour has a way of converting every jibe into a joke.

With his golden curls, his carefree approach to batting, and the elegance of his shotmaking, Gower was certainly one of the most popular overseas cricketers to play in Chennai, but it was a revelation that he still has a fan following here decades after he last played in the city. Gower himself was overwhelmed by the high level of awareness of cricket history among the locals he met. "Their knowledge of my cricket statistics is quite amazing,'' he said.




Gower brought out the best in Graeme Fowler during the 1984-85 India tour © Getty Images


Ray Illingworth, Mike Brearley and Richie Benaud were the captains who inspired Gower. ''Be yourself'' was the mantra he followed as captain, and asked his players to follow, but he also never forgot Benaud's advice, ''Captaincy is 90% luck and 10% skill, but don't try it without that 10%." In the early days of his captaincy Alastair Cook, Gower claims, was trying to be Andrew Strauss, and the improvement when he decided to be himself was palpable.

Beating India in India in 1984-85 was among his finest hours as captain, second only to England's Ashes win the same year for the amount of satisfaction he derived from it. Though his on-off career as both player and captain was not easy to deal with, and he is generally self-deprecatory about his captaincy, he recalls with some pride that he gave his players the freedom to express themselves on the field and in team meetings. He believed in giving each player responsibility, sometimes specific responsibilities. The results were there for all to see - for instance in the almost unexpected successes of Graeme Fowler and Mike Gatting in India.

Fowler tended sometimes to behave like a kid and was treated as one. By giving him the responsibility and encouragement to open the innings in alien conditions, Gower made sure the boy grew up.

Gatting, who had debuted for England before Gower, had been in and out of the team for some seven years, and he too was given the freedom to play his natural game, and his appointment as vice-captain placed on him added responsibility. Both scored runs in the series opener in Bombay, disastrous for England, where L Sivaramakrishnan took 12 wickets to send them hurtling down to defeat, but the English batsmen bounced back in the very next Test, in Delhi, though Siva's golden streak continued, with another six-wicket haul in England's first innings. By this time, however, there was a distinct change of mindset among the English batsmen, who were beginning to play the bowling on its merits, without getting bamboozled by the turning ball.

Gatting and Fowler made the transformation complete when they scored double-centuries in the Madras Test. In this match, a new fast bowler had emerged in Neil Foster, who took 11 wickets in the match, starting with a fiery spell on the first morning. The captain's laid-back but confident style had paid off.

During Gower's Chennai visit, he and I talked about a match we had played against each other back in January 1978, he for a Perth club, and I for the touring Hyderabad Blues. I remembered that he had been uncomfortable against spin in that game, and marvelled at his rapid progress in that department which enabled him to make a double-hundred against India the following year. ''I was a novice against spin when we played that match'', he said, ''and I worked really hard when I went back to England. I had help from my captain, Ray Illingworth, and other team-mates, and we worked systematically on my approach to playing slow bowling.'' This was evidence of the steel under that casual exterior, the same determination that helped him to play the great West Indian pacemen better than many other batsmen of his era.

What's the next generation of batsmen learning?

Ian Chappell in Cricinfo


It's now eight years since Misbah-ul-Haq's ill-conceived attempted scoop shot ballooned to short fine leg at the Wanderers Stadium and India were crowned inaugural World T20 champions.

Much has happened in cricket since that exciting five-run victory and the bulk of it revolves around the evolution of T20. Leagues have sprung up like daisies in summer, with the IPL being the most affluent and gaudy, whilst the other two versions of the game - Test and 50-over cricket - have receded into the shadows.

Now that kids from all over the world who watched that Wanderers final are at an age where they could make their own name in the game, it's time to look at how young players are being developed.

The dilemma involving the development of young cricketers is simple. For batsmen, it's: do you concentrate on a method that provides hitting power and the capability of scoring at ten runs per over, or do you develop a solid foundation that allows for adjustment to any form of the game?

For a bowler it's even more straightforward: do you implant in his mind a metronomic desire to produce a string of dot balls, or a mentality that stresses the priority of wickets?

Having just witnessed a 40-year-old Michael Hussey shred a Big Bash League attack with a mixture of scorching off-drives, gentle taps to initiate a scampered single and four power-laden shots that cleared the boundary, I'd opt for the solid foundation method.

Hussey, along with a number of other fine batsmen from an era when players were brought up with success in the longer forms of the game as a measuring stick, is proof a solid all-round technique is easily adaptable to T20 cricket. The best T20 teams have a combination of batsmen who can survive and prosper against good bowling and those who regularly clear the boundary rope.

The ideal fast bowling blueprint is Dale Steyn, a bowler who combines an excellent strike rate with a relatively low economy rate. For spinners, R Ashwin is a good role model; he takes wickets at both ends of the batting order and keeps the long balls to a minimum.
The secret to good bowling is to keep believing you can dismiss a batsman. Once that thought turns to purely containment, the batsman is winning the battle.

Given reasonable pitches, the bowlers adapt well, but many batsmen struggle in anything other than serene conditions. On the evidence of the eye test and the average length of a Test, it's obvious that solid foundations are crumbling and most batsmen are ill-equipped to survive a searching test by a good bowler. This has been a recent trend but I don't see any attempt to alter the way batsmen are being developed.

I suspect batsmen are being over-coached and bombarded with theories in structured net sessions that often involve the dreaded bowling machine. There's a lot to be said for the old-fashioned method of simply advocating a solid defence and then encouraging a youngster to spend hours playing in match situations - either in the backyard or at the local park - in order to learn how his own game works best.

This method worked extremely well for batsmen as successful and diverse in style as Sir Garfield Sobers, Sachin Tendulkar and Greg Chappell. As Sobers says in his excellent coaching book: "One of the tragedies of cricket coaching is the greatness of the game's best players is revered but never followed."
It would be a good start for a budding young batsman to emulate the style and development process of a Tendulkar, a Hussey or an AB de Villiers. It would also help if the youngster avoided listening to coaches with theories on batting that haven't been proven in the middle. As former great Australian legspinner Bill O'Reilly once stated: "If you see a coach coming, son, run and hide behind a tree."
I'd modify that for a young batsman and say: "Seek good coaching or else avoid it at all costs and learn the game for yourself."

Batting:The downside of up

Grounded for life: Justin Langer at the Gabba© Getty Images

What began as a technical tweak for one Aussie batsman is now a nationwide fad. And not everyone is impressed

SB TANG in Cricinfo | NOVEMBER 2015

For the first 128 years of Australia's Test history, there was one constant in a boundless sea of technical heterodoxy - great Australian batsmen gently and rhythmically tapped their bats on the ground as the bowler ran in, and kept their bats grounded until around the time the bowler jumped into his delivery stride.

Every permanent member of the top seven (Matthew Hayden, Michael Slater/Justin Langer, Ricky Ponting, Mark Waugh, Steve Waugh, Damien Martyn and Adam Gilchrist) of Australia's victorious 2001 Ashes team - the last to win an Ashes series on English soil - adhered to this method.

Mike Hussey was not a member of that top seven. In the English summer of 2001, Hussey was a 26-year-old Western Australian opening batsman who had never played for Australia at the senior level. In the preceding Australian summer, he had averaged 30.25 in first-class cricket, passing 50 only twice in 21 innings. In the seemingly ever-growing queue of applicants for a spot in the Test line-up, he was, at a conservative estimate, behind Slater, Simon Katich, Darren Lehmann, Brad Hodge, Martin Love, Matthew Elliott, Jimmy Maher, Greg Blewett and Jamie Cox.

As a kid acting out his dream of playing for Australia in backyard games with his younger brother David in the beachside Perth suburb of Mullaloo in the '80s, Hussey tapped his bat and kept it down because, as he revealed to the Cricket Monthly, all the guys he watched batting for Australia, "likeGreg Chappell" and his "hero", Allan Border, did so. The thought of holding his bat up like a baseballer never occurred to him as a kid; none of the Australian Test batsmen he watched and admired did that.

When Hussey scored his solitary first-class hundred of an otherwise dismal summer in March 2001, he was still tapping his bat and keeping it down. But not long thereafter, he realised he had a problem that he would have to rectify if he was to realise his dream of playing for Australia - his bat-tap was causing his head to "fall over too much towards the off side and so… was having trouble hitting the balls off his pads and getting LB". Hussey is five foot ten inches tall and has "quite long legs". He "tried batting with a long blade bat, just to try and keep myself a little more upright and keep my weight more upright, but every time I leant over to tap the bat it took my head over [towards the off side] and I had bad balance".

The pioneer: Mike Hussey's success with holding the bat up in the stance kicked off a revolution in Australian cricket © AFP

Some time after that middling season - he can't remember exactly when - Hussey did something momentous, something that - according to photographic and video evidence compiled by Dean Plunkett, the WACA's Performance Analysis Coordinator - no great Australian Test or Sheffield Shield batsman before him had done: he got rid of his bat-tap and started holding his bat up above knee level as the bowler ran in to bowl. Since his bat-tap was causing his head to fall over, he reasoned that removing it and "standing upright" would enable him to get his head into the best balanced position and "access the straight balls a bit better".

Once he went bat-up, Hussey was unstoppable. He made his one-day international debut in February 2004 and his Test debut in November 2005. After his first 20 Tests, the only batsman he could statistically be compared with was Donald Bradman - he was averaging 84.80.

Hussey retired from Test cricket in January 2013 - with 6235 runs and 19 hundreds, at an average of 51.52 - as the first great Australian Test batsman to use a bat-up technique.

He won't be the last.

Steven Smith uses a bat-up technique. When Australia won a fifth World Cup earlier this year, five batsmen - Smith, Aaron Finch, Shane Watson, Glenn Maxwell and James Faulkner - in Australia's top seven used bat-up. (A sixth member of that top seven, Michael Clarke, could be argued to have had a bat-up technique by that very late stage of his illustrious career, having been bat-down for most of it.)

The significant, and growing, proportion of Australian batsmen who have started holding their bats up like baseballers over the past decade has been, to borrow a phrase from WG Grace, one of those "silent revolutions transforming cricket". Chappell certainly believes so. He said that it's "a revolution that is changing batting like it's never changed before in the history of the game".

Ed Cowan grew up in Sydney, with a poster of Ricky Ponting on his bedroom wall, as a naturally attacking, free-flowing batsman who destroyed bowling attacks and once, according to the renowned junior coach Trent Woodhill, scored 199 off 34 overs in an Under-21 game.

Greg Chappell, one in a long line of bat-down Australian batsmen, believes the traditional method is more efficient since it helps synchronise hand and foot movement © Getty Images

Cowan said he "had always been a very strong back-foot player" and had pulled and hooked the quicks fluently at first-grade level. But, he explained, "when you hit first-class cricket you go from facing guys bowling 125 k's an hour and wickets that don't tend to bounce above your belly button in club cricket to [faster, bouncier] first-class wickets", and bowlers averaging 135kph and regularly exceeding 140. In Cowan's first three Shield matches in early 2005, he faced: Shaun Tait (in his fearsome prime), Ryan Harris, Andy Bichel, Ashley Noffke, Steve Magoffin and Brad Williams. Those blokes didn't bowl at 125kph.

The 22-year-old Cowan quickly realised: "I can't [hook and pull fluently] at this level and I need to find a way because it is limiting what I am doing." He looked at what the best batsmen in Australia and the world were doing. What he saw, in the Australian winter of 2005, was: "the best player in the [New South Wales] squad" and "probably the best player of the short ball in Shield cricket at the time", Katich, with his bat up; Jacques Kallis, one of the best batsmen in the world, with his bat up; Kevin Pietersen, a swashbuckling 25-year-old whose maiden Test hundred had just consigned Australia to their first Ashes series defeat in nearly 19 years, with his bat up; and Hussey, who had an ODI average of 123.50 and a strike rate of 94.45 after the first 21 months of his international career, with his bat up.

Thus, Cowan decided to experiment with his bat up to try to give himself "a chance to play" the hook and pull shots against Shield quicks. Like Hussey before him, Cowan made the decision to go bat-up himself and takes full responsibility for it. He had a conversation with Trevor Bayliss, NSW's coach at the time, about his decision. Bayliss, like most of the best coaches in the land, respected the player's decision. He made no attempt to change it, but he did explain the inherently risky nature of any technical change.

Australian cricketers are always looking for a competitive edge. Their "Darwinian first-class competition", in the words of historian Gideon Haigh, demands it. In light of that and what Haigh calls the "Australian tradition of autodidactism", it was inevitable that once some batsmen, especially a prominent Australian, started dominating at Test level with a bat-up technique, young Australians would give it a go. As Cowan explained: "You can't stop searching for improvement and I think that's player-driven because… players want to perform." For example, "I don't think Steve Smith liked getting out caught in the slips consistently [when he first came into the Test XI in 2010]", therefore, he worked his tail off and rectified that problem by, among other things, adopting a bat-up set-up in around May 2013.

Ian "Mad Dog" Callen played one Test for Australia against India at the Adelaide Oval in 1978, taking 6 for 191 - including the prize wicket of Sunil Gavaskar - to help Bob Simpson's Packer-depleted Australian side win the Test and clinch the five-match series 3-2.

Up or down? Should kids be allowed to develop their own rhythms? © Getty Images

Callen now lives on a property named Kookaburra, near the small Victorian country town of Tarrawarra with his wife, Susan. He greets me with a warm grin inside the two-storey wooden barn, nestled at the bottom of a grassy hill, where he spends his days hand-making cricket bats from his own Australian-grown English willow and training Australian bat-makers in the ancient craft. He takes a seat at the dining table, directly underneath his framed Australian team blazer from the 1977-78 tour of the West Indies, and highlights two technological reasons why the bat-up method has risen in popularity in Australia over the course of the last decade: helmets and bats.

Firstly, the more upright bat-up batsman presents a bigger target for the fast bowler with a good bouncer than the classical, bat-down batsman who is tapping his bat (and therefore at least slightly crouched, on his toes, at the ready, like a boxer). Thus, in the pre- and early-helmet era, the greater likelihood of being struck by a bouncer dissuaded batsmen from going bat-up. However, by the mid-2000s, advancements in helmet technology had greatly reduced the risk of serious injury.

Secondly, Callen found, through systematic testing, that the quality of the sweet spot on a good English willow bat has not changed much, if at all, over the last century - if you drop a ball onto the sweet spot of a 1930s bat, it will bounce as high as one dropped onto the sweet spot of a current-day bat. But the size of the sweet spot has increased exponentially. Therefore, today's batsmen have a much greater margin for error than batsmen in the 1930s or even the 1970s.

Proponents of the bat-down method, such as Chappell, who is now Cricket Australia's National Talent Manager, believe that it enables a batsman to more easily synchronise his hand and foot movement, thereby making it easier for him to get into "a more optimal position" to play the shot that he has imagined, "at the correct time", which in turn enables him to consistently hit "the ball in the middle of the sweet spot". There is obviously less need for him to do that if the sweet spot on his bat is much larger. According to Chappell, bat-up is a "less efficient" method of batting and "it's probably the improvement in the bats that has allowed these [less efficient] methods to prosper, because the mishit goes better than it's ever gone before, so batsmen are probably not getting the feedback… that these methods are less efficient than methods that have been used before".

Graham Gooch was one of the early proponents of the bat-up method, which worked in English conditions © PA Photos

Chappell provides another reason why bat-up has become so popular: "Young batsmen using bats that are too heavy for them find it very difficult from the bat-down position because it's really hard to overcome inertia, to get started, so they feel that they need to get the bat up early." Justin Langer concurs: "When I was a kid, Kenny Meuleman used to make me use a two-pound-five or -six bat, it was so light. You look at some of these kids, they have got these big, heavy bats, it is a lot harder to pick it up and get rhythm". Langer reveals that up until around 2001 he "was [successfully] playing Test cricket and Shield cricket using two-pound-five or -six bats". Bradman, writing over half a century ago in The Art of Cricket, observed that "a good serviceable weight is about 2 lb. 4 ozs". Nowadays, the national chain of cricket stores that bears Greg Chappell's name doesn't even stock two-pound-five bats for sale!

Two other factors may have contributed to the rise of bat-up over the last decade. Cowan astutely points out that from "six, seven years ago, right until maybe two years ago, Shield wickets were very sporting and so people discovered that [bat-up] helped their game [in those conditions]".

It makes sense that in those green, English-style conditions, Australian batsmen would experiment with, and ultimately adopt, a technique that had been popularised by two successful English batsmen, Tony Greig and Graham Gooch. A bat-up technique helps a batsman achieve a basic level of competence in those conditions - because the bat is already up, the batsman can make a late decision to play or leave the ball, thereby accounting for late lateral movement. But the empirical evidence suggests that it may also hinder a batsman's ability to achieve mastery in them.

From 1989 to 2001, when Australian Test teams touring England featured batting line-ups composed entirely of bat-down batsmen (with the notable exception of Geoff Marsh in 1989), Australia comfortably won every Ashes series played in England. Since the mid-2000s, when bat-up batsmen started filtering into the Test XI, Australia have not won a single Ashes series in England. From 1989 to 2001, Australia's regular top six averaged 52.17 per batsman and scored 31 hundreds in 23 Tests. From 2005 to 2015, Australia's regular top six averaged 37.62 per batsman and scored 17 hundreds in 20 Tests.

Moreover, Chappell observes: "I've seen more low scores in top-level cricket in recent times than I've seen throughout my life because of that reason - [bat-up] batsmen are not able to change their position." That limitation, he explains, is exposed when the ball seams, swings or turns: see, for example, Australia's 60 at Trent Bridge in 2015, 131 in Hyderabad in 2013, 47 at Newlands in 2011, 98 at the MCG in 2010 and 88 at Headingley in 2010.

99.94 reasons to go bat-down © Getty Images

One reason commonly - and incorrectly - cited for the rise of bat-up is the influence of elite-level coaches. It has been widely rumoured that Victoria's coaching staff, led by Greg Shipperd(the state's hugely successful head coach from January 2004 to March 2015), pushed batsmen into adopting bat-up. There is no truth to that rumour. What happened was this: Victorian players, starting with their young captain Cameron White in the mid-2000s, made the decision to go bat-up and then ran it by Shipperd and his coaching staff. Shipperd said that he and his staff were happy to respect the player's decision. "If that's the way you want to go, well, we'll coach around that as your preferred model."

Peter Handscomb - the 24-year-old Victoria batsman-keeper, one of the rising stars of Australian cricket - said that his original decision to start holding his bat up was made in around 2006-07 at the Victorian U-17s carnival at the suggestion of a coach. Handscomb was also "definitely" influenced by the success of batsmen such as Hussey, Kallis and Pietersen, who "were making runs and making it look easier with a bat-up approach".

For Handscomb and many other batsmen of the T20 generation, the bat-up method helps them to play "new shots in the game that weren't there 20 or 30-odd years ago… like reverse sweep, lap sweep, lap shot, basically anything reverse. If you have got your bat on the ground when the ball is released, then to get your bat up and then change and… try and hit the ball, it can almost be too long."

If anyone in Australian cricket has seen it all, it's 40-year-old Brad Hodge. The compact, classical batsman made his debut for Victoria as an 18-year-old in October 1993. And he is still playing - very successfully - all around the world as a T20 freelancer, in addition to working as an assistant coach with Adelaide Strikers. He is bat-down and has always been so, because that is what works for him, but cheerfully acknowledges that bat-up works for other batsmen such as Chris Gayle.

Many coaches fear that the proliferation of bat-up batsmen in the country could endanger the Australian style of aggressive, free-flowing batting © Getty Images

Hodge underlined a benefit of bat-down that Chappell mentioned too - "the feeling of your hands and the rest of your body moving through the ball". By contrast, the bat-up method can make a batsman more "robotic" - as he "rigidly pushes at the ball" - and make him lose that natural "feeling".

Langer, now the highly successful coach of Western Australia and Perth Scorchers, uses a similar word to describe the bat-up method: mechanical. "What often happens when you hold the bat up is that you [have] just got one plane to come down, so you are really stopping the ball, rather than having nice rhythm throughout the delivery". The problem with many mediocre bat-up batsmen is that they stand still and stiff in their stance, with their wrists fully cocked and their bat locked-in at the top of its bat-swing. This means that, like a marble statue of a batsman at the top of his backswing, they often limit themselves to one pre-selected swing plane.

The obvious strength of bat-up, as Cowan observes, is that it allows batsmen to "get a pretty regular [bat-swing]" that is "easy to replicate". But that strength is also the method's greatest flaw. Batting - in the words of two of Australia's greatest batsmen, Bradman and Chappell - is an "art", not a science. Picking the bat up from a neutral, bat-down position allows a batsman to wield his bat like an artist wields his paintbrush on a blank canvas - he can literally do anything with it, as he has an almost infinite variety of swing planes to choose from - whereas the rigid, bat-up batsman, with only a limited number of pre-selected swing planes available to him, often wields his bat like a robot on a factory assembly line.

Moreover, Hodge points out that the bat-down batsman's act of picking his bat up off the ground provides him with "fluid momentum" and natural power. That is particularly beneficial for a batsman like him with "a small stature" who cannot use brute force to muscle the ball over the rope. As his hands pick his bat up off the ground, and his feet move - in sync with his hands - out to the ball, he achieves what Langer lyrically describes as "that beautiful free-flowing fling" as the ball pings off the middle of his bat's sweet spot. This, according to proponents of bat-down, is the method's primary benefit. Chappell calls it "synchronisation". Langer calls it "having good footwork patterns" and "being relaxed at the crease". In the revised 1984 edition of The Art of Cricket, Bradman referred to it as the batsman's "coordination" of "the movements of his bat and feet", before swiftly declaring that he is "an opponent of the [bat-up] method".

Watch any successful bat-up batsman closely at the approximate point of release and one immediately notices that he employs a range of countermeasures to ameliorate the flaws of the bat-up method by effectively imitating the actions of a bat-down batsman. Langer highlights the "very loose" arms, "like a hose in a swimming pool", of the batsmen he admires who have successfully gone bat-up - Steven Smith, Hashim Amla, Katich and Phillip Hughes ("magnificent player he was, a beautiful player") - but concludes that, in his opinion, "the best way to get that relaxation in your shoulders and in your arms is to tap your bat". Chappell concurs and adds that by tapping his bat "subconsciously, the batsman is acting in time with the bowler's rhythm… getting into rhythm with the bowler… is a really important part of batting".

Australia's top seven in the 1990s and early 2000s all faced the bowler from neutral, bat-down positions, which allowed them to choose from a variety of swing planes © Getty Images

Other common countermeasures employed by bat-up batsmen include: wrists that are not cocked (Smith and Maxwell), bent knees (Smith and Handscomb), rocking hands down and up (Joe Root), and a preliminary bat-wiggle (Handscomb and Ben Stokes). Handscomb agrees to an extent with the argument that bat-up can adversely affect balance and synchronisation, but says:

"… there are ways to combat that and you can have your bat up and still be very, very, very balanced… if you watch a lot of batsmen that have bat up, just as the ball's released, there's always a little pre-movement or just something that changes it up and gets them into a strong position. For example, my bat's up but as the ball's coming down my bat goes back down and then back up again, so it's almost as if I've just picked it up off the ground."

Thus, it seems that in order for the bat-up method to work, the batsman must implement a range of countermeasures whose purpose is to imitate a bat-down batsman. That, essentially, is the point that Chappell is making when he describes bat-down as "the most efficient method".

In recent times, seasoned Australian batsmen, such as Cowan and Adam Voges, have substantially improved their performances by reverting to bat-down. Chappell and Langer both played a part in persuading Cowan to make the change. Langer was rather more blunt with his mate "Vogey", a man he respects and admires. "He'd been playing county cricket and he was batting like Graham Gooch with his left foot pointing down the wicket and I said, 'Mate, what the f*** are you doing?' He goes: 'Aw, I'll be in trouble [if I change now].' I said: 'Mate, nah, I'm not throwing you one more ball, I'm coach of Western Australia now, please start getting your stance right, start tapping again, mate, just get natural again.' Well, the rest is history."

Voges, after taking a season to bed down the technical change, put together two outstanding Shield summers, averaging 54.92and 104.46, to earn his Test cap at the age of 35. He proceeded to score a match-winning century on debut and was recently named the vice-captain of Australia for the eventually postponed Test tour of Bangladesh.

Two schools of thought have arisen in Australia in response to the spread of bat-up. The first, the freedom school, has no objection to kids experimenting with bat-up - but does not actively tell kids to go bat-up - because, as Shipperd explains, coaches like him believe that the decision belongs to the individual batsman. "We coach around that [decision], as opposed to fighting [it]." Shipperd and Woodhill - Steven Smith's highly respected junior coach, who currently works as David Warner's personal batting coach - belong to this school. Woodhill cautions that broad anti-bat-up pronouncements could hinder young batsmen establishing their own technique and we could "miss out on the more unusual superstar like a Steven Smith".

Comedown: Adam Voges returned to the bat-down method in 2012, and his subsequent prolific domestic seasons won him a Test cap at the age of 35 © Getty Images

The second school of thought, the Bradman-Chappell school, believes that the bat-up method, if used by kids, threatens the ability to produce truly Australian batsmen - that is, outstanding, free-flowing artists who destroy all types of bowling in all conditions - which, in turn, would threaten the ability to continue to play a distinctly Australian style of cricket - aggressive, attacking and winning. Accordingly, Chappell believes that Cricket Australia should adopt a "coherent policy" which explains to kids (and coaches) why bat-down is the most efficient way to learn to bat so that they have the opportunity - that "they've not been given in recent times" - "to experiment with the bat down".

Langer broadly agrees with Chappell's policy proposal. Ultimately the empirical evidence in favour of that policy is simply too persuasive. Plunkett compiled photographs and videos of Australia's top 15 Test and top 15 Shield run scorers at the approximate point of the bowler's release. Of those 29 great Australian batsmen (Langer appears on both lists), only two - Hussey and Chris Rogers - were bat-up.

It must be emphasised that the batsmen are categorised by reference to their position at the approximate point of the bowler's release. The great Australian batsmen did not all lift their bats at exactly the same point in time - there is, and has always been, a range of temporal lift points. At one end of the spectrum are Steve Waugh and Greg Chappell, who kept their bats grounded until just before the bowler released the ball. At the other end are Border and Michael Clarke, who lifted their bats relatively early - roughly when the fast bowlers jumped into their delivery stride. Border and Clarke are still categorised as bat-down, bat-tappers in Plunkett's data - because by tapping their bats as the bowler ran in to bowl and only lifting their bats at the approximate point of release, they accessed the substantive benefits of the bat-down method.

Cowan describes Plunkett's empirical evidence as compelling and acknowledges that "that's what brought me back to where I am now", which is bat-down, like he was as a kid. As Chappell points out, even those batsmen who have successfully gone bat-up as adults - for example, Hussey, Handscomb, Katich, Steven Smith, Kallis and AB de Villiers - learned the game as kids with their bats down.

Former Victoria coach Greg Shipperd was happy to allow his players to experiment with their batting stances, coaching around it, rather than fighting it © Getty Images

"There is," as the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally observed, "a divinity to our cricket", a divinity that ought to be preserved and nurtured in a time of uncertainty and change. If Chappell and Bradman are right, then that divinity - the very identity of the Australian cricket team, which hinges on their ability to play cricket the Australian way - is being imperilled by the proliferation of the bat-up method among children.

What began on the country's western seaboard more than a decade ago, as one Australian batsman's eminently sensible solution to a specific technical problem, has spread throughout our land like a virus, to the point where bat-up is now, arguably, the majority default approach in our junior ranks. The initial symptoms are purely cosmetic but make no mistake: if left untreated, the virus may threaten the very soul of Australian cricket. As Chappell put it:

"Australian cricket has survived on the back of outstanding players. I believe we have a responsibility to try and produce outstanding players, not mediocre to struggling players, players who are batting to survive. Most of the methods that I see that are being adopted by young batsmen are stopping them from ever becoming great players. That is a serious problem, in my opinion."

What happens in a batting collapse

Ian O'Brien in Cricinfo


The mood inside the dressing room turns sour, and batsmen forget to play the way they normally do. It doesn't have to be like that


Nerves are on edge as wickets tumble and it's your turn to bat next © Getty Images



An old cricketing cliché is proffered flippantly, often in times of despair, a psychological pick-me-up for one team, a reinforcement of the seriousness or severity of the situation for the other: "One brings two, guys. One brings two"

While statistically this adage is flippant, quantitatively it is obvious. You really do need the "one" to have the "two". But it is no more likely that two wickets will fall within 10 to 20 of each other than that one will fall as a singular event.

What happens when one does bring two? And then two brings three. And then…

The ill-fated, most feared and dreaded batting collapse.

What defines a collapse? For me, a basis of three top- to middle-order wickets falling collectively for less than 40 runs, and then concurrent dismissals within 10 and 15 runs of each other from that point forward. A minimum of 40 for 3 to anywhere around 70 for 5 and onwards. A dramatic, game-changing period of play.

What happens in the changing room? What happens to the changing room? How do players and coaches react? Not react? How do you deal with a collapse to limit its effect?

Typically a collapse will happen during a session, not either side of a break. There is no time to pause and reflect, no time to regather and regroup. No opportunity to take a breather in the middle of it to stem the tide. There is no chance to take the moment out of the moment.

It smothers you. All of a sudden there is no oxygen in the changing room, no chat, no communication. All the vibe and positivity, the entire atmosphere gone. Empty. A void.

Like waking in the night to a noise downstairs. The changing room is on edge, anxiety-ridden. You hear everything as if on high alert. Every sound amplified. The empty coffee mug gets put down - it wobbles on its base before settling. It's the noisiest thing ever done. Every movement is stifled. Very little eye contact. Players know they are in the middle of a collapse. The changing room door keeps opening and closing. And opening and closing. The sound of Velcro pulled apart rips through silence. A bat is placed gently down next to your seat. A glove is thrown into a bag, a helmet rolls off a bench and rattles to the floor. Muffled swear words, outward frustrations for personal failures.

The batsmen draw ranks. "Hard luck, mate. That [delivery] was a good one."

The bowlers, waiting to bat, also draw together. "I'm going to have to bat soon. I just f****n bowled. I've just done my job. We've got our wickets. I'm going to have to go out and bat. Show these boys how to bat." Angry bowlers. Aggrieved bowlers. "We'll be bowing again, way too soon. F*** you batsmen." It shouldn't be personal. It's not, but it is. It always is. It always will be.

One of the most deflating things to see is a batsman failing meekly. Apprehension has taken over. They have gone away from their style, their game plan, and their grace. Visibly shaken by the situation. Noticeably nervous and jerky movements have replaced their typically measured and flowing nature. Twitchy. Feeling. Scratchy. Groping. Poking.

And that is the psychology of the situation. Firstly focusing on stopping the crash, the collapse, then the head focuses on avoiding mistakes, somehow preventing failure: what not to do, and not, as on a normal day, on creating a head space where success is consummated.



Captains and coaches can seek to arrest the collapse by talking to the remaining batsmen about their preparation and the importance of playing naturally © Getty Images





I have never been in a changing room that has ever challenged a collapse; a changing room that has found a way of negotiating it and found a way out of the mire.

Can it be done? I think yes. But some batsmen, I think, are not going to like it.

There are a few things you don't do, typically, in a changing room. One of the more important ones is to not talk to the batsman who's next in, unless he initiates the conversation. You leave him in his bubble. Whatever he might be doing, let him do it. Whatever is ticking over in his head, let him be. Preparing in his own way. Some batsmen like to chat, nervously, about anything. Some sit and stew, contemplate. Others, a crossword, newspaper quiz, anything to not watch, not concentrate. Some don't even watch the game.

In the middle of a collapse the batsman next in doesn't get the opportunity to do any of those things. And this is where a coach or captain can step in. Once two wickets have fallen together quickly, things are a bit panicky, rushed. A coach or captain can (they currently usually don't) have a word with the batsmen, remind them of their processes, their preparation, their thought patterns. A good coach or captain should know how each player prepares.

A calming of the situation. Remove the apprehension. "Go and do your thing. Think about your things, your processes. Don't rush. Breathe."

This requires coaches and captains knowing their players and team-mates probably better than they currently do. It means having care and consideration, on both sides, and knowing that individual and team success may have to take a back seat to the player's "normal" preparation. Doing things differently. Teams talk about collapses, but only after they have happened.

Slow things down, add as much time to the preparation time a player has. Take the moment out of the moment.

Expecting Sehwag to do the unexpected

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan in Cricinfo

Opposition captains always feared: what if Sehwag gets going? Everyone else just learned to accept that he would forever surprise


Going up: Sehwag constantly turned traditional batting concepts on their head © AFP



The heart wishes Virender Sehwag had retired after a rousing Test, his team-mates chairing him off the ground, the crowd bidding him adieu with a standing ovation. The mind understands that this was never going to come to pass, that Sehwag's days as an international cricketer were long past, and that he would tweet the news of his exit (as he had promised late last year) and be off without a fuss.

The end was as abrupt as it was apt. Not for him a press conference bathed in emotion, or a speech that tugged at heartstrings. There was no grand felicitation, there were no teary goodbyes. Instead he went his own way, wrapping up with a tweet that started "I hereby… " and a statement that began, "To paraphrase Mark Twain…"

None of this should come as a surprise; to have experienced Sehwag's career is to have come to expect the unexpected. During times when conventional wisdom advised circumspection, he would blast off. Where other batsmen shut shop a few overs before stumps, he saw it as an opportunity to pick off boundaries. When opposition captains pushed mid-off and mid-on back, he didn't look at it as a chance for singles; instead he was determined to launch the ball over the fielders' heads. Where team-mates used the services of a nightwatchman, he deemed it an insult ("If I can't play for 25 minutes, I'm not much of a batsman.")

Stories of Sehwag's counter-intuition are legion. He once charged a medium-pace bowler in a Ranji Trophy game, swished wildly, and missed by more than a foot. That in itself should come as no surprise, except, as his former team-mate Aakash Chopra wrote on this website, it was little but an act. On "one of the worst pitches", Sehwag was actually trying to mess with the bowler's length. Sure enough, the trick rattled the opponent. The next two balls pitched short. And Sehwag smashed two fours.



Paul Harris ended up the loser in his contest with Sehwag in 2008 © Getty Images


The common refrain while talking about Sehwag's batting is how his approach was so simple, how the see-ball-hit-ball approach served him so well. This, of course, is partly true - he has himself acknowledged the value of clearing all clutter from the mind - but it is also somewhat reductionist. Sehwag might not have analysed ground conditions and wagon wheels with a high level of granularity (and, back in 2006, he might not have known about Pankaj Roy and Vinoo Mankad's record partnership) but he was far from unschooled. He analysed his innings and dismissals, and spoke to those he respected about technical glitches, taking on advice from openers as varied in approach as Sunil Gavaskar and Kris Srikkanth. He enjoyed chatting with psychologist Rudi Webster (he was especially curious to hear about the early struggles of Viv Richards, whom Webster likened Sehwag to) and sometimes surprised team-mates by reeling off names of bowlers he had faced in stray innings.

Most significantly he was astute enough to constantly upend traditional approaches to batting. Where Sachin Tendulkar was bogged down, padding away Ashley Giles bowling over the wicket, Sehwag backed away and slashed; charged diagonally and slashed; and, in what was little short of a tight slap across the bowler's face, reverse-swept without a care in the world. None of this was blind slogging; it was a planned assault to disrupt a bowler's rhythm, nullifying his negative tactics. Six years on, when another left-arm spinner targeted his pads, Sehwag challenged him: "Come round the wicket and first ball I'll hit you for a six." Paul Harris - with a long-off, long-on, deep midwicket and a deep point - accepted the dare. And sure enough, the first ball soared over the sightscreen.

Such provocation wasn't merely an instinctive flash of bravado. Like the smartest of bowlers, Sehwag understood when to needle the opposition and when to send out a message by shutting up. Against Australia in Chennai in 2004, he made friendly small-talk with some fielders as he walked off after the first day's play. But come the end of the fourth day, with India chasing a tricky target, he pounded a drive past Glenn McGrath and strode off, chin up, with a raging sense of purpose. "You have to show the other team that you're here to win," he would later say of that unforgettable walk-off.



Fury Road: Sehwag set up India's record chase against England in Chennai in 2008 © AFP


It has often been pointed out that Sehwag averaged slightly over 30 in the third and fourth innings of Tests with just one hundred, a stat used to demonstrate his frailty under "scoreboard pressure". What is not highlighted as much is that he averaged a mighty 65.91 in the second innings of Tests, with 12 hundreds - many of which came after the opposition had piled on massive scores. When New Zealand amassed 630 in Mohali in 2003, Sehwag responded with 130; when South Africa piled on 510 in Kanpur in 2004, he answered with 164; when Pakistan erected 679 in Lahore in 2006, he blitzed 254; and when South Africa put on 540 in Chennai in 2008, he smoked the fastest Test triple-hundred. As important as it is to celebrate Sehwag the match-winner, it's vital to hail Sehwag the match-saver: the opening batsman who drew games not by playing out time but by rollicking along at berserker pace, eliminating threats of India following on.

What this meant was that, despite his poor fourth-innings record, teams were often hesitant to declare in the third innings, the fear of "what if Sehwag gets going?" never far from their calculations. There is no stat to quantify the psychological effect that Sehwag had on fielding teams but an Ian Chappell quote from 2005 sums up the sentiment: "Sehwag can change the course of a match with the ease of Moses parting the Red Sea".

Over the years there were a number of innings when Sehwag parted the metaphorical Red Sea, but the apex of match-changeability arrived on that December afternoon in 2008 - a month after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai - when England set India 387 for victory in Chennai. The odds were grim. No team had chased more than 155 at the ground and no team had achieved a fourth-innings target of more than 276 at any Indian venue.

None of this mattered to Sehwag. He had begun the fourth day by telling Ravi Shastri, "We could easily chase 300-plus against England," and then gone on to burn the batting manual, juddering a 68-ball 83 to fire-start the chase. There were rasping upper cuts and swirling sixes; the short balls ending up in the V between point and third man, the full ones in the V between square leg and midwicket. It was a kind of innings that galvanises the team to dare to dream; an innings that sends shock waves through the fielding side; and an innings that makes ten-year-olds want to reach for their bats, getting them hooked to the game for good.

Once the win was achieved, Tendulkar was asked about Sehwag's mighty eruption. "We are quite used to that," he said with a smile. "You kind of expect something which is not expected."

He may as well have been summing up a once-in-a-lifetime career.