Wired868 Wired868 for smart sport news and opinion
At a critical moment in the final Super Eights game, one of the team coaches left the pavilion and came to the boundary’s edge. Bangladesh looked well on course to get the 115 runs they needed to stop Afghanistan in their semifinal-bound tracks.
One point is enough to make the Afghans’ day and coach Jonathan Trott, media reports say, directed his players to slow things down. Gulbadin Naib, one version of the story runs, may have faked a cramp to reduce the time before the threatening rains intervened. Which they eventually did.
Valentino Singh approves of neither the coach’s action nor the player’s reaction. In sport, he believes, there is no more room for gamesmanship than there is for violence in politics. But how do you prevent it?
So, he told me, direct coaching from the boundary’s edge is going inevitably to become a part of the ever-changing T20I reality.
“Is entertainment driving it, not ethics,” he observed. “And is the betting houses like West Indies sponsor Dafabet who behind it.”
“How you feel about Daren Sammy coming down to the boundary,” he had earlier asked me, “to offer coaching advice to Rovman Powell?”
Photo: Nicholas Bhajan/ Wired868
“That’s for the SSCL, schoolboy cricket. Or Savannah cricket. Harvard versus Crompton. Not for the international game.”
“You’re so wrong!” he shot me down and shut me up. “Dwayne Bravo was very active on the boundary too, giving the bowlers and fieldsmen advice.
“But I don’t think is a West Indian thing. In a year or two, not longer, I betting you, it will have an area near the boundary, maybe a rectangular box, designated for coaches. Just like in football.”
Frankly, I had given it no thought. Tino clearly had. In a couple of hours of talk about the game, he led me to see T20 cricket with very different eyes. And long after the end of our conversation, after India deservedly bagged their second title, I looked back at T20WC24 through a different lens.
Photo: ICC/ Getty
What triggered the reflection was a Rahul Dravid pre-semifinal interview I only watched after the final.
“Cricket is a very conditions-specific sport,” said the India coach. “It’s one of the only sports left where the surface makes such an impact on the actual skills level, the performance levels.
“We’ve moved the needle forward, in terms of our batting.”
Photo: ICC/ Getty
Dravid’s essential point is that India, in the vanguard of the evolution, is ensuring that there is constant cross-fertilization among formats.
There is room in Test cricket for the unorthodox just as there is for the classical in the shortest format. The contrasting journeys of Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli in their careers as well as in the tournament provide ample testimony.
Rohit, who began as an exclusively white ball player, was the top scorer in the 2024 tournament. Kohli, the top scorer in the tournament over the years, made more in his final innings than in the eight innings that preceded it.
(via Cricketnmore)
Both have now called it a day. And a slew of would-be IPL stars are waiting in the wings to take their places. They do not all have the range of a Suryakumar Yadav, an Ishan Kishan or a Yashasvi Jaiswal. But they have truly impressive reverse-this and reverse-that repertoires.
Above all, Dravid notes, they have cricketing brains!
And the game is richer for it—in, as Tino points out, more senses than one!
I shall return to Dravid and India. But it would be remiss of me as a West Indian commentator not to underline the West Indian contribution to the game’s evolution. Or to fail to posit that Carlos Brathwaite’s unforgettable 2016 four-sixes assault on Ben Stokes arguably helped to move the needle.
It may even have indirectly triggered the initiative the shell-shocked Eoin Morgan and Andrew Strauss subsequently started with England.
Have the Caribbean Cavaliers not been in the vanguard at every stage of the game’s evolution?
WI were the first to completely dominate the multi-team Test scene, playing unbeaten in a series for over two decades. WI were the first to rack up two World Cup and two T20 World Cup wins. In the shortest format, Bravo, Chris Gayle, Sunil Narine, Kieron Pollard and Andre Russell emerged as the early top-of-the-ticket items.
Regrettably, however, WI have not yet learned the lesson that the time to be in front is at the end.
I shared those thoughts with Tino. And I also told him what I had discovered in On batting, Chapter 15 of Garry Sobers’ eponymous 2002 autobiography. He took it all in stride.
Cricket’s best-ever allrounder finished with 8,032 runs at an average of 57.78. But both at the crease and in his book, he poured scorn on all the orthodoxy. Not for him did ‘batting properly’ mean insistence on putting bat and pad as close as possible to the ball, high front elbows and playing in the vee.
“The ability to improvise is a talent that can lift a batsman out of the ordinary,” Sobers writes inter alia, “and makes him something special. (…) Sir Vivian Richards (…) was blessed with such a quick eye that he could pick up the ball extremely early. This allowed him to hit across the line.”
Tino took it all in stride, offered an immediate response.
Photo: CricToday
“Viv face [Dennis] Lillee and [Jeff] Thomson, Test cricket’s deadliest duo, in their prime. Without a helmet. He make more Test runs than Sir Garry. You know how? By paying no attention to the foolish, restrictive rules in all the coaching manuals that just cramp your style.
“I sure you know the title of his 1991 autobiography. It is Hitting across the line!”
If, in the Lloyd Best definition, limbo is finding space where there is none, the cultural artform had its best Read more
Every now and again, I indulge in a binge fest of Viv Richards. It’s therapeutic. Maybe it was triggered by Read more
Brian Lara says Nicholas Pooran should be playing Test cricket for the West Indies. Not everyone agrees. But no one Read more
“[…] The Guyana Cricket Board in conjunction with the Government of Guyana has had the foresight to acquire the services Read more
“[…] Last month, the 27-year-old Nicholas Pooran made what turned out to be a smart decision. He made himself unavailable Read more
History, we West Indians are acutely aware, is written for the most part by the victors. So, although the West Read more
Earl Best taught cricket, French, football and Spanish at QRC for many years and has written consistently for the Tapia and the Trinidad and Tobago Review since the 1970’s.
He is also a former sports editor at the Trinidad Guardian and the Trinidad Express and is now a senior lecturer in Journalism at COSTAATT.
