But the trend might be changing, as bowlers come into their own on the tiring pitches at Brabourne and DY Patil stadiums

Vishal Dikshit and S Sudarshanan14-Mar-20235:08

Haynes: It’d be nice to see boundaries pushed out a bit in coming seasons

We are just past the halfway mark in the inaugural WPL and there have already been four 200-plus totals, plenty of fours and sixes, two batters coming close to scoring centuries and more feats, mainly with the bat.There have been three five-wicket hauls, but bowlers have not had a great time. In batting-friendly conditions, they have been carted around the two grounds being used in the tournament, the short boundaries – as close by as 42-44 metres from the batting end in some cases – compounding problems for them.Such scores – Delhi Capitals’ 223 for 2 against Royal Challengers Bangalore has been the highest so far, with both grounds witnessing two 200-plus scores apiece – are rare in women’s T20 cricket.Bowlers, both uncapped and international, have been hit around, and fours and sixes have accounted for 65% of the total runs scored so far. The four 200-plus totals, all in the first innings, have come in just 22 innings (just under one in five innings). For context, the WBBL in Australia has had only four 200-plus scores in eight seasons and 922 innings (once every 230 innings, approximately). A total of 200 in a T20 would roughly equate to a score of 160 in the Hundred, and its two seasons have had just five 160-plus totals in 117 innings (one in 23 innings, approximately).ESPNcricinfo LtdMassive totals aside, the scoring rate in the WPL after ten games was 8.69, well ahead of 7.18 in the last season of the WBBL and 7.73 in the 2022 Hundred. One of the main reasons, again, for that is how often the batters have been hitting fours and sixes in the WPL compared to the WBBL and the Hundred.ESPNcricinfo LtdShort boundaries, though, are just one reason. There’s more.

Flat pitches and quick outfields

Even though both Brabourne Stadium and DY Patil Stadium have been rotating the pitches, conditions have predominantly been friendly for batters. Apart from the odd sign of swing and turn, batters have not had to worry about much. And even if they miscue a shot, they get the advantages of quick outfields and, yes, the remarkably short boundaries.Shabnim Ismail, UP Warriorz’s South African pace spearhead, pointed out that the high scores were also a result of how the women’s game has progressed, and some batters have been hitting big sixes.”The boundaries are short but women’s cricket in general is moving forward, so you can see some batters have been hitting huge sixes, like 70-plus metres,” Ismail told ESPNcricinfo. “So it’s not only about the small boundaries, also how you can capitalise in the middle, which is great to see in women’s cricket in general.”The boundary ropes have been pulled in to measure as short as 42 or 44 metres on one part of the ground, and the BCCI has reportedly set a cap of 60 metres for the longest boundary, compared to 65 at the Women’s T20 World Cup last month.Related

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The going’s good at the moment, but as the pitches suffer more wear and tear, scores may start to come down and we may see more assistance for the slower bowlers.”I’ve probably got a few grey hairs being a captain [to stop the run flow], but as a batter definitely your eyes tend to light up a little bit,” Warriorz captain Alyssa Healy told ESPNcricinfo about the scores. “That’s the nature of the competition. As it continues to go on and the wickets get tired a little bit, the scores might come down just a fraction. It’s been exciting, the 200-run scores have looked great, but there also have been tight contests. So, I have enjoyed that side of the game than the big scores.”On that last point, there has been one chase achieved with one ball to spare, one with two balls to spare, and one victory by 11 runs in a match in which 391 runs were scored.While the intention behind preparing batting-friendly conditions is perhaps to pull in more crowds at the grounds and attract more eyeballs on TV, for a tournament that has just started, Lisa Sthalekar, who played 187 internationals for Australia, does commentary around the world, and is currently the Warriorz mentor, said it was not the best way to promote the game.”I understand the reason why BCCI did that… same thing happened in the WBBL – bring everything in, we want the scores high,” she said. “For cricket tragics, they look at the scorecard and think, ‘120 vs 130, why am I watching this? But 160 vs 170, I am definitely watching that’.”The WPL has to keep educating people along the way. If you have to manipulate things to get the outcome you want, I think players understand that. But at some point, you have to even the ledger out. One thing I have seen over time is if you have good pace, good bounce, good carry in a pitch, you can put the boundaries out. The players are strong enough to hit sixes. So you don’t need to manipulate it much. But if it’s a low, slow turning pitch, then it’s hard.”

Overseas batters bring in the powerplay

The first boundary in the WPL was a six, when Hayley Matthews sent Mansi Joshi’s length ball over deep square-leg. That was perhaps an early sign that the overseas players were going to dominate the Indian domestic and not-too-experienced international players.While Smriti Mandhana, Richa Ghosh and S Meghana haven’t sparkled so far, Shafali Verma is the only Indian among the top-eight run-scorers in the competition so far. She is at the top of the six-hitters’ chart, which is again dominated by the overseas players. Shafali, Harmanpreet Kaur, Kiran Navgire and Harleen Deol are the only Indians to have struck half-centuries (six, overall), compared to the 13 from overseas players.”Everyone recruited pretty well at the auction and so, you’ve got some outstanding batting line-ups in all the teams,” Delhi Capitals head coach Jonathan Batty, who has coached Oval Invincibles to titles in the women’s Hundred and Melbourne Stars in the WBBL, said. “You’ve got more overseas players in these teams than you would do in others [leagues]. You’ve got four [in the XI], you’d normally have only three in the others. So the teams are actually probably stronger and batting-heavy in a lot of them.”

Inexperienced bowlers struggle to keep pace

The other aspect is the less-experienced bowlers bowling to these top-flight batters.Case in point, left-arm spinner Preeti Bose, who played five internationals for India in 2016, bowling to the explosive England batter Sophia Dunkley in the powerplay. Gujarat Giants’ Dunkley tore into Bose for a 23-run over on her way to an 18-ball half-century against Royal Challengers Bangalore. Those are the most runs leaked by an Indian bowler in an over in the WPL so far.Among the 11 overs that have gone for 20 or more in the WPL, eight have been by bowlers who have not played, or played very little, international cricket. Australia’s Annabel Sutherland, who played most of her 33 internationals in 2022-23, has twice conceded 22 or more in an over, both times at the death.1:38

Dunkley on her 18-ball fifty: ‘At my best, I just go with the flow’

Save for Warriorz, whose most expensive over has come from Australia’s Tahlia McGrath (19 runs, twice), most of the other teams has had inexperienced bowlers bleeding runs: Bose for RCB, Sutherland for Giants, and USA’s left-arm seamer Tara Norris for Capitals. And none of the domestic Indian players, with the notable exception of Mumbai Indians’ Saika Ishaque, have managed to pick up wickets regularly. Only Shikha Pandey and Deepti Sharma have taken five or more wickets among Indian bowlers, apart from Ishaque’s chart-topping 12.There’s another interesting factor here. The inexperience of some of the captains, which has led to bowlers not always been used in the best possible way. Meg Lanning and Harmanpreet aside, none of the captains have much experience leading international sides. Point to note: Lanning’s Capitals and Harmanpreet’s Mumbai are top of the table currently.Not only are three of the five captains inexperienced at the job, they hardly had any time to get to know their squads and plan strategies. Now that each team has played at least four games, the captains can strategise better to probably not bowl two uncapped bowlers in tandem or not expose them too much in the powerplay and the death overs.The WPL provides a platform for such bowlers to excel and enhance their skills by being exposed to such scenarios. As the competition has gone on, bowlers have also adapted and pitches have started to tire out, which could be why the WPL hasn’t had a 200-plus score after the first six games. Maybe that will be the trend from here on, and bowlers will have more of a say.

They were given the chance to experiment with their team and they took it. Now the question is, will they give their new players time to find their way?

Danyal Rasool28-Mar-2023Almost seven years ago, Pakistan turned up in Manchester on a cool September night to cap off a miserable white-ball tour with a one-off T20I. The prospects for a relatively inexperienced Pakistani side looked bleak; they had just come off a wretched 2016 T20 World Cup campaign, while England’s incipient rise to the top of the white-ball game was picking up steam. The ODI series just prior hadn’t gone to plan for the visitors, brushed aside 4-1, including a humbling defeat that saw England post a then-world record 444 at Trent Bridge.Pakistan made a number of changes from that ill-fated T20 World Cup five months prior. Shahid Afridi was finally done away with, and Sarfaraz Ahmed was handed the captaincy. Mohammad Sami was phased out, and 22-year-old Hasan Ali made his debut. Mohammad Rizwan earned a recall after six months. Another slight, unassuming 21-year-old also made his T20I debut; Babar Azam would go on to hit the winning runs in a nine-wicket romp.Related

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That night sent Pakistan on a journey that allowed this game to assume great importance in hindsight. New captain Sarfaraz led the side to 11-straight T20I series wins. Rizwan went on to become one of the most consistent T20 openers in the world. Hasan took home the player-of-the-series award when Pakistan won the 2017 Champions Trophy nine months later. And Babar, well, you get the point.England on the other hand didn’t really care about the loss. Not as much as they did about the chance to test new players transitioning into a new system. One that resulted in the ODI World Cup win in 2019 and, further down the line, the T20 World Cup win in 2022. That old nine-wicket thumping in Manchester wasn’t a harbinger of anything inauspicious; nine of those who started that game would also start at least one of those World Cup finals.Pakistan lost the three-match series against Afghanistan by a 2-1 margin•Afghanistan cricketWhich brings us to Pakistan’s historic defeat at Afghanistan’s hands over the past week and why it might not be such a bad thing.Pakistan were right in giving their newfound PSL stars a go in international cricket. They have the time now, with the next T20 World Cup almost two years away, to supplement the talent they have with the experience they will need.Saim Ayub lit up the PSL. Mohammad Haris was the catalyst for a Pakistan revival at last year’s T20 World Cup. As opening batters, they are very different to Babar and Rizwan, but given the way T20 cricket is being played right now, it almost feels like they are the conventional choice rather than their more decorated, more conservative counterparts. Only, Ayub and Haris found themselves thrown in on surfaces that were much better suited to the accumulating instincts, as well as superior techniques, of Babar and Rizwan.The value of this series to Pakistan was never about bringing home that T20 trophy, ornate as it was. Shadab Khan, Babar’s deputy for some time now, had the opportunity to juggle his all-round role with the captaincy. He was allowed to make his mistakes while the stakes aren’t suffocatingly high. Things didn’t go perfectly to plan but it was important that Pakistan found out what life beyond Babar will look like. Shadab might never end up being a permanent captain for Pakistan, but there were few better occasions to see what he can do, something that he himself touched upon at the end of the series.”Unfortunately, we didn’t win the series,” Shadab said. “But the way our youngsters showed their talent was very exciting, and I’m confident they’ll end up becoming stars. The conditions were evidently totally different to the PSL, and young players can get nervous when they put on the green shirt for the first time. But what I liked was how quickly they adapted. After two difficult matches, they showed in the third their calibre and quality.”These conditions were new for them, and they should learn from it. Those who succeeded in this series and those who failed we might need to work on game awareness a little bit, about when to play what shot. But they’re young, and when you’re nervous, you make mistakes. But with their talent and attitude, they’ll pick up these things quickly.”Shadab Khan remained positive despite Pakistan’s loss•Afghanistan Cricket BoardImad Wasim and Abdullah Shafique found themselves back on the international stage, and only time will tell if they, or indeed Tayyab Tahir, end up being a part of Pakistan’s long-term plan. But the general discomfort at the idea of Pakistan selecting players who might not necessarily be part of their best squads speaks to a culture where rest, rotation and experimentation have never been allowed to take root.Since the start of 2021, until this series began, Pakistan had fielded 32 players in the T20I format. Only Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Ireland, whose talent pools are infinitely shallower, fielded fewer. For starts per T20I played, only Ireland experiment less than Pakistan. The leaders, India, handed out nearly 50% more starts, with 45 different cricketers donning T20I caps in this period.But rotation can be as illuminating as it is rejuvenating, as Pakistan would have discovered after watching Ihsanullah and Zaman Khan this series. Knowing Pakistan’s penchant for knee-jerk volte-faces, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a full-strength T20I side gear up for the home series against New Zealand next month, even though the visitors will send in a significantly weakened squad. Should that happen, it is entirely likely that New Zealand will be the team that walks away having learned more about themselves, regardless of the series outcome.The roles from that night in Manchester have been completely reversed. It is Afghanistan who should view this series as their springboard to something special. Pakistan – just like England that night – need only move on.

They have won close to two-thirds of their Tests in the most recent cycle, and their fast bowlers and spinners alike have delivered stellar numbers

Kartikeya Date12-Jul-2023India have now lost four knockout matches in ICC tournaments in England in Tests and ODIs, all at two-year intervals, in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023. In among these four setbacks, their T20 international side failed to win any World Cups too. It has been a humiliating period for India’s millions of fans, and like most humiliated fans, they’re asking questions.It is now just past ten years that India last won an ICC tournament, when they beat South Africa, West Indies, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and then England in a rain-affected final in the 2013 ICC Champions Trophy. In this period, they have won the ODI and T20I Asia Cups once each, and the Nidahas Trophy in 2018, but no ICC title. Across three formats, in ten years, India have lost eight ICC knockout matches – three ODIs, three T20Is and two Tests. In these ten years, India have played 207 other ODIs, 151 other T20Is, and 96 other Tests, and won them all at a ratio of close to two wins to each loss – a rate that no previous Indian side has approached. By any reasonable measure, this is not only the best Indian side yet, it is one of the greatest cricket teams in the history of the game.Related

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This article looks at only Test cricket, since that’s where India have apparently most recently failed. However, it is difficult to compare Test teams because unlike, say, a formal league (such as the IPL, or the English Premier League in football), Test cricket does not operate on a regular calendar. The Future Tours Programme provides for home and away tours over a four- or five-year cycle. Leaving Afghanistan and Ireland aside for now, since they are just beginning their time as Test teams, the other ten Test teams are supposed to play each other home and away regularly. One way to evaluate teams, which is used in this article, is to consider each team’s most recent home and away series against the other nine teams.Note: For many seasons in the 21st century, Pakistan fulfilled their “home” fixtures in the Test tours calendar in the UAE (several teams, several seasons), in Sri Lanka (2002-03 vs Australia), and in England (2010 vs Aus). These fixtures are counted as home fixtures for Pakistan in this article.This method is not perfect. No method is. But considering that the key virtue of Test cricket is that it tests its contestants under a wide variety of circumstances, looking at the most recent home and away results is among the better ways of evaluating Test teams. There are some obvious problems here, such as India not having played Pakistan in Tests since 2007-08, and India having played Australia twice in Australia in the last five years. In all such cases, the most recent series result is included. Eighteen series are considered for each team – nine at home and nine away.

The team is youthful and there is promise, but there are significant gaps in skill and strategy, and no serious body of work to look back at

Andrew Fidel Fernando05-Oct-20231:58

Spin-heavy Sri Lanka could sneak into knockouts

If there had been hype building for this Sri Lanka side through their Asia Cup campaign, much of it burned down, like a Vesak lantern that catches fire and ends in a smouldering mess, as a result of that calamitous final – a total of 50 all out tends to have this effect.But there been a hard-fought victory against Pakistan to reach that final, plus two wins over Bangladesh through the course of the campaign, as well as a victory over Afghanistan that was partly the result of the opposition’s miscalculations. There is enough of a body of work to suggest this is no pushover team, even if they had to qualify for this World Cup via a qualifier in Zimbabwe (in a tournament they went unbeaten in, by the way).Expectations at home, though, are muted. Dare fans dream of a semi-final spot? Right now, it seems more sensible to find reasons to keep a lid on the excitement.Related

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Chief among these reasons, perhaps, is that captain Dasun Shanaka has been on perhaps the longest stretch of batting misery as can be remembered for a Sri Lanka cricketer (and this is something of a crowded field). We won’t run through his recent run of scores here, largely because even stating these facts seems malicious. Suffice to say the guy averages 9.78 and has struck at 76 since March this year and, if anything, the scores are getting leaner.If he were not captain, he would have been dropped. In fact, despite his having led Sri Lanka to better ODI results than in the years prior to his captaincy, Sri Lanka’s selectors still seriously considered letting him go in the days following 50 all out. Part of why they have retained him is because no other player is seriously gunning for the job, of which there may be two interpretations: either no one wants to be saddled with the leadership of this team for a World Cup campaign, or there remains trust in Shanaka within the dressing room.Still, a non-performing captain is unlikely to venture the kind of risks that might see a side with such limited resources overperform in the tournament, which, let’s be honest, is what they would be doing if they were in that final four. He is a diminished force in selection conversations. And if, early in the tournament especially, someone needs to be told they are left out of the XI… how does Shanaka even broach that conversation?Beyond this big one, several other concerns.Kusal Perera will likely start the tournament as the opener that partners Pathum Nissanka, but there remain serious doubts as to whether his ailing body can withstand a 50-over tournament that puts teams on a travel-train-play treadmill for almost six weeks. Even when Shanaka contributes, Sri Lanka have been poor at providing the finishing fireworks that good ODI sides frequently produce with the bat. And though several of Sri Lanka’s batting performances in the Asia Cup were founded on Kusal Mendis’ innings, Mendis has not historically been a sustainer of good form.If Dasun Shanaka were not captain, he would have been dropped•AFP/Getty ImagesEven the bowling attack, which has bowled out 13 of its last 15 oppositions, has hit new snags. Wanindu Hasaranga is not in the squad, after aggravating a hamstring injury. Hasaranga had not completely cracked ODI cricket, so perhaps this is not as substantial a bowling loss as it may appear. But his batting brought crucial balance, particularly in the context of Shanaka’s form. Maheesh Theekshana remains under an injury cloud too.If Sri Lanka go with Matheesha Pathirana in their starting XI, as they are likely to do, they will have to find a second new-ball bowler to partner Dilshan Madushanka. For all the pace and death-overs skill that Pathirana brings, he remains unable to swing the new ball, for now. In the Asia Cup, it came down to Shanaka – whose average speeds are in the mid 120kph range – to bowl in the powerplay.Pathirana is, to some extent, a fitting mascot for the team. It is youthful (only five of 15 squad members are over 30, and three of those are 32 or younger), and, to some extent, full of promise. But there are also significant gaps in skill and strategy, and no serious body of work to which they can point.Where once Sri Lanka built conscientiously towards global events, they have tended to lurch scriptlessly towards them in the past seven years. If there is hope, it is hope in youth; that someone will find a new gear. That collectively, there are enough unknowns here, that they will surprise.

The Vijay Hazare Trophy champions were handed a reality check in October but also had plenty of players delivering when it mattered most

Shashank Kishore18-Dec-2023In October, after Haryana went down for a second straight game, against Chhattisgarh, at the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, seamer Harshal Patel remembers walking into the dressing room in Jaipur to deathly silence. Everyone had huddled around, but there were no words exchanged. But when they dispersed, Harshal sensed something had changed.And on Saturday, as he stood on the cusp of a title win in Rajkot, Haryana’s maiden Vijay Hazare triumph, Harshal’s mind briefly went back to that October night. He’s now convinced it was the “slap on the face” they needed.Related

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“With the firepower we had, not qualifying for the SMAT knockouts was quite embarrassing,” Harshal tells ESPNcricinfo. “Over the years, we’ve blown hot and cold with the intensity we bring to a game. But in this tournament, it was top-notch and I’d compare it to the standards of any IPL or international team. That SMAT loss was a slap on our face. We needed to pull our socks up.”The semi-final against Tamil Nadu was a perfect testing ground. They had vowed to not be intimidated or bullied by teams, and this was an opportunity to prove it in a game scenario.”If you objectively look at both sides, 99% people would’ve said TN would be the clear winners,” Harshal reflects. “We went into the game as underdogs and knew we had to play out of our skins. We didn’t have a great powerplay. We struggled, but nobody threw their wicket away. Himanshu [Rana] started slowly, so did Yuvraj [Singh]. As the ball got older, we started throwing punches.”The team’s think tank felt the key to countering Tamil Nadu’s threat lay in taking their spinners out of the equation. Haryana managed to keep them at bay for much of their innings. It wasn’t until the 32nd over, when Haryana were beginning to shift gears, that TN had a wicket through spin. Varun Chakravarthy and R Sai Kishore ended up taking four wickets, but the dismissals had all come towards the back end of the innings. Haryana finished with 293 for 7, an innings fuelled by Himanshu Rana’s 116. It was way above par.Rahul Tewatia walloped a 42-ball 80 against Mizoram from No. 7•Shailesh Bhatnagar”I genuinely felt if we play their spinners well we’re more likely to win because they don’t really have a lot of fast bowlers,” Harshal says. “I felt after the first ten overs, TN felt they could keep the foot on the pedal. Till the 15th or 17th over, they had just two-three players out when they could’ve had four and build pressure.”It allowed us to get boundaries and counterattack and start building those partnerships and take the game deep. Honestly, had they gone with a conventional approach with conventional fields, it would have forced us to take risks and we may have been 20-30 short. That tactic kind of backfired on them and it played into our hands.”There were other challenges as well. In their fourth league fixture, they found themselves tottering at 1 for 3 inside two overs against an unfancied Mizoram. Rana led the way out of trouble with 136, while Rahul Tewatia, their finisher supreme, walloped an unbeaten 80 off 42 balls from No. 7 to eventually help them post 315 for 6. It proved to be 190 too many for Mizoram.Haryana’s campaign was punctuated by clutch performances from different players. They also had to deviate from set plans at times to accommodate young and inexperienced players in the absence of seniors. Mohit Sharma wasn’t available for the entire tournament after picking up a hip injury during SMAT; Jayant Yadav opted out of the first set of games because of family commitments; and Yuzvendra Chahal wasn’t available for the semi-finals and final, although he had left his imprint earlier by picking up 18 wickets at an average of 14.83. Harshal himself picked up 19, the joint-highest, including a three-for in the final.Beyond the seniors, Ankit Kumar, the opener, who was in and out of the team having debuted in 2018, left his mark with 453 runs in ten innings, including two centuries. Rana, who led them at SMAT, came good at other times, most crucially in the semi-final after seasons of having underachieved. Sumit Kumar played the perfect allrounder role, delivering new-ball wickets and end-overs momentum, while Anshul Kamboj bowled the tough overs.File photo: Himanshu Rana chipped in for Haryana with crucial knocks throughout the season•PTI “One of the good things in Haryana is if you’re doing well, you will get a long rope even if you have a bad tournament or season,” Harshal says. “All these are prerequisites to creating a good environment. We’ve emphasised a lot on team culture. It plays a big part. Haryana is usually a hierarchy-based conservative culture.”Even if I’m not cut off, to the juniors, I’m almost unreachable – at least that’s what they thought. Same with Yuzi, Rahul, Jayant. We tried to create an environment where anyone can tell senior players anything. We have an open-door policy. We try and set the right examples and keep reminding them of basics.”When we deviate from it, the chat is to remember the basics, do them right, and if everyone takes care of their roles, we’ll be fine with the skill and talent we have. That has been the major focus. There have been occasions where we’ve gone away from that, trying to do too many things too soon with the young guys, and it has never worked.”It was a conscious decision to work on our roles, our jobs and then luckily the boys picked up on that energy and realised the important thing was to do their roles right, and everything else took care of itself. At the moment, everyone feels comfortable enough to go to anyone and talk about anything. That’s a byproduct of us winning, but I hope when we’re not doing well also, they’re comfortable enough to come up to us and tell us.”Creating a culture is easier said than done. It could have been a tricky ground for Haryana this time around given they had a new captain in Ashok Menaria, whose exit from Rajasthan had been messy. The association had accused him of faking injury. He decided to move.In some set-ups, such a move has the potential to unsettle the group. At Haryana, it only appeared to galvanise them. On his part, Menaria proved to be a calming influence as a leader, and with the bat, he saved his best for the last, making 70 in the final.”The focus was only on performance and what you could do for the team,” says Harshal, who moved to the side from Gujarat in 2010-11. “The same principle has applied to Ashok. None of us felt, ‘Oh he’s come from outside and taken the captaincy’. None of us have that aspiration for a ‘c’ next to our name. No grudges. The good thing is whoever has been given the rein has put the team first.Harshal Patel: “We tried to create an environment where anyone can tell senior players anything”•Pankaj Nangia/BCCI”If that was not the case, things may have been different. It happens in a lot of teams – one faction pulls to the left, other to the right. Luckily everyone who has led this team – me, Mohit before me, Amit Mishra before him… they’ve always put the team first. Expectation has always trickled from top to bottom.”Right from Anirudh [Chaudhry, former HCA top boss] sir to the coaching staff, there has never been the case where someone feels they have been robbed of a position in power at the expense of someone else, which is a great thing, because in a team of 15, even if there’s one bad apple, it could all go down.”Purely on the cricket side of things, Haryana isn’t quite the gold standard in Indian domestic cricket but they have made the most of the resources they have, both in terms of infrastructure and talent.”Even though we don’t have club cricket system like other states, the good thing we have is when they identify a player who they think has potential to do well in the long run, they keep them around in the system,” Harshal explains. “If we have a junior bowler coming in when a senior camp is going on, he’s given an opportunity to come and bowl in the nets.”He’s thrown into the senior team environment during practice games, so they’re constantly exposed to these quality of players. Then they realise what they’re doing well, where they’re falling short. The system is such they are always around camps, practice games, off-season boot camps, under observation.”Today, the junior teams across men’s and women’s categories are consistently challengers for the title. And a number of players from the senior team are beginning to make a mark, either in the IPL or for India. Like Harshal and Chahal, and Mohit, Jayant and Mishra before them. Surely, now the aspiration must be to win titles consistently?”Yes, titles are what is seen but honestly how we define success is by seeing the quality of cricket we play, the kind of principles we follow,” Harshal says. “Most of the guys are below 25, they’re coming up from age-group cricket and wetting their feet in professional cricket. It’s important how we set examples, the way we play whether we win or lose. We step onto the field with the intention to win but these attributes are important for us. If we can do that, we can consistently win titles.”

He used to wake up to 5am alarms every year on December 26. Now he’s about to play his first MCG Test, confident Pakistan can end their run of Australian misery

Danyal Rasool21-Dec-2023Perhaps it was Saud Shakeel who gave birth to the Pakistan Way. It is difficult to think of another cricketer on whom the idea could be so pointedly based after looking at how Shakeel went about his business at home a year ago.”Before the Sri Lanka series started, I worked on batting with a more positive mindset,” Shakeel says. “And then I executed that in Sri Lanka.”Related

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Over what was a miserable winter for Pakistan last season, when they lost three Tests out of five and didn’t win a single one at home, Shakeel emerged as a significant positive in the middle order, with 580 runs in five Tests at 72.50.”When you play cricket, your main job is to perform for the team,” he says. “I don’t think of whether I’m new to the team or not. I just want to score runs that win matches for the team.”It was his strike rate of 41.66, though, that got more attention than his sparkling average. Shakeel’s stodgy grit was emblematic of a side that wasn’t just outplayed by two better sides at home, but, perhaps more unforgivably for Pakistan, was also out-styled. Pakistan were a dull, conservative watch over those six weeks, scrambling to save Test matches rather than looking to win them.Shakeel, at least, was doing it somewhat effectively, famously putting together an epic unpbeaten 125 that took more than eight hours and 341 balls to compile. While Pakistan just about managed to rescue that game against New Zealand – the final pair clinging on for 21 balls – how close they had come to winning it was equally noteworthy; when stumps on day five were called, Pakistan were just 15 runs from victory.Thereafter, the Pakistan Way began to emerge. Sequentially, it appeared to be less a cricketing philosophy than a passive-aggressive dig at Pakistan’s player of the season. Shakeel was told he was missing out on scoring opportunities, failing to put away bad deliveries even when the opportunities to do so with very little risk presented themselves. He understood he had the technical ability to go after the bowling more, and in Sri Lanka, he did just that. His strike rate through that series was an impressive 57.95, as he scored an unbeaten double-hundred and a half-century to help Pakistan win 2-0.It is unsurprising, then, that Shakeel can do a better job explaining the elusive Pakistan Way than just about anyone else who’s tried. “The Pakistan Way doesn’t mean you go out and start attacking like mad and only target boundaries,” he says. “The theory behind the Pakistan Way is to look at the situation and take the most positive route out of it. If the situation demands caution, the philosophy doesn’t prevent you from doing that. But always look for positive intent. If you look at my double-hundred in Sri Lanka, there were phases in that innings where I batted slowly, but I always looked for the positive option.”Shakeel added an extra gear to his batting on the tour of Sri Lanka•AFP/Getty ImagesWe’re at the MCG, a ground Shakeel holds special affinity for. When he was younger, he used to set a 5am alarm on December 26 every year, looking to catch the start of the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne. He has just finished a two-and-a-half hour training session at the nets across from the ground, testing his defensive block against pace and using his feet to spin. At one point, Pakistan spin-bowling coach Saeed Ajmal sent down a few deliveries, with Shakeel managing to look assured, something that eluded most cricketers in Ajmal’s heyday.Perhaps, though, that has to do with the conditions, too. “Whenever you come to Australia, it takes time to get used to conditions,” Shakeel says. “We played a practice match in Canberra but the conditions there weren’t the fast-bouncing pitches we got in Perth, so it took us time to get used to that. We’ve moved on from that now and are looking ahead, and getting more and more used to conditions by the day. I haven’t got big runs in the first Test, but my intent was positive there. And that’s the mentality for us as a batting group, to go out there and play positive and attacking cricket.”Anyone who watched that first Test on a pitch that was – even by West Australian standards – exceptionally spicy will understand why Pakistan felt so strongly about the strip prepared for the four-day game in Canberra. While unseasonal rains and a historically flat surface in the capital meant Pakistan were never going to get the sort of authentic experience that awaited them in Perth, the one word every cricketer reverts to is “practice”.”It’s tricky to make the transition from Asia to Perth,” Shakeel a product of routine and method, says. “When I went to Sri Lanka, I had previously gone there on A tours. Unfortunately, I’ve never been to Australia or New Zealand on an A tour so it was quite new for me to adapt to conditions here. The quicker you adapt and the more practice you have, the easier to find it to perform. There was enough time to practice, if the pitches we practiced on weren’t quick enough. But unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.”I’d never played on a drop-in pitch before, [such as the one] in Perth. It takes one or two days to adjust. But as a professional cricketer, you have to adapt quickly so you’re able to perform. I learned a lot from that match.”And though he managed a modest 52 runs across the two innings, his tendency to get starts in every Test innings remained unabated. He scored 28 and 24, meaning he has not once been dismissed below 20, in a career spanning 15 Test innings. While doing so, he quietly surpassed Everton Weekes’ record of 14 innings, which had stood for 73 years.With that toughest test out of the way, Shakeel feels it might even be a blessing to have gone through that baptism of fire first up. The MCG is unlikely to carry the same spitting venom as Perth did even deep into the fourth day, and the surface most probably won’t break up quite as easily either. That means Australia’s seam attack might not be afforded quite as much assistance as they were at the Optus, with Nathan Lyon potentially finding it trickier to make his presence felt, too.”The practice today was really good. After we played Perth, the pitch here almost feels like Pakistan,” Shakeel says. “The matches in Melbourne, I’ve seen it’s not that hard to bat on. I’m really looking forward to this Test match. The boys are feeling good; it was a very healthy practice session and the players look in good nick. I think you’ll get the chance to see a complete turnaround, especially in this Melbourne Test.After the searing pace and bounce in Perth, Pakistan can expect more straightforward batting conditions in Melbourne•Getty Images”Our country and our fans always have high expectations of you. If you represent Pakistan, it doesn’t matter if you’re inexperienced or not; there are always expectations if you play for Pakistan. I back myself to perform well.”We will try our level best not to repeat mistakes. We did make mistakes in the bowling. The pitch was seaming very well on the first day. Our two inexperienced young bowlers tried hard but it takes time to adjust your lengths. So considering the quality of that pitch, we allowed too many runs to be scored, and found ourselves on the back foot there and then.”But Pakistan clearly felt the practice arrangements agreed to ahead of the tour were a little thin, a point crystallised by the 360-run battering Australia handed out to what looked like an undercooked Pakistan side in Perth. To that end, and with eight days between the first two Tests, the PCB asked for an additional tour game to be wedged in. That will take place at the Junction Oval in Melbourne on December 22 and 23 against a strong Victorian XI side. And while the Junction Oval also has a reputation for being among the flattest tracks in Australia, Pakistan want all the exposure to these conditions they can get.”When you come to Australia, you see they’ve got good experience and a quality bowling attack,” Shakeel says. “When you’re playing in their home conditions it becomes more of a mental challenge than a physical one. We’re aware of our record here but as a team we have to go out there and score runs.”Pakistan’s consecutive defeat tally in Australia now extends to 15 Tests spanning six series stretching back to 1999. As such, most of the players now trying to stem that tide have no reference point to look back upon; eight of the players in the Pakistan squad weren’t even born when Pakistan last won a Test in Australia. Shakeel wasn’t even three months old when it happened.As such, anything that gives Pakistan a straw to clutch at is welcome, and all Pakistan have at the moment is ancient history. The only two venues in this country they have won Tests at are Melbourne and Sydney, the site of the next two Test matches.”There are nerves before you go out to bat, of course,” Shakeel says. “But if I look at the vibe and the feel of the MCG, especially on Boxing Day, it’s special. It’s a very unique feeling and the excitement of this particular Test match is like none other. It’s a huge opportunity for us, still. No Pakistani side has won a series here, so if we perform well and win the series, as a player, think of how much growth that will afford a player throughout a career. So I just look at it as an opportunity.”The boy waking up to 5am alarms continues to dream. And while he’ll never have seen a result pan out his way over those cold winter mornings half a world away, he finds himself in a position to try and give the kids setting those early alarms next week a different experience. No one would want to sleep through that.

India saw certain qualities in Patidar that they liked. He is in the squad for the Dharamsala Test because nothing’s changed on that front

Karthik Krishnaswamy02-Mar-2024If you’ve played cricket at all, you’ve felt it, even if you’ve only played with a tennis ball in the backyard. The transcendental feeling of middling the ball and watching it fly. It’s at the very core of cricket’s appeal, well before runs and wickets come into the picture. You would imagine even Test cricketers feel it.Rajat Patidar probably felt it on the first morning of the Rajkot Test, when he got on his toes to a perfectly good ball from Mark Wood – fifth-stump channel, reaching the batter just above stump height – and sent it racing to the cover boundary with a punch of crisp minimalism, all timing and no movements wasted.If you’ve played cricket at all, you’ve probably also been engulfed in the gloom of batting. It’s the best thing in the world, and it’s the absolute worst thing, a thing of beauty and fragility and outcomes that are always beyond your control, no matter how good you are and how hard you work. Sometimes, you get a filthy long-hop that sticks in the pitch and transforms into something utterly spiteful.Related

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Patidar got a ball like that from Tom Hartley, not long after his moment of transcendence against Wood, and was out for 5.32, 9, 5, 0, 17, 0.Sixty-three runs at an average of 10.5. Patidar has been out twice to long-hops, he’s middled a defensive shot that rolled back onto his stumps, and he’s got out to good balls too. All batters go through times like this in their careers, if they play for long enough. Patidar has experienced it in his debut series.Judgments can fly from every corner when a batter goes through an initiation like this, verdicts passed on technique, temperament, body language. In Patidar’s case, there’s also the fact that he came to Test cricket with a first-class average in the 40s. It may have been held up as a case of selectorial genius if he had made runs; now it’s a stick you can beat him and the selectors with.With the series won and one Test to play, and with KL Rahul and Virat Kohli still unavailable, the selectors have retained Patidar in India’s squad. A section of fans may believe it would have been more prudent to release him for Madhya Pradesh’s Ranji Trophy semi-final against Vidarbha, but India have resisted that idea and kept him in the mix for Dharamsala.The reason is simple. India saw certain qualities in Patidar that they believed would bring him success at Test level when they picked him as Kohli’s replacement on January 24. Five weeks on, they probably still see those qualities in him, the same ones that brought him hundreds in successive red-ball games for India A against England Lions in the lead-up to this series.India would probably also contend that Patidar has had an unusually poor run of luck.The further right you’re located on this graph, the more control you’ve shown as a batter. The higher up you are, the luckier you’ve been. Of all India batters who have faced at least 100 balls in this series, only Shubman Gill, Dhruv Jurel and Axar Patel have achieved better control percentages than Patidar’s 89.02. No one, however, has survived as few false shots per dismissal as Patidar has. He’s only played 18 false shots in this series, but he’s been dismissed six times. Every third misjudgment has cost him his wicket.The graph also tells you something about India’s selections through this series. They have dropped Shreyas Iyer and left KS Bharat out of their first XI – these two happen to have the worst control percentages of India’s batters – and they have retained Patidar in their squad for Dharamsala. India are keeping a close eye on the processes, and not worrying too much about outcomes. They probably judge that Patidar is batting well enough, and expect his rotten run of luck to turn at some point.Patidar may yet find himself out of the XI in Dharamsala. Devdutt Padikkal has made an incredibly strong claim for selection with six hundreds and an unbeaten 93 in his last 14 innings in first-class and List A cricket. It could happen that Padikkal makes a better impression in the nets than Patidar in the lead-up to the Test match.Whether India play Patidar or leave him out, though, they will make their decision for reasons that go deeper than his string of low scores. They know there’s an immensely gifted cricketer hidden beneath those numbers.

The young offspinner, who’s shown his maturity and nous on a high-profile tour, is setting England on a course for a much-needed Test win

Vithushan Ehantharajah24-Feb-20241:17

Manjrekar: Bashir has been the most accurate of all England spinners

There is a story from Shoaib Bashir’s stint in Australian grade cricket over the 2022-23 winter that his Somerset team-mates love bringing up to embarrass him.Bashir was playing in Sydney, for Linfield District Cricket Club, sharing accommodation with team-mates around the same age. One day, he felt generous and offered to cook for the group, which, as you can imagine, was gratefully received by a mix of late teens and young 20-somethings.It did not take long for Bashir to regret the offer. When it came to dinner time, his housemates were instead greeted by an exasperated Bashir, fuming that the pasta he had on the hob for close to half an hour was nowhere near done. The rest shared his bemusement until they quickly spotted the problem. He had not added any water.Related

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We’ve all been there; 19, first time away from home, trying to do grown-up things, failing miserably, mocked by your mates, never to live it down. It’s only been a year, to be fair, so there will be more juice to squeeze from that anecdote.But Bashir need not worry. For starters, he has the team chef out here in India to sort him all the al dente rigatoni and fusilli he could ever want. And regardless of a lack of nous in the kitchen, he was cooking in Ranchi.On just his second appearance in Test cricket, the rookie off-spinner built on Joe Root’s unbeaten 122 to tilt this fourth Test further England’s way. With four wickets – for now, at 84 – Bashir has new career-best figures in first-class cricket. It was a spell that has the tourists a step closer to squaring the series 2-2, with India ending Saturday seven down, still trailing by 134 on first-innings runs.And it really was a spell, by the way. A mammoth 31 overs were delivered unbroken from the Amitabh Choudhary Pavilion End. The most on the bounce since Graeme Swann’s 32 overs at Headingley against New Zealand in May 2013.A maiden before lunch got him a taste, before going right through to tea, then out the other side and deep into the third session. He was eventually taken off with three overs to go, only to re-emerge at the Media Box End to bowl the penultimate set of six. In a career now just eight red-ball appearances old, he has, in one day, bowled more overs than he had in three previous matches.The 53 overs on debut in Visakhapatnam slots in at number two on that growing list, which included 28 overs on day one. He grafted for 4 for 196 in the match, and has already doubled that tally. How about that for exponential brilliance?England learned plenty from that outing about his consistency and durability, which is why Ben Stokes had no qualms pushing him through today’s marathon stint. For the most part, there were no offside fielders between first slip and extra cover to right-handers, with the leg side dotted around in the odd catching and single-saving position.It relied on Bashir maintaining a straight attacking line. He did that like someone who had taken 67 County Championship wickets at an average of 10, not the other way around. A burst of cramp in his 24th over, chasing to stop the ball after James Anderson’s throw ricocheted off the stumps, and the occasional dropping of his right arm in delivery were the only signs of tiredness. The spirit, throughout, was rock solid.Naturally when sticking so diligently to an off-stump channel, the dismissals came. Shubman Gill was trapped in front (just) with drift getting the No.3’s front foot set before enough turn to strike the pads. It ended a stand of 82 between Gill and wunderkind Yashasvi Jaiswal that had England worrying their 353 might not be enough.It was just the second lbw dismissal of Bashir’s professional career, after snaring Nottinghamshire’s Joe Clarke that way last summer. Leg before number three soon arrived, as Rajat Patidar misjudged length, perhaps because of the dip, going back to a ball he should have gone forward to, and subsequently wearing a low-bouncing delivery halfway up his shin.Ravindra Jadeja, having sent Tom Hartley for back-to-back sixes, was soon on his way, pressing forward to a delivery from around the wicket that bounced more than anticipated and found some bat. Ollie Pope took the catch at short leg. At this point, Bashir was in a groove; those three dismissals coming in a 41-ball period for the concession of just five runs.Sarfaraz Khan joining Jaiswal was as good a time as any for India’s counter-attack. A brace of fours from Jaiswal in Bashir’s 18th over – the first slashed wildly beyond first slip – doubled the number of boundaries conceded in his previous 17. Jaiswal carved one more boundary off him before that six-foot-four action found a spot with not enough bounce to force the left-hander to bunt the ball into the ground and back onto his middle stump. It was Jaiswal’s first false shot played against Bashir off the back foot.Bashir’s evolution in the last month alone has been something to savour for a group who, all told, did not know all that much about him. That is, beyond the clip of him doing Alastair Cook a couple of times on his first class debut, that Stokes shared with Rob Key and Brendon McCullum.Ben Stokes and Ben Foakes surround Shoaib Bashir as Rajat Patidar is dismissed•Getty ImagesHe impressed with the Lions, earning a full call-up on attributes rather than statistics. The respect of his peers came on the pre-tour training camp in Abu Dhabi. Beyond the undoubted skill and purchase he could get on the ball with his long fingers, there has been a growing admiration for his toughness and disposition.”The way he bowls is a good indication of his character and personality,” Root said on Saturday evening. “He’s cheeky, he’s funny – a great lad to have around the dressing-room and I really enjoy his company.”Perhaps the best example of all those traits is contained within the visa issues England have encountered on this tour.Bashir, who is of Pakistani origin, was unable to travel out with the squad on the Sunday before the first Test in Hyderabad because of a delay in receiving his paperwork. After staying in the UAE for a few days, he returned to London, where his British passport was issued, to get the final, necessary stamp. He eventually joined his team-mates a week later, receiving a hero’s welcome as he entered the away dressing-room at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium on the morning of day four and stuck around to see them go 1-0 up in the series.Bashir took the rigmarole in his stride – “It was a bit of a hassle, but I’m here now” he beamed after his first day as a Test cricketer – training hard and back mixing with the squad like it was nothing. When Rehan Ahmed first discovered he would not be allowed to re-enter India at Rajkot airport after the mid-series break in Abu Dhabi because he only held a single-entry Visa, Bashir cut the tension with a quick-witted response: “Ah well, enjoy your trip back to London mate!” A few hours later, Rehan rejoined his tour buddy at the team hotel.It speaks of the environment within the team that someone so young can feel so at ease in such a high-profile, high-pressure tour. Likewise for Rehan, who played the first three Tests before having to return home for an urgent family matter, and Hartley, who, with two dismissals on day two, is now the leading wicket-taker of the series with 18, one ahead of Jasprit Bumrah who was rested for this match. Considering Stokes’ go-to spinner Jack Leach had to return home after playing just the opening Test because of a left knee injury that has now required surgery, the trio have stepped up and shown maturity and nous beyond their years.”I think it’s the environment that’s been created by Ben,” Root said. “Shane Warne used to say ‘so what’ if you get hit for six – you’ve got another chance, you’ve got another opportunity and if you take a wicket, the game looks very different. And that’s something Ben’s brought into the way we approach things out there in the field.”It’s great to see those young lads responding so positively to it and putting in big performances in foreign conditions against some of the best players of spin in the world.”Beyond Stokes’ feel for people is his tactical acumen, which was on show again today. Root cites Hartley’s dismissal of Sarfaraz Khan as a perfect example of this.”Randomly after two balls (in the 52nd over) he chucks deep cover out – then he (Sarfaraz) tries to knock it there for one, gets a nick, caught first slip,” Root, who completed the dismissal diving to his left, said. “Great catch as well.”From being released by Surrey at age-group level and hustling back into the 18-county system via national county cricket with Berkshire and club cricket in Guildford, Bashir’s story is as inspiring as it is rare.Of course, there has been some luck. What if Stokes had not been idly scrolling social media on the afternoon of June 11, 2023?”Imagine being 15 or 16 years old, a young spinner, and hearing Bashir’s story?” Root said. “It just shows how close you can actually be, how you should keep dreaming and chasing it, keep giving yourself the best chance to work at your game. Because you never know where you could end up.”Right now, a new chapter is being written in a story of perseverance and belonging. Of a 20-year-old offspinner setting England on a course for a much-needed Test victory to keep this series against India alive.