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.

The corrida of uncertainty

There is much to admire in the rhythm and timing of a batsman's leave-alone, which at times resembles the quintessentially Iberian art of bullfighting

Scott Oliver

May 21, 2014

 

When Jack Russell left the ball alone he could have been pulling back a curtain © Getty Images

There's something elemental, almost sacramental, about early-season cricket in England. Rested up over winter, their muscles twanged into readiness in nets and gyms, seamers are ready to come thundering out of dressing rooms and into the arena, near-frenzied by the scent of batsmen's blood.

They have been trained for this moment, and understand that April and May is their time. Meanwhile, faced with such coiled energy and focused menace, and with a dangerous projectile force, the opening batsman's job is to draw the sting from the bowler, to wear him down - conceding now, the better to conquer later.

It may not seem immediately obvious, but there is much in that quintessentially English early-season choreography that resembles the quintessentially Iberian art of bullfighting. Indeed, just as the aficionado's appreciation of the corrida lies mainly in the poise and refinement of the passes, each perhaps more daring and intimate than the last, so the cricketing connoisseur can be equally enthralled by a dexterous and graceful leave-alone.

It may well be passé in the T20 era to eulogise the prosaic skills of defensive batting, but Mike Hussey allowing the ball to pass over his stumps and under his eyes with a raising of the hands as measured and rhythmical as a windscreen wiper was a thing of esoteric beauty. And should the bowler have speed and aggression to add to his movement, the batsman will need nimbleness and, above all, cojones.

	Kumar Sangakkara once left a Warne wrong'un, pitching middle, with such gorgeous disdain that it was a wonder the leggie didn't fall to his knees, broken

Where the valiant torero squeezes those cojones into his "suit of lights", the opening batsman will slip into an equally figure-hugging suit of lightweight protective material. Thereafter, stood typically in rigid profile, proud and unyielding, the batsman-torero will, with a sweep of the arms and swing of the back hip, allow the darting, rearing ball/bull to pass by stomach or snout, smelling its leathery exterior but not allowing his fear to be smelled in turn.

For the first half of this elegant veronica - the basic pass named after the saint who wiped the face of Christ on the way to Golgotha - the batsman's eyes will be fixed on the ball/bull until the deadly force of the snorteris dissipated by a smart thwack into the keeper's gloves. At its most refined, the rhythm and timing of the leave-alone embodies the bullfighting concept of templar: tempering the attack of the bull by moving the cape so that the bull never quite touches it, but not so early that he seeks another target - such as the torero, say! You might even say that the bullfighter is the only one in this death's edge dance that should be touching cloth.

Much as the bullfighter lures the bull in with his capote, so the batsman, through his judicious leaving of the ball, will hope to entice the bowling into his scoring areas, eventually driving him to distraction before administering the kill. However, where the bullfighter's art has evolved from movement to stillness - its great innovator Juan Belmonte, cover star of Time in 1925, said: "My theory was: You stand there, and the bull does not move you... if you know how to fight" - that of the batsman seems to have gone in the opposite direction.

In the corrida, it's the cape that moves and attracts the bull, the man being the ultimate target (the bull, of course, initially failing to realise it); in cricket, the immobile stumps are the bowler's ultimate target - certainly, if the batsman is leaving well (although he will also receive the counter-intuitive instruction not to get "too straight") - while a moving batsman can distract the bowler, entice him to another line. Making a similar conceptual leap to Belmonte, that sometime cape-wearing innovative genius Kevin Pietersen would often play Makhaya Ntini - bowling from the very edge of the return crease - with a quicksilver skip out toward mid-off that took lbw out of the game while simultaneously covering his stumps, enabling him to work Ntini's line into his favoured legside. Ungainly, perhaps, but effective.

	In bullfighting, aesthetics is paramount © Getty Images  Enlarge

In bullfighting, of course, aesthetics is paramount. It is to this day covered in the Arts and Culture sections of newspapers, while the three-tier scoring system - one ear, two ears, two ears and tail - is determined by the matador's faena ("display") as judged by the president of the plaza de toros in "dialogue" with the petitioning crowd and their handkerchiefs.

There is no hard-headed getting-the-job-done in an arena where even the most graceful faena can be ruined by a clumsy kill. In cricket, by contrast, pragmatism is all. Think of Jack Russell's "pulling back the curtain", a veronica seen many times at that famous cricketing bullring, the Wanderers in Johannesburg, when his unbeaten 29 from 235 deliveries helped Atherton tame a bullocking Pollock and Donald.

No, cricket's leave-alone is not about aesthetics. Indeed, the roundheads will tell you there are only two types of leave: good and bad. But that isn't strictly true. Just as certain passes are designed to show mastery of the bull, so some leave-alones can be as much about demoralising the opponent as immediate survival. Kumar Sangakkara once left a Warne wrong'un, pitching middle, with such gorgeous disdain - hands alongside the back hip in a classic torero's pose before a tellingly delayed one-handed shadow-drive swooshed the blade through as two very different types of smile were kept from the adversaries' faces - that it was a wonder the leggie, with something of the bull's heft back then, didn't fall to his knees, broken. ¡Olé!

And yet the "moment of truth" must eventually come for the bowler - a Death in the Afternoon anatomised in Ernest Hemingway's celebrated book on bullfighting, "the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honour". If not the afternoon, then later in the season, perhaps, when high sun has sapped life from limb and demons from pitch.

But April 20 to May 21 is truly the bull's time, and in that moment of passing peril - the ball in its ballistic destruction, the bull in its instinctual aggression - there is the shared thrill of proximate death that unites the matador's and the opener's art.