Alvin Corneal

Yes, my friends, the lessons are clear. The pic­tures which are demon­strat­ed by a num­ber of the more ad­vanced crick­et teams in the In­ter­na­tion­al Crick­et Coun­cil (ICC) World Cup so far, have ex­posed the me­thod­i­cal ap­proach. Tech­ni­cal­ly and tac­ti­cal­ly, for those who wish to learn. Hav­ing watched care­ful­ly the per­for­mances of Eng­land, Aus­tralia, In­dia, Sri Lan­ka, South Africa and to a less­er ex­tent Pak­istan, it is easy to recog­nise the salient points which were clear­ly ad­dressed for the 50-over game.

To my mind, the prin­ci­ples on which this type of game should work have not been clear­ly un­der­stood by our young play­ers and while there is an abun­dance of tal­ent in al­most every area of the game, strat­e­gy and plan­ning for bats­men, bowlers and even field­ers, must now be care­ful­ly stud­ied. We have now viewed the sen­si­ble ap­proach of play­ers like An­drew Strauss, Kevin Pietersen, Ku­mar San­gakar­ra, AB De Vil­liers, Hashim Am­la, and of course Sachin Ten­dulkar. These guys have made full use of the pat­tern which pro­duces runs un­der any type of bowl­ing qual­i­ty.

Tak­ing the pace off de­fen­sive shots and ex­tract­ing sin­gles, turn­ing sin­gles in­to dou­bles from a shot to deep field, of­ten brought an ex­tra one be­cause of the speed of the bat­ters tak­ing their first run.

It gave their teams a guar­an­tee of a for­mi­da­ble to­tal, and when the oc­ca­sion­al loose de­liv­ery came by, they ex­er­cised their nat­ur­al abil­i­ty to dis­patch them to the bound­ary. It was in­ter­est­ing to see bats­men im­i­tat­ing the Char­lie Davis and Lawrence Rowe style of count­ing the num­ber of field­ers on each side of the wick­et, a prin­ci­ple which al­lowed them the ease of find­ing the gaps on the field for bound­ary shots.

There is on­ly one Viren­der Se­hwag, one Chris Gayle, and pos­si­bly a few Bri­an Mc Mil­lans, but their con­sis­ten­cy rate for suc­cess does not com­pare with the con­ven­tion­al stroke­play of Am­la, De Vil­liers, Strauss and Ten­dulkar. These lads do not have to hit a bunch of six­es in or­der to make ex­cel­lent scores and stay ahead in the runs per ball fac­tor. The busi­ness of bowl­ing was even more grat­i­fy­ing as bowlers were no longer firm­ly based up­on bowl­ing dot balls, but bowl­ing at the stumps, forc­ing bats­men in­to run­ning risks un­der pres­sure be­came an ex­cit­ing wick­et tak­ing fac­tor.

It is a joy to watch Dale Steyn, La­sith Ma­lin­ga. Ke­mar Roach, Brett Lee, and even a few bowlers from the Nether­lands and Ire­land. Who said that spin­ners can­not sur­vive on the slow wick­ets on the sub­con­ti­nent? Did Har­ba­jhan Singh, Daniel Vet­tori, Greame Swann, Sulie­man Benn, and mas­ter spin­ner Mut­ti­ah Mu­ralitha­ran not de­mand re­spect from the great bats­men? No one seemed in a hur­ry to hide the de­liv­er­ies. They at­tacked the bats­men care­ful­ly with­in the rules of the game and re­strict­ed the flow of strokes with well set fields.

As to the field­ers, the bril­liance of Ire­land and Hol­land stood out when it came to sav­ing runs in the field. Some teams had too many "one run bound­ary" field­ers, even when they were in­side of the 30 me­tre mark. The re­lay sys­tem of chas­ing balls down to the bound­ary, just to save a sin­gle if they could, was a fea­ture of the game which is now bring­ing good qual­i­ty crick­et in all de­part­ments. The com­pe­tence of the cap­tains var­ied from bril­liant to ridicu­lous, but one could take pat­tern from Strauss, You­nis Khan, Vet­tori to name a few.

If one is to point out ar­eas which could af­fect cer­tain teams, my first com­ment will be In­dia's weak­ness in the field, Pak­istan's fail­ure to get their bats­men to take their fifties to hun­dreds which leaves them short on scores for which they seem ca­pa­ble, Eng­land's fail­ure to get their seam bowlers to utilise the fun­da­men­tal ap­proach of keep­ing line and length, which would ac­com­mo­date their field plac­ing, and South Africa's de­pen­den­cy up­on Steyn in or­der to en­sure pen­e­tra­tion. As to the West In­dies, de­spite their two vic­to­ries, one would have ob­served the num­ber of in­juries be­fore and dur­ing the se­ries, es­pe­cial­ly those mus­cles which should have been tar­get­ed for much at­ten­tion in the train­ing ground.

Roach must con­tin­ue to bowl well and keep off the in­jury ta­ble, while Benn must have won­der­ful match­es against In­dia and Eng­land. In­con­sis­ten­cy is our biggest prob­lem, hence the rea­son why we al­ways have ap­pre­hen­sions about op­po­nents who tend to test the qual­i­ty of our lead­er­ship us­ing the in­tri­ca­cies of the game, such as run­ning be­tween wick­ets, sav­ing runs when field­ing, turn­ing dot balls in­to sin­gles reg­u­lar­ly and bats­men util­is­ing the shots which they are most com­fort­able when ex­e­cut­ing.

Spec­u­lat­ing is on­ly an op­tion when chas­ing huge to­tals and not many overs to get them.

It is my hope that our two coach­es will make dai­ly as­sess­ments on what they are see­ing and have strong game plans to de­feat our op­po­nents. Vic­to­ry can be­long to the West In­dies, on­ly if we ap­ply good de­ci­sion mak­ing and as­tute dis­ci­pline in both bat­ting and bowl­ing.