Mitchell Santner ran in to bowl in his typically graceful manner. He
bowled slightly short of a good length, and the ball skidded off the pitch.
Hamilton Masakadza diffused it comfortably, playing it out into the off side.
-
In his reply to David Hume’s argument about miracles, CS
Lewis added in a chapter titled “A Chapter Not Strictly Necessary.” The idea
was that it was a chapter that wasn’t really needed for his argument, but it
gave him pleasure to write it, and so he added it into his book. His chapter
was about the aesthetic beauty of nature.
Mitchell Santner is a very good bower. The fact that he
makes what he does look good is a bonus, it’s not really necessary. If he took
ugly wickets, it would look the same in the scorebook.
Almost every cricket club has the older gentleman who has
well-worn whites and rolls his arm over with a bit of finger-spin. He’s
normally in his early 40’s, is slightly overweight and has to be hidden in the
field. He normally plays the game hard, putting pressure on the umpires, and is
the one most likely to threaten the batsman at the non-strikers end with a
Mankad. Mitchell Santner is the complete opposite to this player.
He’s lithe and athletic. He is naïve enough that when he
walked out to bat on his test debut, he told the Australian fielders that he
was really nervous. He looks more like a greyhound than a St Bernard.
He really doesn’t have any business bowling left-arm spin.
He looks more like a batsman who fields at slip. But when he approaches the
crease he is pure poetry. His run up is more like a high jumper approaching the
bar than the typical club spinner’s shuffle to the wicket. His action is fluid:
he almost floats through the crease.
-
The second delivery in the over was full on middle stump. It
drew Masakadza forward and he pushed it tentatively into the off side.
Masakadza is not generally a tentative batsman, he favours bold movements, but
this ball was a little fuller than he was anticipating and he picked it up a
little later than he would have liked.
-
A few years ago, I contributed a few jingles to Testmatchsofa
and Guerilla Cricket. Most of them were not very good. Some were appallingly bad.
The two that I was most proud of were one about Kane Williamson’s bowling and
one that never ended up getting played, as Daniel Vettori had retired before it
was able to be used.
The Vettori jingle (to the tune of “Thine Be the Glory”)
included the line “when the batsman face him/they expect some spin/but when it
goes straight on/it bamboozles them.” That was Vettori’s skill in his latter
years, he made the batsmen think that the ball was spinning when it generally
didn’t.
There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story told that a young Vettori
spun a ball hugely, and completely beat a batsman. Adam Parore, who was the
keeper at the time, walked down the wicket to him and said “that was a great TV
ball, now turn it less and get him out.” If that was true, then that piece of
advice really summed up Vettori’s career.
The best example of Vettori doing that was a pair of
deliveries that he bowled to Mahela Jayewardene in the Champions Trophy 2009.
The first ball pitched on off stump and turned sharply. Jayawardene adjusted
for the turn, and played it to the fielder on the off side.
The next ball looked identical. It had the same trajectory,
it looked the same out of the hand, it flew through the air the same. It just
didn’t turn. Jayawardene was not expecting it to not turn. He had seen enough in
the previous delivery that he felt he knew what this one was going to do. He
swng through the line of where he expected the ball to end up, only to lose his
off stump.
That was typical Vettori. He took a wicket with a ball that
didn’t turn. But he actually took a wicket with a ball that looked like one
thing, but was actually something else. The subtlety of Vettori was the reason
why he got a lot of very good players out, without seeming to have any weapons.
-
Santner’s third ball of the over was thrown up a little
more. It almost looked like a full toss, until it dropped onto a yorker length.
Masakadza dug it out as though it was a Waqar Younis thunderbolt.
-
I really enjoy coaching young bowlers. I’ve only been
coaching for a short while, but it can be really rewarding watching players’
skills improve. In my first season as a coach, I had the pleasure of coaching three
young spin bowlers who were really quite capable.
One of them went on to play for New Zealand under-19, and is
possibly going to have a big future in the game. I was working with him one day
on the art of using flight. The aim was to get the batsman playing shots off
the wrong foot. To get him to play forward to one that was too short, or to get
him to play back to one that was too full. The way that I got him to do it was
to practice bowling two basic trajectories. One that would be just on the full
side of a good length if he bowled it quite quickly, and one that would be just
short of a good length if he bowled it slowly. Once he had the trajectory
sorted, the next aim was to try varying his pace without changing the initial
trajectory. That way the batsman was expecting the ball to be full, but it was
actually short, and vice-versa.
This young bowler took about 30 minutes before he really got
the idea, but he soon had all the batsmen in knots. They could not figure out
where the ball was going to land, and so had no idea what to do with their feet.
This was testament in part to a good plan, but mostly to the
extreme level of skill of this young bowler. To beat a batsman in the air is a much
harder skill than it looks.
-
Santner’s fourth ball of the over had the same trajectory as
the third ball. It curved a bit, and looked like it was going to end up on a
yorker length. But this ball was a little bit slower, and had a little bit more
overspin. As a result it dipped earlier, and Masakadza, in trying to dig out
the yorker, spooned up a return catch to Santner.
“Hamilton Masakadza, what have you done? You’ve thrown your
wicket away.”
No comments:
Post a Comment