How to bat in Twenty20
June 12, 2009 by SPIN
Filed under Features, Masterclass
SUCCESSFUL TWENTY20 batting is not all about innovation and taking risks, writes Gary Palmer. Generally, the best T20 batters play ‘proper’ cricket shots, hit down the ground with the full face of the bat as their preferred scoring option. You need a good basic batting technique from which to improvise and attach additional flair shots.
Because T20 requires you to score off more balls it is vital to maximise your hitting zone by keeping he bat going through the line of the ball for the maximum time with the full face of the bat. This minimises risk.
To do this consistently and effectively you need all your basics in place: you need to be well balanced, well aligned to where you want to hit the ball and make sure you have exaggerated finishing positions where you fully complete the shots with good technique. For example when you are trying to hit down the ground, finishing your shots with high hands and a high leading elbow.
Once the back-swing is well aligned to the area you want to hit the ball, keeping the leading elbow high after the shot ensures the bat goes through the line of the ball for the maximum amount of time. Aiming to hit as smoothly as possible, your straight drives become low-risk scoring shots.
Maximise Technique and Minimise Risk
One very important point for batters when trying to improvise – don’t try to hit the ball too hard. Stroke the ball with correct technique and keep the bat flowing through the line of the ball.
Trying to deliberately hit the ball hard and swinging the bat fast does become important when pulling and cutting – shots where the bat swings horizontally through the line of the ball and the bottom hand dominates.
Don’t get caught up in playing reverse sweeps and ‘trendy’ shots because you think that’s the thing to do in T20. They are very high risk. The reverse sweep is a last resort against spin bowling if all else has failed.
If you are going to play a high risk shot make sure its one that will get you a boundary, preferably a six.
How to hit the gaps successfully
Swing the bat in a straight line to the target area from backswing to completion of stroke with the leading elbow high on and after contact with the ball. As you make contact close the face of the bat slightly to hit the gap you have identified. Go for small changes of angle to hit gaps rather than wide angle changes.
Prioritise practising the straight-batted shots down the ground and perfect them before spending too much time practising the high risk shots square of the wicket.
For straight batted shots, your top hand should dominate, with the bottom hand loose to ensure the full blade of bat is stroking through the line of the ball for the maximum amount of time.
Getting your front leg out of the way
You need to manoeuvre the body to enable the bat to swing in a straight line to where you want to hit the ball especially when improvising to hit boundaries. When hitting over the top in the V and trying to score on the legside clear the front leg towards the leg side to allow you good access to the ball.
Going back and across into the crease, opening the shoulders and moving the front leg aside allows you to swing the bat in as straight a line as possible. Against pace bowlers this initial movement (trigger) gives you slightly more time to select your shot, giving you the option of hooking. cutting and pulling the ball when it is shorter.
Going back into the crease also can turn half volleys in to length balls that are easier to hit for boundaries and it gives you time to align yourself to execute the shot.
The more you open your shoulders and clear the front leg the more options you have to hit down the ground with the full face.
Things to work on
1 Practice hitting the low full toss straight down the ground.
2 Against balls that are swinging or turning away, arriving at the legside of middle stump: try to step inside the line of the delivery aligning both feet straight back up the pitch and then look to hit on the legside.
3 Against balls swinging in or turning in that arrive on the off-stump side of middle: practice hitting these straight in the ‘V’
or with the spin on the legside. Look to step across the crease and get in line or inside the line of the delivery so that you can align you feet straight or open up the front leg towards the leg side to enable you to hit with the spin/swing.
Gary Palmer has been batting coach to many county and international players and has helped a series of young players win pro contracts. For info on courses and one-to-one coaching: www.ccmacademy.co.uk
Sympathy but no tea
March 11, 2009 by Duncan Steer
Filed under Reviews
India’s first foreign coach loved his job. But, he says in his excellent memoir, banning beverages from training was the least of his worries
John Wright’s Indian Summers
by John Wright, with Sharda Ugra and Paul Thomas.
Souvenir Press, £18.99
Reviewed in SPIN, August 2007
In the spring of 1997, the ex-New Zealand Test opener John Wright was working as a sales rep for a cake company. He had never coached a first-class cricket team. Within four years, he was coach of India, the most fanatically supported team in the world, and right in the middle of an epic series win over Steve Waugh’s previously all-conquering Australians.
Indian Summers is all about Wright’s sudden immersion in top-class coaching and the excitingly bizarre world of Indian cricket culture.
In his five years as the side’s first-ever foreign coach, they became the most successful team in Indian cricket history.
Based on Wright’s diaries, Indian Summers is tightly written – with the aid of two ghosts, one a novelist, one a journalist – and full of colour, context and observation. Wright is genuinely wide-eyed about the journey he is on, sharing his theories of coaching and his frustrations with Indian cricket: the horse-trading nature of team selection means that quality players miss out all the way from under-16 level to Test level; the instant celebrity and riches on offer to young players can turn their heads, and make them lose focus on their cricket; the celebrity of older players can make them undroppable.
Some of the team’s hilarious ‘training’ methods make Wright’s early to-do lists easily compiled: sharing a gym with the no-nonsense Aussies during 2001, one India star sits half-heartedly on a bike in his sandals, while a butler brings him tea and sandwiches. Wright cuts out tea at training, brings in a fitness coach, focuses on fielding and weeds out those whose lack of fight had stopped the team winning overseas in over a decade.
Wright is in awe of the team’s natural talent – but frustrated by their lack of application. After one disappointing dismissal, he refuses to let Virender Sehwag back in the dressing room.
Wright is also awed by the fandom that engulfs the Indian national side: villagers in isolated areas waiting for hours for a passing glimpse of the team bus; low-paid workers in the street thanking him sincerely for doing the privileged, well-paid job of being national coach.
This is an genuinely reflective and revealing account of a Westerner’s life at the heart of Indian cricket, but it’s not warts-and-all: allusions are made, for example, of Wright not seeing eye-to-eye with captain Sourav Ganguly, but we are given few details. Narratives of specific matches and series are sparse, Wright’s insightful narrative having no need of the standard filler of sports autobiographies. (Though he does find space to include a song he wrote about his time in India; something coach Fletcher’s England memoirs will surely struggle to match). Indian Summers is a crisp, entertaining read that puts most of the rest of the flabby genre to shame. Duncan Steer
In a nutshell
Inside the world of India’s first foreign coach
Biggest surprise?
Wright including his own Dylanesque song about life on the road: “The mini-bar has run away on me/the paintings hang like sleeping cats.” But of course!
Verdict •••••
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