Am I crazy to be fading the winningest team in baseball at home?  Maybe. But, by now, you know my style, so stay with me for a bit. Our bankroll has been growing. 

Yes, the Yankees are the best team in baseball right now and the only team with 50 wins. They will also be sending Nestor Cortes to the mound, and he's been stellar at home.   When pitching at home this season, Cortes has a mere 1.77 ERA. That's dominant.  

Juan Soto is back in the lineup, and Aaron Judge is doing Aaron Judge things. He's batting .300 with 26 home runs, which is on pace to match and possibly eclipse his record-setting 62 home run MVP season.   

South Africa played like a team intent on silencing the noise around them but still came up second to England once again

Firdose Moonda27-Nov-2020International cricket is back. In South Africa. And by South Africa. But England are still the masters of the white-ball.As recently as 12 days ago, this series was in danger of not happening and CSA was in danger of having its status as the national body of cricket in this country stripped away. The sports minister was ready to step in and potentially prevent them from fielding a team that could call itself South Africa.As recently as Thursday, South African cricket’s chief medical officer warned that if a significant number of players contracted Covid-19, matches could be called off. Two of the 24-man squad had returned positive tests so his fears were not entirely unfounded.And here we are. For the first time in almost eight months, the South Africa men’s team got on the park and it was clear they had something to prove. Until the 17th over of England’s innings, South Africa played like a team intent on silencing the noise. Like a team that wanted to end the wittering around themselves and their culture, the whispers around the administration and the crisis. And even in that over that cost 28 runs and put England on the path to victory, South Africa still played in a way that amplified the sound of bat on ball. Finally. There was cricket.ALSO READ: Bairstow 86* powers England to five-wicket winIn the lead up to this series, the conversation has been about sportsmen and social justice especially when it comes to racial prejudice. Given the history of Apartheid, colonialism and slavery, South Africa could be one of the countries that could best understands and embodies the antiracist doctrine, but it is still grappling with recent schisms and trying to find solutions.CSA’s attempt was to put up two large banners with the message “We stand in solidarity against racism and gender-based violence” and drape them over stands at opposite ends of the ground. But on the day that New Zealand and West Indies took a knee and Australia and India formed a barefoot circle, the absence of any gesture from South Africa was glaring. They are the only one of the six teams that were in action who have not symbolically shown their support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, even though they insist they are working on living out a doctrine of equality.On top of that, they also have other causes to be concerned about. The first 16 days of next month are dedicated annually as days of activism against gender-based violence and both teams wore black armbands to mourn those who lose their lives to abuse and those who have died from Covid-19. In South Africa, the latter has risen to more than 21,000 and with infection rates rising, there are fears of many more. Ten minutes before the start of play, flags were frantically lowered to half-mast, where they should have been flying since Wednesday. Among the many things that needed to be done as Newlands got ready for international cricket, it seemed someone remembered that one just in time.As South Africa lined up to sing their national anthem, directly in front of the SuperSport commentary team, they could hear JP Duminy being asked about BLM and supporting the activist sportsman. An aura of awkwardness settled over the opening salvo and when the final chords of “Nkosi Sikelel’i Afrika” rung out, and everyone remained standing, it felt as though something had been left unsaid, or undone. History will judge South Africa’s (in)action and assess how well they have applied the principles of inclusion they have committed to.It may also see this season as one in which South Africa built on the foundation stone’s laid last summer, when a new coaching regime took over. Their tenure showed promise, with a Test victory but it was clear they needed time. The longest off-season since readmission may not have been exactly what they had in mind but it gave them room to reflect and reimagine the kind of team they want to be.We need more than one match to be able to see what their new approach of “aggressive, but smart,” means but we can already make some deductions. Faf du Plessis best demonstrated it with the bat when he twice went close to hitting one of the Egyptian geese that have made the Newlands outfield their home, but twice evaded them. While Harry the Hadeda, the avian superstar from England’s last tour, was nowhere to be found two adult and four teenage geese occupied positions from the covers to long-on, walking in to almost every ball and scurrying away as soon as it was hit.Kagiso Rabada’s catch gave George Linde a wicket•Getty ImagesDu Plessis played around them and in the same vein as he had been doing at the IPL. In the fifth over, he changed the tone of South Africa’s start from unsure, on a pitch where the ball was not coming on as quickly as might have been expected, to in control when he buried a ball in the construction site, smoked the new one down the ground and on to the railway stand, where the absence of fans meant the few in the ground could hear the ping as it hit a flagpole, and then mowed it through midwicket.The way George Linde, the debutant, was used was the other example of how the new style of play may reveal itself. Linde was tasked with opening the bowling and rewarded his captain with a wicket off the second ball and then switched ends to claim another as Rabada took a stunning low catch. South Africa seldom give a spinner or a new player that level of responsibility but Linde plays his franchise cricket here and has the experience of 81 domestic T20s so they trusted him and it paid off.More’s the pity that Linde did not have his home crowd cheering him on but these are the times. Newlands is not ready for visitors anyway as the construction of an office block continues. And who knows what commentary might have provided late in the game when, with England needing 84 runs from 48 balls, Quinton de Kock turned to Heinrich Klaasen to bowl at Ben Stokes. That was South Africa saying they thought they were so far ahead they could do anything. And they were wrong. Not aggressive, and definitely not smart.Klaasen conceded 14 runs, before de Kock went back to his premier spinner Tabraiz Shamsi. In hindsight, he should have let Shamsi bowl his full quota of four overs, although even that may not have stopped what happened later. Beuran Hendricks conceded 28 runs, including eight wides in an over where he lost control.Some will question why Anrich Nortje, who has just come off a fantastic IPL, didn’t play. Perhaps South Africa thought the pitch would better suit those who take pace off the ball – it looked that way when England was bowling. Perhaps there were transformation targets to consider, which could have been solved in other ways.Or perhaps still it’s that England, who are unbeaten in seven T20 series, are a bloody good team, who bat deep and back themselves until the very end. There is no better opposition to return to international action against. Welcome back, England. Welcome back, international cricket.

“I worked on my off-side game before this season because bowlers had started bowling wide with an off-side field”

Hemant Brar30-Apr-2022After Rahul Tewatia helped Gujarat Titans pull off yet another odds-defying chase, this time against Royal Challengers Bangalore, everyone from commentators to Twitteratis started calling him Iceman. His captain Hardik Pandya, too, approved of the moniker. “If you can finish games like this, you have to be super cool,” Pandya said at the post-match presentation.However, if Tewatia is to be believed, he isn’t as cool in the middle as he appears to be.”I cannot say I am cool while batting,” he told Star Sports after being named the Player of the Match for his unbeaten 25-ball 43. “I might look cool but inside my head, many things are going on, like from which over to execute my plans, which bowler to take chances against. I think a lot, and then whatever plan I come with, I follow that.”At the Brabourne Stadium, Titans needed 71 from the last six overs with Tewatia and David Miller at the crease. The two hit nine fours and three sixes between them, adding 79 off 40 balls, and wrapped up the win with three balls to spare.Until recently, Tewatia has predominantly been a leg-side player, and the Royal Challengers seamers tried to take advantage of that. With the long boundary on the off side, they bowled outside off, but Tewatia caught them by surprise.He steered Mohammed Siraj fine of third man four before creaming Josh Hazlewood through covers. On the last ball of the 19th over, now with the shorter boundary on the off side, he skipped down the track and launched Harshal Patel inside out over extra cover for a six.”I worked on my off-side game before this season,” Tewatia said, “because bowlers had started bowling wide with an off-side field. So I was like if I can find the gaps, I can get boundaries on the off side too. So now I can play on both sides of the wicket.”In the death overs, you have to play premeditated shots but I always have an eye on the field. In the end, you have to play according to the ball. I try if it’s an off stump ball, I play it on the off side. And if it’s on the leg stump, which is my area, I make sure not to miss out.”David Miller and Rahul Tewatia were at it again guiding the chase for Titans•BCCIBut is there a number in Tewatia’s mind he feels confident of chasing?”It’s not like how many I can chase down,” he said. “It’s all about the situation and conditions. On some pitches chasing 60 in five overs is a big ask. But these pitches are much easier to bat on. Here 60 in five overs is quite chaseable, and we have been doing that since the start of the season.”You need to have that belief on yourself that till you are at the crease, you can do it. If you have that belief, your confidence to finish the games automatically gets that extra boost.”Earlier in the tournament too, Tewatia has had crucial partnerships with Miller. In six innings, they have added 236 runs at a rate of 10.48 per over. According to Tewatia, the duo’s bonding, both on and off the field, has played a big part in that.”We have been playing together for quite some time now. We were together at Kings XI [Punjab] for one year and at Rajasthan Royals for two years. Off the field also we have good bonding, we spent a lot of time together. In net sessions, we discuss how we can finish a game. Now that we are doing it in the middle, it feels great.”

Notts batter has rediscovered freedom of youth as he prepares for Test return after six-year absence

Vithushan Ehantharajah28-Nov-2022Ahead of an expected first Test engagement in six years, Ben Duckett has openly talked about the fact that as recently as 12 months ago he thought he would never play the format again. Which, all told, is pretty odd.Go back a year and England were hardly setting world cricket alight, in the midst of run of 11 defeats and just four wins in 20 matches between the start of 2021 and the beginning of the 2022 summer. There were question marks over several in the XI, specifically those occupying Duckett’s preferred position up top. And though he was hardly in electric form for Nottinghamshire – three first-class centuries and a healthy average of 42.2 across the 2020 and 2021 seasons combined – you’d think an engaging talent at a big county, with four caps already to his name, was surely never going to drift completely off the radar.”I guess at times you have no idea where you are in the pecking order,” Duckett tells ESPNcricinfo. “I wasn’t really in the mix, I wasn’t really ever spoken about. I went to Trent Bridge [from Northamptonshire, in 2018] and wasn’t scoring buckets of runs. I was feeling good but we were producing green seamers. I wasn’t knocking the door down.”Related

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He didn’t question his ability to get back into the fray. The 2022 season is a testament to that: 1012 runs at an average of 72.28 with three centuries among eight scores above fifty as the dynamo propelling Nottinghamshire to the Division Two title. And most of all, doing so at a strike rate of 76.09.That last figure is perhaps the most important of all when it comes to what his head coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes want from anyone who comes into this set-up. Not only is he in the squad for three upcoming Tests against Pakistan, but he is in line to partner Zak Crawley at the top of the order in the opening match in Rawalpindi.As much as Duckett is in step with the new regime, he acknowledges perhaps he was out of step with the old. So much so that while there is a sense of making up for lost time, the delay of this second coming is regarded as a blessing.”I’ll be honest, at times over the last six years, I haven’t wanted to be involved,” Duckett says. “From the outside, it’s looked tough.” Tough not just on the team, as previous results show, but individuals, too.”I certainly think looking at this format, for example, especially with top order batsmen, it was a bit of a conveyor belt at times: how many openers we went through. I think now, the way this group of players is, I think everyone trusts each other. [Alex] Lees played 10 Tests, ‘Creepy’ [Crawley] deserves time. You’re going to have series where you struggle.”You’re not going to come in as an opener and go hundred, hundred. The more that happens with this group, the more backing they get, the better they’re going to get. That’s the important thing. You have to allow them time to believe in themselves because they believe in themselves. There’s no better time to play Test cricket than right now, under Stokesy, under McCullum.”

“The thought of scoring a Test hundred is as top as it gets. A few years ago I was saying I could tell my grandchildren I played Test cricket. I want to be able to tell them I scored a Test hundred”

A first taste of the new order came when Duckett was called up for the final match of the South Africa series at the end of the summer after Jonny Bairstow’s golfing accident. Over the last fortnight, he has been able to bed in a little more with the camp in Abu Dhabi, which was more bonhomie than back-breaking. He can’t get enough of it.”Just batting in the nets, you don’t get a ‘well done’ or a ‘great shot’ when you play a straight drive down the ground now – it’s when you get the reverse sweep out or you slog-sweep the offie over midwicket. It’s that real enjoyment, showing intent, which is how I play red-ball cricket. I want to score quickly, I want to score at a rate where I’m putting bowlers under pressure and putting the team in a good position.”Aged 28, he is perhaps as ready as he’ll ever be. Wiser than when he first got the nod, at 22, under Trevor Bayliss and Joe Root, more mature than the 23-year-old dropped after pouring a drink over James Anderson during the 2017-18 Ashes winter.Of course, there have been technical tweaks along the way, as is usually the case during this period of a cricketer’s life cycle, especially a batter. However, most of those have now been jettisoned because they did not come from a clear state of mind, or body.Heading into the 2018 summer, he underwent an operation in February on the ring finger of his left hand which had taken a blow at the end of the 2017 season. The initial prognosis was of 12 weeks out but Duckett came back early for Northamptonshire, his county at the time, against Middlesex.”I was nowhere near ready,” he says. “I look back and think ‘why did I come back four weeks early from my hand operation?’ I mean, I know why: it was the first game of the summer, I was trying to get back into the England team, it was Lord’s and I just wanted to play.”Duckett looks set to open with Zak Crawley in Pakistan•ECB ImagesThe knock-on effect was quite severe. While playing through the pain – “there are pictures of me that summer where I’m playing a forward defence and my hand is off the bat” – his grip on the handle changed. Not noticeably at first, but enough to impact his red- and white-ball game. The latter was most affected, particularly given how bottom-hand dominant he is with the sweeps, reverses and flays on both sides of the wicket.In first-class cricket, however, he was actually ticking along nicely. He averaged 56.28 in the Bob Willis Trophy during the 2020 Covid summer, and found himself leaving a lot outside off stump and “crabbing” a lot through leg. So much so that Paul Franks, Nottinghamshire’s assistant head coach, kept calling him Graeme Smith. And for a moment, Duckett thought, “maybe this is how I play Test cricket again?”Thankfully, he recognised he was veering from his natural game – and thus, dulling his instincts. With no franchise commitments in the winter of 2020-21, he set about some intense remedial work at Trent Bridge to rediscover the original hold he had on the bat. It worked.”Mate, I wouldn’t even be able to tell you the different ways over the last few years,” he replies when asked to chart the degradation of his grip. “The easiest way to put it was how I held a bat for 20 years – after the operation, because I came back four weeks early, I had to find a way to hold the bat just to cope.”I said to Peter Moores and Ant Botha that I want to play around with my grip. I reckon two weeks just focusing on hitting, I found it again. The next stage was making it feel natural again and I think now it does – I pick up the bat and it feels good and I can play the shots I used to play.”Pakistan’s T20 side got a taste of those shots in the T20 series a month or so ago, when Duckett struck 233 runs across seven matches – at 46.60 and a strike rate of 159.58 – all from No. 4. And the Test side will likely get a sight of most, if not all, of them over the following weeks.There’s a temptation, for chronology’s sake, to regard all this as the evolution of Duckett, when really this is more of a reawakening of the old Duckett. A regression to a cricketing norm that is really no regression at all. Especially in this more-relaxed, encouraging environment.Duckett says he has gone back to “see ball, hit ball” with his batting•Alex Davidson/Getty Images”I felt like you can’t do that in Test cricket – play shots and go after the bowlers like I did,” he says. “That’s the way it seemed for a while. It’s the purest game, you’ve got to go and bat all day. If you’re an opener or number three, you’ve got to leave the ball well.”I think it’s only really this summer where I went, ‘nah’. I was facing – I don’t want to say average spinners – but whoever it was, I was facing spin and I thought, ‘I don’t know why I’m blocking him here, why am I not smacking him into the stands?'”That’s what I did very well as a youngster, I used to just take them on. And almost play like I played in the T20 series [in Pakistan], sweep both ways and say ‘you’re going to have to stop bowling and get the seamer back on’. I went through a period of time where I felt like that wasn’t the way to play in that format. And this year I just went, you know what, I’m just going to go back to see ball, hit ball again.”He says if he goes 0 and 8 in his first two innings, he won’t then clutch at the next chance. McCullum and Stokes already have a track record of backing those in possession, which is perhaps why Duckett is open about a milestone on his mind. Having registered a half-century in Bangladesh back in 2016, he is desperate for a full one.”The thought of scoring a Test hundred, for me, is as top as it gets. There’s nothing better than that for me. A few years ago I was saying I could tell my grandchildren I played Test cricket. I want to be able to tell them I scored a Test hundred. Now I’ve got an opportunity to do that.”

Pujara’s philosophy is to spend more time in the middle to create more chances of scoring runs

Sidharth Monga09-Jan-20212:11

Chopra: Pujara’s back leg movement a ‘flaw’ causing dismissals against Cummins

“I don’t think it was the right approach, I think he needed to be a bit more proactive with his scoring rate because I felt it was putting too much pressure on his batting partners.”That was Ricky Ponting’s assessment, posted on Twitter in response to a question posed to him about Cheteshwar Pujara’s approach in India’s first innings of the Sydney Test. Pujara had scored his slowest half-century, facing 176 balls, but despite facing only five overs fewer than Australia, India ended 94 runs behind. There was a run-out and a played-on dismissal while Pujara was at the wicket, which were indirectly linked to his rate of scoring.This is not opportunistic criticism in hindsight. The questioning of Pujara’s approach began well before his, or Ajinkya Rahane’s or Hanuma Vihari’s, dismissal. The import of it is that if you bat with that approach, you put others around you under pressure and, thus, don’t leave yourself and your team an option but to score a big one yourself. And on difficult pitches against good attacks, you are bound to get a good ball before you score a hundred going at that pace.There is merit to this criticism, but “approach” can soon start to give way to “intent” and it can begin to sound like the batsman is not even thinking of runs. In reality, the approach is not decided by a batsman based on which side of the bed he wakes up. It is a reaction to the quality of the bowling, the nature of the pitch, the match situation, the strength of his own batting line-up, and, perhaps most importantly, his own ability.It isn’t as though Pujara doesn’t know the pitfalls of not scoring at a certain rate. This is a method – let’s not call it approach because it leads to the awful word intent, which suggests the player doesn’t intend to do what is best for the team – that has worked the best for Pujara and India. This was the method that worked on the last tour of Australia when he won India the series by facing more balls than any visiting batsman in a series in Australia in which he played four Tests or fewer. This was the method that worked in Johannesburg where he took 50 balls to get off the mark. This is a method that works for him at home.This method relies on the philosophy that the more time you spend at the wicket, the better your reactions get and the less accurate and intense the bowling gets. Pujara has shown more than enough times that he can make up for these starts once he has bowlers where he wants them. And it is not always accurate that if he gets out for 20 off 80, he has done his side no favours. The last Test was a good example of Shubman Gill and Pujara tiring Pat Cummins out, forcing him to bowl an eight-over spell in the morning session. The centurion Rahane was well into his 20s, having faced 70-plus balls when he first faced a proper spell from Cummins. It is not always apparent, and it is not always extremely significant, but it has some benefit for those who follow him.Of course, Pujara can show more “intent” and try to play quicker, but his judgement tells him that involves an undue amount of risk. He was up against stronger, quicker, taller and more accurate fast bowlers than Australia’s batsmen were on a pitch that called for accurate banging of the ball into the pitch. The bounce available meant Nathan Lyon was in the game too.There was no release available for Pujara unlike for Australia’s batsmen who had Navdeep Saini, Ravindra Jadeja – his four wickets perhaps flatter his effort – and even R Ashwin, who was now getting hit off the back foot into the off side. All told, Pujara faced 20 full balls and duly scored 14 runs off them. It was the good balls that he didn’t go after.Look at how Rahane got out: that late-cut over the cordon would perhaps work on another pitch, but the uneven bounce meant he played on. Look at how Rishabh Pant got hurt: trying to pull. Pujara knew this wasn’t a pitch for the horizontal-bat shots.Cheteshwar Pujara drops his hands and sways out of the way of a snorter•Getty ImagesThe combination of the pitch and the quality of the Australian bowling meant that the slight closing of the face or opening of it for even those singles was deemed to be too risky by the batsmen in the middle. Pujara has faced more than 31,000 balls in first-class cricket in varied conditions and match situations, close to 13,000 of them in Tests. Perhaps it is wise to trust his judgement of what is risky.Of course, you can try to play the shots regardless, and they can come off on your day, but elite batsmen don’t like to take that much risk. Not leaving things to chance is what makes them elite. Especially when they are playing just five pure batsmen.The risk involved here is of another nature. Pujara concentrated hard for 176 balls, helped take India to 195 for 4, but then an injured Rishabh Pant and he fell on the same score and the tail stood no chance of getting India close to Australia’s score. The ball Pujara got was, according to him, the ball of the series, a ball that he said would have got him had he been batting even on 100 or 200. While Pujara can take solace in that he made Australia throw the best punch they possibly could, Cummins, the bowler of the monster ball that kicked off just short of a length, rubbed it in that Pujara’s scoring rate helped him and the other bowlers.”At one stage he had been out there for 200 balls or 150 balls and I looked up there thinking they are still 200 away from our first-innings total,” Cummins said after the day’s play. “So if things go that way and we can keep bowling well, you’re not overly bothered. He is someone you know you are going have to bowl a lot at. I think we got our head around that this series, for him to score runs we are going to make it as hard as possible. Whether he bats 200 or 300 balls, just try and bowl good ball after good ball, and challenge both sides of his bat.”Related

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In what can be a bit of a mind game lies an admission too. That Pujara makes you bowl at your best for longer periods of time than other batsmen. Against the same attack, it worked on the last tour. It came close to working on this tour too. At least it gave Pujara a chance.On this pitch, against this bowling, to force the pace and drive on the up, while not taking an undue amount of risk, you have to be as good as Virat Kohli at that kind of batting. Pujara probably knows he isn’t. That is not his skill. His skill is to absorb the blows before taking down tired bowlers. Since about late 2018, even Kohli has started buying into the Pujara philosophy. The best innings of this series in terms of method, Kohli’s 74 in Adelaide, took 180 balls. For the first 80 balls of that innings, he went at a strike rate under 30. It was exactly like a Pujara innings, except that Kohli’s higher skill at shot-making meant he opened up sooner than Pujara could have.There is another, more nuanced criticism of Pujara’s batting, something he probably needs to work harder on. You don’t see too many driveable balls when he is at the wicket because he gets stuck on the crease. So what might be a half-volley for other batsmen is a length ball that Pujara is forced to show respect to. It gives the bowlers a wider margin of error, which means they feel no pressure and thus make less errors.There is merit to that but Pujara will turn around and tell you that this is what allows him to keep out balls that take other batsmen’s edges. Instead of pushing at the ball, he either lets them seam past his edge or play them late and under his eye if they are straight. That by facing more balls the way he does, he actually makes some unplayable balls look negotiable. That by facing more balls, he gives himself a better chance at scoring runs.With bowlers getting fitter and stronger, with bowling attacks now carrying fewer weak links, it is true that Pujara’s method will become less and less prevalent with the future batsmen. This is why probably India made a reasonable call when they dropped him for lack of intent in the past, but Pujara came back and showed with his immense powers of concentration that his method can work. That the criticism of method is not necessarily on the mark. That he shouldn’t be praised for the same method in 2018-19 and be criticised for it in 2020-21.The biggest problem with the criticism perhaps is that Pujara’s method was not a significant difference between the two sides. Or any batsman’s method for that matter. Australia’s bowling in the absence of Ishant Sharma and Mohammed Shami is far superior to India’s. It is high credit to the visitors that they pulled off the Melbourne miracle but the longer a series goes in Australia, an attack with stronger, quicker, more accurate fast bowlers will prevail over one whose seam attack has a combined experience of 17 Tests, one of them a debutant who has shown the tendency to not be accurate. That is exactly what has happened in Sydney so far.

Brilliant gloveman never recovered from fateful decision to tour Apartheid South Africa in 1980s

Andrew Miller26-Nov-2022David Murray, the former West Indies wicketkeeper whose life and career was ruined by his fateful decision to join the rebel tours of South Africa in the 1980s, has died in his native Barbados at the age of 72.Murray, son of the legendary Sir Everton Weekes, played a total of 19 Tests and ten ODIs for West Indies between 1973 and 1982, and was hailed by the great fast bowlers of his era – Malcolm Marshall and Michael Holding among them – as the finest gloveman that they had played with.It was Murray’s misfortune that his career ended up being bookended by two of the most legendary Caribbean wicketkeepers of them all – his namesake (but no relation) Deryck Murray, who kept him out of the Test team for much of his pomp, and then at the start of the 1980s, his younger rival Jeff Dujon, who once admitted that Murray’s silky skills made his own glovework look like “Dolly Parton”, but whose superior batting brooked no argument with the selectors.Related

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Ultimately, however, Murray’s predilection for marijuana – a habit that he had begun aged 13 – was the catalyst for his downfall, first as an international cricketer and then, after his fateful decision to accept US$125,000 to tour Apartheid South Africa in the winter of 1983, as a member of society too. His final decades were spent in poverty in his native Barbados, selling drugs to tourists in Bridgetown, and trading on his infamy.In the early part of his career, while the quality of his glovework was earning plaudits, and with the fast-tracking that came from being the son of a West Indies great, Murray had been adamant that his drug use was beneficial to his cricket. “It gives you good meditation… concentration you know,” he told ESPNcricinfo’s Siddhartha Vaidyanathan back in 2006. “Not that you did it to enhance your performance … never in the breaks – you can’t do that.”Within the West Indies set-up, however, Murray could never shake the suspicion that his face did not fit, particularly while Deryck – Cambridge-educated and a key lieutenant to Clive Lloyd – was the favoured wicketkeeper. And when, after nearly a decade as the squad’s understudy, he did finally made his Test debut, against Australia in March 1978, it was due in large part to Deryck’s decision to join Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. It was a source of much frustration – and arguably a factor in his subsequent South Africa decision – that he lost his place again the following year, when the Packer players were reinstated.In his brief time as the Test No.1, Murray still managed to score three half-centuries, with a best of 84 against India in Bombay in 1978-79, as well as a first-class double-hundred in Jamshedpur on the same tour.However, Murray had already been in trouble with the team management for his off-field antics, notably on the 1975-76 tour of Australia, when it took the intervention of Lance Gibbs to spare him an early flight home. And matters came to a head on West Indies’ return to Australia in 1981-82, where the emergence of Dujon gave the selectors a reason to dispense of a talented but increasingly erratic player.Bad luck played a major part in Murray’s downfall, too. Early on the tour, he had broken his middle finger while attempting to catch a drive off Lloyd in the nets, but having played through the pain with supreme skill – taking a West Indies’ record nine catches in the first Test at Melbourne – he was rested for the subsequent one-dayers, allowing Dujon to make his case for a permanent berth with a match-winning fifty at the MCG.Murray reacted badly to Dujon’s promotion. With his drug use now causing him to sleep through team meetings, he turned up for 12th-man duties at the subsequent Adelaide Test without his equipment, and was expelled from the tour by manager Steve Camacho after refusing to take the water cart onto the field.The die was cast for Murray’s recruitment on the South Africa rebel tour. The previous winter, a 12-man party of England cricketers, led by Graham Gooch, had flown into Johannesburg for a month-long tour that contravened the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement discouraging sporting relations with the Apartheid regime.David Murray of the rebel West Indies XI bats during a one-day match against South Africa in Durban•Adrian Murrell/Getty ImagesCompared to the mild censure (and swift forgiveness) that would come to the England players, however, the opprobrium heaped upon the West Indies tourists would be something else entirely. Murray’s tour fee, which he would quickly squander on “jeeps, new cars and partying out”, would be of no lasting benefit in the years to come.”I f***ed up,” Murray told Ashley Gray, author of the award-winning , which recounted the tale of the West Indian rebels. His first on-field act in South Africa had been to take a catch off Sylvester Clarke in a tour match against Border, but that, as he told Gray, had been a crushing moment in itself. “Lawrence Rowe said to me as a joke, ‘You can’t play for West Indies anymore.’ Only one delivery. It felt bad.”Murray’s personal life was upended by the South Africa decision, too. In the latter weeks of the Australian tour, he had married his fiancée Kerry McAteer in a private ceremony in Adelaide, but after initially being refused re-entry to the country due to a visa ban implemented by the anti-Apartheid prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, an ill-judged affair cemented his estrangement from his wife and new-born child, and left him rootless and ostracised back in his native Barbados.He returned home to a “vibe” of rejection, Murray related in . “‘He sold his birthright’. They don’t forget. They are narrow-minded. I still cop it. ‘He is a traitor’. I have no regrets.”His response was to turn to harder drugs, including cocaine, which in turn deepened his estrangement from his father, who feared he would steal from him to subsidise his habit. For the final decades of his life, Murray was skeletal-thin with matted dreadlocks framing his increasingly gaunt features.Nevertheless, in 1989, the West Indies Cricket Board rescinded its lifetime ban on the South Africa rebels, and to the extent that forgiveness was achieved in the Caribbean, it was available in Barbados. One of Murray’s fellow rebels, Ezra Moseley, went on to play Test cricket – famously breaking Gooch’s hand in the Trinidad Test in 1990, while Murray’s own son, Ricky Hoyte, was Barbados wicketkeeper in the 1990s, and might have broken into the Test team too had he not shared some of his father’s wayward (if less self-destructive) traits.Murray himself, however, remained a self-imposed outcast to the end.

It’s not only his performances but also his data-driven approach that has played a part in Pakistan getting to the final

Osman Samiuddin12-Nov-20222:03

What makes Shadab so successful in Australia?

Before the start of this tournament, Shadab Khan was asked to rate Pakistan’s reliance on data analytics in T20 on a scale of 1 to 10. He answered with words, not numbers, but if ever words represented a solid five, this was it. Difficult to say. Franchises are different. International cricket is different. Hmmm. Haww. Not reliant on it. Not disregarding it.Shadab is a poster boy of the Islamabad United data dynasty. He gets it. He applies it. He believes in it. He is also the vice-captain of a Pakistan team where the captain is not a great believer in match-ups, where a religious philosopher doubles as a coach and a mentor who is a man of words that don’t always make sense. At the last T20 World Cup, almost the same Pakistan side were mostly ignoring – politely – data-based tactical advice they were getting from analysts, and they reached the semi-finals unbeaten. Shadab gets this too. He believes in this too.Related

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But this happy accommodation – Shadab of the Pakistan ethos, Pakistan of Shadab – captures something intrinsic about this latest Pakistan ride, of which Shadab has been the absolute beating heart. A ride fuelled by a little bit of data, a little bit of (prayer) and a whole lot of Pakistan.

****

History repeats itself, the saying should go, first as Pakistan cricket, then as a meme. The 1992 parallels have long gone viral, but there’s a more compelling one from an individual performance from Pakistan’s second world title. Trent Bridge, 2009 and you know where this is headed: the coronation of Shahid Afridi, 13 years into his career. A fifty first, the blown kiss for Jacques Kallis and then the iconic castling of Herschelle Gibbs and AB de Villiers in four balls to set up Pakistan for the final.In Sydney, a little over a week ago, against South Africa, in another must-win game, Shadab dismissed Temba Bavuma and Aiden Markram in the space of three balls to unhinge the chase. Earlier he had rescued Pakistan with a 22-ball 52, like Afridi in 2009, his first fifty in an ICC event. No kisses were blown.Memory says the Shadab ball to dismiss Markram might have resembled Afridi’s to de Villiers but Youtube proves otherwise. Afridi was getting so much drift in those days, each ball was like a fully formed character out of a Kerouac novel. But the Markram delivery was almost identical to Shadab’s own dismissal of Markram from the only other time he’s bowled to him, in a World Cup game three years ago. A flipper maybe, or a toppie, a goodie definitely: across nine balls, it’s bowled Markram twice.Shadab Khan is a big draw in this Pakistan team•ICC via Getty ImagesThis isn’t a coronation, not yet anyway, more an arrival. Shadab’s been a gun for a while, but he’s now stamped his presence all over a global event. He’s a genuine shot for player of the tournament though if it’s just a fan vote, only one guy is winning that (You don’t even have to scroll down. He’s right there).Shadab still considers himself a legspinner first, though his batting has come on so sharply in recent years soon it might not be so easy to agree. But it’s perhaps the highest compliment to his bowling in this tournament that it has made the central issue of his batting – to be higher up the order more often – redundant.He’s offered Pakistan essential control in those middle overs, foremost with 10 wickets – the most by any bowler in that phase at the tournament (to have bowled at least 30 balls). That’s one wicket less than Rashid Khan, Adil Rashid and Adam Zampa combined. Among spinners, his economy rate of 6.59 is the fifth best, and he’s basically as good as the most economical spinners because only 0.22 per over separates him from top spot.That fifty against South Africa was no fluke though. Since 2020, he’s one of just three players in all T20s to have scored over 1000 runs and taken 100 wickets (Samit Patel and Jason Holder are the other two). Dig a bit more into that period* and he’s the only player alongside Mohammad Nabi to have at least 10 scores of 30+ at a strike rate above 150 as well as at least 10 innings where he’s bowled his full quota of four overs and conceded less than six per over. Most teams would love to have a player tick one of those boxes: Shadab ticks both. No surprise either that ESPNcricinfo’s Smart Stats has him as the fifth-most impactful T20 player in the world since 2020.So he might call himself a legspinner, but he’s as all-round as they come, not least when his fielding is factored in. He’s the best fielder in the best fielding side Pakistan has ever put out at a global event. The run-out of Devon Conway in the semi-final was an electric and pivotal moment, but in the canon of Shadab run-outs, hardly spectacular. All three stumps, nice and easy bounce for the pick-up – if he’d missed it, it would’ve been surprising.

****

Shadab Khan might call himself a legspinner, but he’s as all-round as they come•Getty ImagesIn his first season as captain, Shadab’s Islamabad were chasing 183 against Lahore Qalandars at Gaddafi Stadium. They were 5-2 at the end of the second, both openers gone. Until that point Shadab had mostly batted lower down, usually at seven.The story goes that he reasoned to coach Misbah-ul-Haq that he should go in at four. The chase was a tall one and going in himself was a way of maximising resources. He would go hard from ball one and if he failed, it would hardly be a dent on batting resources with Colin Ingram, Asif Ali and Hussain Talat to come.As it turns out, his 29-ball 52 helped Islamabad win a raucous game, but more than the potential of his batting, the story reflects his grasp of the format’s demands. The phrase low-value wicket wasn’t as in vogue then, but that is exactly what he was.That game awareness, built off some homespun instinct and enabled by the environment at Islamabad, is something that few in the Pakistan side can match. That is what filters through to the national side. It’s been said, for instance, that it was his input that led to the recent tactical flexibility in Pakistan’s batting order. There’s a suggestion Shadab had a fingerprint on the early introduction of Mohammad Nawaz against Glenn Phillips in the semi-final. High pace is usually a good way to go against Phillips but Shadab was aware that Phillips’ can struggle early against left-arm spin. Nawaz took his wicket sixth ball, bowled one more economical over and was done.None of this is to exaggerate Shadab’s role, merely to highlight that Pakistan have come upon, in him and Babar Azam, a valuable complementariness in on-field leadership. Babar’s a more orthodox captain, albeit with sound instincts. Shadab’s approach bounces nicely off this and they get on far too well for it to be any more complicated than that.Not that the last bit matters at this moment. The last Pakistan captain and vice-captain to feature in a world final at the MCG had, you might recall, an infamously complicated relationship. You might also recall where that got them that day.

A Test match in India is no place for the faint-hearted, neither is it to be missed, for it will be among the richest experiences of these players’ lives.

Mark Nicholas02-Feb-2021Imagine for a moment that you are walking out to bat for England in Chennai. You have played a few Test matches and made a hundred along the line but you have yet to establish certain selection for every match, everywhere. In other words, your name is in the mix as a good option rather than as a convincing solution. You have worked yourself to the limit of expectation in the days preceding the match, planning especially for the Indian spinners, upon whom the narrative is so often built in these steamy parts. Chennai is incredibly hot and equally humid, which is fine for some but not for all. Virat Kohli, pretty much the most animated and gifted opponent in the world, is captain of India. An aura is around him, as are the disciples, fresh off beating the Australians at their own game in their own backyard without him. They are keen to impress.You take guard, asking the umpire for middle stump in a strong voice. You mark that guard and then cough a little to clear your throat. You are nervous – of course you are, I am nervous writing about it. You look up from the crease, spinning the bat handle in your fingers, and are aware not so much of the close fielders, whom you took in immediately on arrival, but of the way they are looking at you and of things they are saying among each other.Related

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You assume these are things about you, but you don’t know that, you just assume. There are many languages spoken but you understand none of them. Hindi leads the way, of which you have an inkling from people around the dressing rooms and hotels but by no means an understanding. The others? Forget it. Suddenly one of those fielders, the short leg, say, drops in an English phrase. It is not about you, it is about the pitch and the problems it has been causing, but you know to whom it is directed. You survey the leg side, because short leg was the first to attract your attention, seeing gaps as well as fielders. You see Kohli at midwicket and think better of looking to get off the mark in his space.He walks towards you, seeming to ask questions with his eyes. “What have you got?” “Are you frightened or just as nervous as you look?” “Can you read Ashwin? The field is up, will you risk taking him on?” “If not, who will blink first?” “You look out of your depth. We shall see… who you are, what you are, exactly what you have got.”This is the mood once referred to as mental disintegration by Steve Waugh, which became a soundtrack to the modern game and is running free in your imagination. Kohli hasn’t said a word. He is resetting the field now. The truth is that the IPL has brought players closer together. You turn away, annoyed at allowing yourself to feel such claustrophobia, such weight. It is not there, you tell yourself. But somehow it is. It is then that you realise you are asking these questions of yourself. “C’mon, get a grip and toughen up” is your response.You see a gap at cover but you remind yourself not to drive through the off side against Ashwin unless the ball is wildly overpitched, which it won’t be. You remember that Ashwin was getting the better of Steve Smith just the other day on pitches much less responsive than this one. You watch Ashwin and respect him; you don’t mess with him but neither do you bow at his feet. If the chance comes to attack him, you take it. In the meantime, you back your defence.R Ashwin, Steve Smith’s current nemesis, is not a man you want to mess with•AFP via Getty ImagesYou are talking to yourself now and your heart is pumping fast and hard, soaring to 200 and beyond. First slip says something to silly point, whereupon leg slip responds with laughter. Kohli is near you now, joining in. He pushes silly point to midwicket and promptly comes in tight there himself. He shouts something to Ashwin, who agrees. He wishes you good luck. Then he lowers himself to a crouch, aggressively claps his hands and prompts a frenzy of urgent calls to Ashwin from his team-mates.Your mouth is dry now. Sweat trickles from the back of your neck to the point of your back between, and a tad beneath, your shoulder blades. You try to scratch this point but cannot quite reach the exact spot. You can, of course, but not right now. Your mind is turning this stuff over, playing tricks with it and distracting you from the task you have long dreamt of successfully completing. You smile inwardly, thinking it almost funny that such ambition brings so much fear. Not physical but mental: the fear of failure.You need to step back for a minute and bravely you do so. Ashwin pretends to have started his approach to bowl and theatrically pulls out of his stride. The fielders turn up the volume. The India captain looks hard at you, lips tight and thin, eyes narrow. It is as if he is boring through your soul. You step away and take undemonstrative deep breaths, irritating the close fielders with your ability to hold a beat. You like that. Once again, you smile to yourself, an unseen smile that this time signifies the start of battle.You settle into your stance, eyes level, hands soft on the bat, shoulders loose. The calls for Ashwin begin again. He’s in now, a tall, strong and seemingly confident man, ready to take you down. You squint a little and then widen your eyes in a final adjustment to the yellow light of the afternoon sun, while reminding yourself to stay still and watch the ball.You first pick out that ball in his hand and follow it as if your life depended on doing so. It is released at the high point of his action and bowled “up” on a threatening line outside off stump. You see it perfectly, pick its length and move forward to defend. At the last millisecond of its journey before landing on the baked and shorn surface of the MA Chidambaram Stadium pitch, it dips just a fraction. Then it spins like a top and bounces violently into the meat of your thigh pad before flying into the air and the region of that man at short leg, who throws himself like a gymnast to clutch it centimetres from the ground. No!They all appeal, Kohli with near manic contortion. He made an extraordinary hundred earlier in the day, a great player with points to prove. Every element of his game was perfectly in tune and every moment of his time at the wicket an exhibition. They say Kane Williamson and Smith are as good. No way, you think, not after what I saw today. Now he is pleading for your wicket, first ball.A time for thoughts and prayers•AFPNot out, says the umpire.What!Not out.Kohli immediately reviews.Your heart sinks.The third umpire takes an age, even checks for the lbw. The minutes tick by. Your hands are increasingly clammy. Your partner says you didn’t hit it. You say you know that but will the third umpire?The big screen is ready. Your heart arrives in your mouth – a mouth now so dry, you can barely speak. Your heart is fighting to break free from your chest.The decision is given.Not out.Momentary silence. You close your eyes and exhale. Your heart speeds up and then with a single further deep breath, slows down to manageable.Everybody returns to their position, at which point the Indian players up the ante. You wonder what this would be like with a crowd. You thank your lucky stars there isn’t one. You figure one against 11 is a better chance than one against 50,000. On the other hand, you wouldn’t mind knowing what it felt like, to have that many people turned against you in such a cauldron. This whole thing is so damn intense as it is… But add the atmosphere, that cacophony of sound, and imagine it then.You remember that Tony Greig played to the crowd, just loved it, and told the Indian umpires they were the best in the world. No fool, that Greigy. Right now, you too think the Indian umpires are the best in the world. You remember that David Gower charmed his way round the country having first ridden out various political storms and that Alastair Cook won over India with the resilience in his batting and the sheer brilliance of Kevin Pietersen alongside him. You are reminded that all things are possible.Tony Greig plays to the gallery in 1977•Patrick Eagar/Getty ImagesYou settle back into your stance. Ashwin approaches but then stutters at the crease, like the old VHS tapes that caught between play and pause. It is a trick he uses to unsettle the batsman’s trigger movement. You are ready for this; you have prepared. He releases the ball an iota late and it drops short. In one swift, sweet move you step back and thrash it to the cover boundary for four. The shot is replayed on the big screen. Perfect: 10,000 hours and now perfect. Oh my days.Game on, against one of the great Indian teams, on their patch.Commentating on the denouement of the 1977 Centenary Test in Melbourne, as Dennis Lillee was tearing in to clean up the England tail, John Arlott said something like, “The seagulls are as vultures, recruited by Lillee to feast on the corpse of the English batting.” And that is exactly what the England batsmen will feel when surrounded by close fielders on a turning pitch in Chennai or Ahmedabad.A Test match in India is no place for the faint-hearted, neither is it to be missed, for it will be among the richest experiences of these players’ lives. Three times in the last 45 years England have won series there and those responsible still look back in wonder.Greig did so in 1976-77 with plenty of chutzpah, the swinging ball – yes, John Lever took 26 wickets alongside Derek Underwood’s 29 – and the huge amount of self-belief that came from an innings win in the first match, in Delhi. His lads, good pros all, won the next two as well to go three-up before India had woken up. For what it’s worth, at the press conference on arrival, Greig did indeed loudly proclaim that India had the best umpires in the world.Gower was, of course, splendidly calm under pressure and there was a lot of it in 1984-85 – not least surrounding the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, and Percy Norris, the British High Commissioner. The first thought was that the tour would be called off, but England stayed and won. Mike Gatting made even more runs than Cook in 2012-13 – 575 to 562 – as England eventually unravelled Laxman Sivaramakrishan.Cook plays down his role in the fabulous series win that came from being one down after one. The fact is, he played out of his skin, as did Pietersen. Their partnership in Mumbai was as good as it gets, maybe as good as it has ever got among England performances abroad. After which two really good spinners, Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar, went to work alongside that fellow Jimmy Anderson, who belied the notion that he was all about English conditions – a game he is still playing.Follow the leaders: Cook and Pietersen set the template in 2012•BCCIIt is well documented that the team that bats best in the first innings in India tends to go on and win, especially if the pitch is spinning. So there is a simple formula: steel yourself to go big first up. Each has his own way but a clear plan is important, for these are not innings to be played off the cuff. Defending against spin is a technical skill requiring precision. Attacking spin is all about commitment. Go half-hearted and you go home; go all the way and you have a good chance. The Cook-Pietersen partnership is the template.Of course, England do not have the quality of spinner that took them to victory on previous tours. Joe Root will need to be crafty and flexible and all of them will need to stick to the rule book when bowling at Kohli. This man is a fantastic batsman, among the finest there has been, and he is hungry, having missed the best bits of the tour to Australia. You just have to bowl at a fourth stump, even a fifth – hang it out there and try his patience.It is doubtful that even one of the Sri Lankan players would get into the Indian team, which sums up the size of the task – maybe Lasith Embuldeniya, now that Ravindra Jadeja is injured, or Angelo Mathews at No. 6, but only maybe.Without crowds and with the biosecure restrictions on daily life, a tour of India will lose something of its magic. The sterile environment will make it a more demanding experience than it would be otherwise, and therefore, the perspective and collective spirit of union we saw in Sri Lanka will be tested. Anyone and everyone can play their part in that by constantly reminding one another that, whatever the circumstances, India is a truly wonderful country and its people their fans. It is an achievement even to be touring at this time. The players are the lucky ones, for these are the days of their lives.It is a series to savour, played by two likeable and talented teams. The match-ups are a story in themselves – Kohli vs Root, Bumrah vs Archer, Pant vs Buttler/Bairstow/Foakes, Ashwin and co vs Stokes, Rohit and Shubman vs Anderson and/or Broad. Lovely, bring it on.

Knight Riders have not been their usual selves in 2021, but it’s not too late to fix things

Sreshth Shah03-May-20215:04

What’s ailing KKR’s batting this season?

Failing to set the tempo
Since the middle of last season, the Knight Riders have gone with a top-three which has plenty of potential but is the most inexperienced among all the teams. Nitish Rana and Rahul Tripathi are both uncapped and Shubman Gill is far from being a regular in India’s white-ball squads.Very few IPL teams in the tournament’s history have had a combined top three with only three games of international cricket between them, and the optimistic punt from the management has failed more than it has worked. Inconsistent scores from Rana, who has five innings of 22 and under, and Gill’s average of 18.85 at a strike rate of 117.85 have been the two biggest concerns.The alternatives – Karun Nair, Gurkeerat Singh, Venkatesh Iyer and Sheldon Jackson – are not too compelling either. Apart from Iyer, none of the others are regular openers in T20s, however, they may have the fire in their belly to show their worth. Perhaps, the Knight Riders could harness that.The other option is to bring in Tim Seifert, the New Zealand batter, but that would mean axing an overseas player. Although the issue of inexperience doesn’t get solved, at least a new thought process could bring in different results. After seven games for each side in IPL 2021, the Knight Riders have lost 12 powerplay wickets, the joint-most in the tournament. That along with a powerplay run-rate of 7.35 has hampered the side from setting the tempo early with the bat.Brendon McCullum, the coach, said in a press conference recently that he wants his top order to be aggressive, which they have failed to do. He said: “if you can’t , you change ” Expect a new top order for the rest of the season – the only question is what the personnel will be.Kolkata Knight Riders’ problems have started with the top this season•ESPNcricinfo LtdThe Morgan question
The ideal scenario for the Knight Riders was for their top three to set the base for eight to ten overs, following which a strong middle order of Eoin Morgan, Andre Russell and Dinesh Karthik could change gears to set a big total or complete a win.But with the top order eating nearly half the overs with very little on the board in most games, Morgan’s been forced to look for the big shots from the get-go. However, he has struggled with timing and when he hasn’t, he has fallen just before he could transition into his power-hitting mode. The lack of good scores from the top four has added more pressure on Russell and Karthik, who have also not been able to replicate their peak batting performances from 2019.On numbers alone, no one would bat an eyelid if Morgan was dropped after scoring only 92 runs in seven games, but when he is also wearing the captain’s armband, things get complicated, more so after the Knight Riders changed captains midway through last season. And with Karthik saying last year that captaincy hampers his own batting, the management will have to look beyond the obvious choice for a new leader. In any case – barring Rohit Sharma’s 2013 run with Mumbai Indians – changes in captaincy do not rescue teams from dire situations.McCullum has often stressed on role definition among the Knight Riders, so it’s unlikely Morgan will bat anywhere else either. The side likes Russell to come in at the 12-over mark and Karthik preferred at the death, and with both struggling against spinners who operate in the middle overs, the captain Morgan is set to stay at No. 4.4:01

McCullum: ‘I’ve asked time and again for us to be more aggressive’

The Narine conundrumWith a new bowling action that no longer has the sting of the Narine that lit up the IPL in his early days, does he merit a place in the XI when he no longer opens? Runs off the bat, as a floater, have been few and far in between. And with only three wickets in four games, there are others who can potentially have a greater impact.Although Narine isn’t a shabby opener option given the current struggles in the top order, the Knight Riders may still move to replace him with Shakib Al Hasan. Although Shakib may not replicate Narine’s batting strike rate, he is more consistent and there’s little to separate in the bowling.The other option is dropping Narine for Lockie Ferguson, who has the ability to be the enforcer in the bowling line-up by simply using his pace to trouble batters at any stage of the innings. That would also give the Knight Riders two express overseas quicks to torment oppositions, alongside Pat Cummins, and bring in one of Harbhajan Singh or Kuldeep Yadav as the second spinner. The third option is Seifert at the top for Narine, and add someone like Pawan Negi (or one of the two spinners) lower down.Sunil Narine’s new bowling action no longer has the sting of the old one•BCCIRethinking powerplay bowling plans
The original Moneyball team in the IPL, the Knight Riders have focused on match-ups. But that hasn’t worked out well with the ball.Take the example of Varun Chakravarthy against Royal Challenger Bangalore. With two wickets in the game’s second over, he had given the Knight Riders an early upper hand. Yet, next over, against the new batter Glen Maxwell, it was not Chakravarthy, but left-arm spinner Shakib bowling, who could potentially get the ball to turn away from the batter. Maxwell ended up hitting 78.Against the Delhi Capitals while defending a smaller total, it was Shivam Mavi opening the bowling – against the in-form pair of Shikhar Dhawan and Prithvi Shaw – and not Cummins, who arrived later to pick three wickets, an effort that came too late to have any impact on the match result.Against Chennai Super Kings, on a pitch where Deepak Chahar ended up taking four wickets in the Powerplay, the Knight Riders bowled three overs of spin. The Super Kings openers quietly compiled 54 for 0 to set a strong platform. They finished on 220 for 3.There is merit in their most experienced bowler Cummins taking the new ball in the hunt for early wickets, with Prasidh Krishna and/or Ferguson from the other end. Then bring in Shakib or Narine, leave Chakravarthy to control the middle overs, and once again use the Ferguson-Cummins combo alongside Russell at the death to close out the innings. It’s conventional, and yet propitious. But the Knight Riders – more often than not – prefer taking the path less travelled.

Jos Buttler’s side retain faith in their fundamentals despite fifth ODI defeat in a row

Andrew Miller31-Jan-2023Anyone who has ever worked to a deadline knows how exquisitely zen the onset of panic can be. It doesn’t work every time, or for everyone, but sometimes – particularly for those who know they have the aptitude but find the application harder to come by – there’s nothing quite like a ticking clock to focus the mind and force the issue at hand.So wakey wakey, England’s world-beating 50-over team. We see you there at the back of the class, feet up on the table, yawning your way through your mocks in Australia and South Africa. But, with eight months to go until the defence of the title so thrillingly won at Lord’s back in 2019, and with just four more ODIs to come this side of the summer, perhaps now’s the moment to allow some urgency to drive the agenda?Or perhaps, on second thoughts, now really isn’t the time. Life moves pretty fast, as another famous slacker, Ferris Bueller, once put it. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.Related

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Roy escapes his 'horrible year' with emotional and 'angry' century at Bloemfontein

Bavuma hundred before David Miller ices chase for South Africa

After all, England spent most of 2022 proving – to one extreme or another – that a positive mental attitude can overcome all obstacles, be it a record of one win in 17 prior to Brendon McCullum’s appointment as Test coach, or the seizing of the T20 World Cup in spite of a litany of injuries that would have derailed a less composed squad.And so, even though Jos Buttler’s men have just flunked their way to five consecutive ODI defeats – a run of failure unmatched by England since the summer of 2014 – there is still plenty justification for taking it easy right now, and trusting that the team’s proven knowledge of their subject matter will more than compensate for a lack of exhaustive cramming between now and the big day.After all, what’s the point of scaling endless peaks if you’re not permitted to climb back down to base camp occasionally, to take stock of your latest achievement and gird your loins to go again? Barely two months have elapsed since England won the World Cup! But don’t you dare rest on your laurels… there’s a World Cup to win!It’s little wonder that, in response to a recent Twitter enquiry about the cause of the team’s apparent downturn in white-ball fortunes, Ben Stokes – the main man of 2019 and current Bazballer-in-chief, who announced his ODI retirement last summer due to the insane workload he was facing across formats – responded: “Begins with S ends with E and has chedul in there as well”.ESPNcricinfo LtdWhatever the nuance of their current situation, there’s certainly no sense that England are right back to square one in their preparations for their World Cup defence. There’s been a lack of finesse to their efforts from 2020 to date, with 15 wins and 14 losses since that momentous day at Lord’s, but the team remains – by a whisker – the most attacking batting line-up in the world in that period, rattling along at 6.14 runs per over, compared to India’s next-best figure of 6.13.And as Moeen Ali, who featured in that 2014 downturn, put it in the wake of England’s series-sealing loss in Bloemfontein on Sunday, the current squad is not “in a position like before [the 2015 World Cup], where we were terrible and building a team”.”We’re more experienced, used to different conditions, and going to India where we’ve played a lot of IPL, I feel we’ll be ready to go,” Moeen added. “Results don’t show it yet, but I think we will be better than we were.”And yet, do England even have a chance of being as good as they were not so long ago? Regardless of the stars who may or may not bring their A games for the main event, the bald stats of their ODI performances between the last two World Cups are extraordinary, and point to the extent to which the ECB has given up on the format that, for four years up until 2019, it seemed to care for more than any other.Defeat in Bloemfontein was England’s fifth in a row•Getty ImagesBetween their elimination from the 2015 World Cup and their victory at Lord’s in 2019, England played 98 ODIs, winning a hefty 65 of them – or two in every three. They used 32 players in that period, but the core remained extraordinarily stable. Excluding Jofra Archer, who only qualified on the eve of the tournament (but including Alex Hales, whom England weren’t afraid to banish in the same timeframe in spite of his experience) each of the 12 men who formed the core of that World Cup 15 played at least half of the available games, with Eoin Morgan himself missing just six.Compare that to the current febrile situation. Since the World Cup win, England have played 32 ODIs, with just 11 more scheduled before their defence gets underway. Already, however, they’ve churned through 37 players, of whom just four have featured in more than 20 games. And if those stats are skewed by the Covid outbreak in July 2021 that forced England to field, in effect, their third XI for three matches against Pakistan, then equally the squad has lacked the volume of contests to mitigate for such holes in their preparation.In the three full years between the last two World Cups, England played nothing less than 18 ODIs annually, with a high of 24 in 2018, with which Morgan’s men perfected the front-running attitude that allowed them to embrace the mantra of favourites. In three complete years since 2019, however, they’ve played 9, 9 and 12 – their lowest workload in the format since 1995, offering barely even an opportunity to keep their muscle memory attuned.Stokes, incidentally, was the 22nd player to feature in the format in this post-2019 period. He made his ODI comeback against India in March 2021, 20 months after his heroics against New Zealand, but then binned off the format ten sporadic matches later, protesting with some justification that he could not give “100% to the shirt” while also giving his all to the rebooting of England’s Test fortunes.

Begins with S ends with E and has chedul in there as well https://t.co/U2aF9FOSDw

— Ben Stokes (@benstokes38) January 27, 2023