Butt cashes in
On The Ball for the 3rd ODI
On The Ball with Amit Varma and Arun Gopalakrishnan
10-Apr-2005
India seemed to have figured out Salman Butt in the first Test at Mohali. The man plays beautifully when he is given width on the off side, the wisdom went, so bowl straight to him and dry up the runs. It worked so well that he was dropped for the rest of that series. But what happened here?
Butt made 101 off 116 balls, and of those, 74 came in the off side alone. In fact, 41 came in the covers. Time and again, he got the space and the length to drive; and he cashed in, getting 30 of his runs from cover-drives.
Obviously, he did not pick up balls on off-and-middle and put them away to cover. The bowlers allowed him to play in the manner that he enjoys the most. Of the 73 balls that the faster bowlers bowled to him, 62 pitched on off stump or just outside. More pertinently, 51 pitched outside. That's 70% of the balls in just the wrong area. Bad implementation.
Amit Varma is contributing editor of Cricinfo. He writes the independent blogs, India Uncut and The Middle Stage.
These statistics were prepared by Arun Gopalakrishnan, the operations manager in Cricinfo's Chennai office.