Imagine a football team made up of only strikers. No midfielders, no defenders, no goalkeeper. Would it still be the beautiful game?
In football, goals facilitate results, but they are not the only factor that defines the game or its outcome. Similarly, in cricket, of the T20 kind precisely, fours and sixes, or skyrocketing strike rates, do not necessarily illustrate the game in its totality. There are other aspects to it, the nuances of which have the potential of making it a more engrossing contest. A contest between the bat and the ball, the very constitution on which the game of cricket was built and still stands.
But try telling that to an IPL player or an aficionado. You will be laughed at, rebuked maybe, or, given the ultra-aggressive avatar the game currently sports, you can also be chased away with a raised bat.
Exaggeration, it may sound, but do you really think the modern-day cricket fan — at least most of them — would entertain such boring suggestions? The thrill of consuming the masala-batting of the IPL — from the stands, or from the comfort of home, or even on the go, thanks to smartphones — is no less addictive, to put it mildly, than a packet of potato chips.
There’s no denying that Vaibhav Sooryavanshi is a great sight when he is swinging his bat as if he were born just to do that. When he hits Jasprit Bumrah out of the playing arena, drawing orgasmic ‘ah’s, ooh’s & wows’ from those watching, it’s paisa-wasool stuff, many would say. But when the batters dominate almost every day, with men of Sooryavanshi’s ilk — Abhishek Sharma, Ishan Kishan, Priyansh Arya, Prabhsimran Singh and others — trying to hammer into you the realisation that ‘this is what modern cricket is all about’, it seems a bit monotonous. It sits uncomfortably on the game like an oversized shirt.
There are exceptions though, like Monday’s Delhi Capitals vs Royal Challengers Bengaluru game, where the bowlers bossed around. But mostly, it’s the other way round.
Where does that leave the bowlers? No, we are not saying that the batters should be merciful towards the bowlers. The batters are not responsible for the bowlers’ plight. Batting has evolved; the batters nowadays are like mutants from the Marvel universe, showing off their superhuman skills. The bowlers? They still have miles to cover before they can challenge the batters’ supremacy in the IPL, or in T20s overall, for that matter.
But it’s not entirely the bowlers’ fault that they are finding life increasingly tough on the field. The game, its rules, regulations and facilities are stacked heavily in favour of the batters. In T20s, there’s a Powerplay for batters to exploit, the boundaries have become shorter, the pitches are mostly flat tracks, there’s a free-hit lolly for the batter when a bowler commits a no-ball, there are over-rate penalties in place to refuse the bowler any extra time. There’s also the Impact Player rule in the IPL, which perhaps provides more cushion to batting line-ups than bowling attacks.
Then, a bowler has a maximum of just 24 balls to bowl in a T20, whereas there’s no such restriction for a batter. If several rules can be tweaked and twisted in T20s, why not give the bowlers too a free hand? Or, at least increase their quota of overs, say two bowlers can bowl a maximum of six overs each?
The decision-makers have to make a move, because, no matter how cliched it sounds, a basic balance between the bat and ball is what cricket should strive for. Also, isn’t it a better marketing gimmick if you can arrange for a better match-up between a star batter and a star bowler?
The bowler, on his part, should deconstruct his craft further to come up with newer tricks. Bouncer, slower ball, yorker, wide yorker, slower bouncer — if all these
aren’t enough, they should improvise and come up with more variations. A decent or successful T20 bowler should be able to tempt the batter to take more risks. They have to be disciplined; if it’s a case of who blinks first, then so be it.
Years back, in 2012, when he was the bowling mentor of the Kolkata Knight Riders, Wasim Akram, in an interview to iplt20.com, had said something interesting about bowling in T20s. “I’d have loved to see Joel Garner and Malcolm Marshall (bowl in T20s). For me, Marshall was the best bowler ever in the history of the game... Marshall got wickets everywhere in the world. He was a very clever bowler and what separated him from the others was that he picked the weakness of the batsman in a split second. These qualities would’ve made him interesting to watch in this format,” the pace great had said.
That’s the key. Find the weakness of batters, and find it quickly.
Sooryavanshi, the other day, smashed a 36-ball hundred, the third-fastest in the IPL. Last year, he had a 35-ball ton. Kids aspiring to be a cricketer would surely
want to be a Sooryavanshi someday. But a few years down the line, will any kid want to become a bowler?