It’s raining sixes in Pallekele as I write this. Ross Taylor appears to have gone berserk, but surely it is Shoaib Akhtar and Abdul Razzak who should be mad as hell. Taylor’s been smiting them over mid-wicket as if he was swatting pesky flies, not international pace bowlers, one of whom regularly clocks around 150 kmph. There goes another one over square leg…
The World Cup’s not even half-way through, but it’s been a six-binge right from the time Viru Sehwag hit five in his frenetic 175 against Bangladesh, the tournament’s opening match. Since then, Tendulkar’s hit five in an innings too (against England) only to be upstaged by Kevin O’Brien’s six in Ireland’s sensational win over England, and now Taylor’s got seven against Pakistan.
In between, AB de Villiers had four in a superb century against the West Indies and Kieron Pollard and Yusuf Pathan have shown why they are among the most feared strikers in the game with three apiece in half-centuries, even if their big hits have come against some of the weaker teams and they’ve not made centuries.
I’m not listing the other batsmen who have joined the six-hit party only because there are so many. You get the drift. With more than 110 sixes already (at my last count), this tournament is headed for a record that might have greater significance than just a mention in the statistics column. It reveals the change in the ethos of batsmanship in the last decade, and even more since the advent of T20.
Improved willows, better fitness and smaller grounds have been attributed as the major reasons why batsmen are scoring more quickly and hitting more sixes. That is obviously true, but not the whole truth. Batsmen today are also taking more risks, improvising greater, hitting further and scoring faster.
Let me address this from a different perspective. The 1987 World Cup, also played in the sub-continent, saw only one match where a team scored in excess of 300: in the 2011 edition, there have been more than half-a-dozen already. Indeed, 300 is no longer considered a safe total, as England will readily testify.
In that sense, batsmanship has undergone a catharsis as it were. Perhaps impelled by the demand of an ever-hungry spectatorship (and rewards, like contracts in the cash-rich IPL) or perhaps as a natural process of evolution, it has gone towards optimizing every opportunity to score runs.
Old-timers like me will still marvel at the last ball six hit by Viv Richards off Mike Hendrick in the 1979 World Cup final. A low swinging full toss on the off-stump hoicked away over square-leg took our breath away and we attributed it to the genius of Richards. Now this seems almost a commonplace. Ross Taylor, for instance, went down on one knee and hit Razzak 85 metres deep into the mid-wicket fence as if he was a slow bowler.
New Age batsmen have left time-held virtues of technical correctness as the cornerstone of batsmanship in a sort-of shambles – and with no great damage to Test cricket. The champion Australian team of the 1990s and the first decade of this millennium set the tempo for this uninhibited approach by aiming to score more than 350 runs in a day in a Test match.
Batsmen like Gilchrist, Hayden et al set the pace and an example for others. Since then, guys like the bionic Viru Sehwag have taken attacking batsmanship to a different level altogether. His strike rate hovers around an incredible 80 runs per 100 balls in Test matches itself. With Sehwag as the new role model every young batsman wants to emulate, we perchance could be in for a new Golden Age in cricket.