Batsmen who do not know how to bat
In a piece in the Guardian, excerpted from his blog, Jon Hotten explains how the constant switching between the different formats of the game has shown up several players
06-Sep-2013
The constant switching between Test cricket, Twenty20s and 50-over matches has shown up several batsmen, who have been unable to adapt their game to the needs and conditions of each format, says Jon Hotten. This was most notable during the recently concluded Ashes, where the likes of Phil Hughes, Joe Root and Jonathan Trott were sometimes out of their depth. In a piece in the Guardian, excerpted from his blog, Hotten looks at the big picture.
Any batsman who has made it as far as the international game clearly knows how to bat. Any player playing at the top level evidently knows how to play. Instead, it's to do with circumstance, the demands of format, the ebb and flow of the red-ball game. The longer the batsman is asked to bat, the more nuanced his batting must become. The task in 50-over cricket is almost rote now, its formula exhausted by repetition, while the blunt challenge of T20 remains brutally simple to compute. By contrast the challenge of the five-day game shifts under the batsman's feet even as he is at the crease. Not knowing how to bat, in context, is not knowing how to tune yourself into the fluid set of circumstances that the game produces. Here, self-knowledge is everything.