Squash balls, simulators, straps and more: Unorthodox methods that helped players innovate

A pain in the neck
The neck strap was not Shakib's first attempt at fixing his head position; in fact, it might be an extension of a method he has tried in training before. At the T20 World Cup earlier this year, he was seen warming up with a neck brace on. Shakib's head-positioning issues have stemmed from an eye condition called Central Serous Chorioretinopathy (CSC), where a fluid accumulates beneath the retina and affects the person's vision. As a result, he has had to adjust his head positioning to ensure he could track the ball clearly, while avoiding excessive head tilt that could interfere with his technique.

Gilchrist squashes Sri Lanka
Adam Gilchrist had been working on improving his grip and decided - on the day of the 2007 ODI World Cup final - that he would employ a little hack deviced back home in the big game against Sri Lanka. That hack was lodging a squash ball inside the batting glove of his bottom hand. The result was perhaps the best batting performance in a World Cup final - 149 off 104.

The objective was to avoid gripping the bat too tightly with the last two or three fingers of his bottom hand. To help with this, his batting coach, Bob Meuleman, had suggested placing a squash ball in his glove, which created resistance against those outer fingers. The adjustment forced Gilchrist to rely more on his thumb and forefinger, allowing his top hand to dominate his shots.

Malinga's feet simulator
Lasith Malinga's approach to bowling in limited-overs cricket was simple. As a boy, he watched Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis bowl yorkers and thought it was a "great ball to bowl". Then he met bowling coach Champaka Ramanayake early in his leather-ball-cricket days, who told him to simply focus on bowling straight and fast.

With those clear-minded philosophies in place, Malinga's mastery of the yorker began with another simple but extremely effective drill in the nets. The pair placed two boots at the batting crease, aligned as if a batter was taking guard. Even in the absence of actual batters at the nets, Malinga now had a way of slinging the ball into their feet.

George Bailey turns his back on everyone
In December 2016, when George Bailey first adopted his unconventional stance with his back turned towards the bowler, he admitted to Cricket Australia, "I'll be the first to say it's crazy. That's why I don't like watching it." What drove him to such an extreme adjustment?

Bailey realised that his traditional stance was causing him to get squared up, especially in swinging conditions, where his hands would drift away from his body in compensation. As a "ruthless" fix, he adopted a closed-off stance, positioning his left leg ahead of his right, with both feet pointing towards deep third.

Pietersen goes no-pads
Kevin Pietersen's Test dismissals break-up shows that he was dismissed by left-arm spinners on 29 occasions out of 181 innings. In hindsight, those aren't alarming numbers by any stretch - he did still average 52.86 against that type of bowling. But his perceived problems against left-arm spin became a sticky narrative wherever he went, exacerbated by occasional dismissals against part-timers and rookies.

A remedy emerged in a letter written to him by Rahul Dravid - to face Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar in the nets without his pads on. The idea was that his big front-foot push down the wicket would be slightly delayed, allowing him to not push hard at a turning ball, which was inevitable once the foot was planted early.

Ranjitsinhji flicks open a new scoring area
Ranjitsinhji was the first well-known Indian cricketer. He has been described as "the first Indian of any kind to become universally known and popular" by John Lord in the book The Maharajahs, and is still a part of Indian cricket through the Ranji Trophy, which is named after him. He is also widely believed to have invented the leg glance.

According to legend, one of the Surrey professionals who tutored cricketers at Cambridge - where Ranjitsinhji was an undergraduate - fixed and "nailed" his back boot to the crease to stop him from retreating from the ball. Whether true or not, his newfound ability to deflect deliveries to the leg side revolutionised batting, unlocking previously untapped scoring areas on the field. This 1897 footage of him gives us a glimpse of a rather static back foot.