Chris Jordan and the art of delivering under pressure

Sports Illustrated magazine has Tiger Woods on its cover this week, along with the question, "What happened?" There are lots of good anecdotes, but one, from the golfer John Cook about Woods' ferocious training - at the time pretty much unheard of in professional golf - stood out.

Tiger lived in Isleworth then, a resort complex near Orlando that was home to lots of tour pros, including Cook. "I would be on the back of the range, beating balls," he said, "and Tiger would come up after an eight-mile run: no shirt, hat backward, sunglasses, body soaked with sweat. He would grab my 2-iron and start hitting these missiles. How you going to beat that? You can't beat that."

Woods' domination of golf was about to become total. His greatest asset was not his body or his swing but his mind. He could not only hit his best shots on the range with someone else's clubs when he was knackered after an eight-mile run in the Florida heat, he could do it out on the course under the severest pressure.

It reminded me of the time a friend of mine played a round at Wentworth with a European tour pro. The course was almost empty and they played at a fast pace, the pro walking up to every shot and barely looking at it before lasering his ball at pin after pin. If they'd been scoring, my pal said, he would have shot somewhere in the low 60s. For a few years after that I saw his name occasionally, in the middle of the pack at second-rung tour events. He was a brilliant golfer, better than all but a few hundred people in Europe. The problem was, he couldn't do it when he really needed to.

Woods' most famous single shot is probably his chip-in on the 16th in the final round of the 2005 Masters, a shot that essentially won him the green jacket. He had seen a pitch mark on a spot 25 feet above the hole. He knew he needed to land the ball there so that it would begin its right-angled turn down the sloping green, and he hit it.

It may seem like a big leap from Tiger Woods to Chris Jordan, but imagine for a moment how difficult it is to bowl an accurate yorker at high pace. You are aiming at a spot about the size of a golf-ball's pitch mark, not ten feet in front of you but 20 yards away. Perhaps it's at the base of leg stump, or more likely, a few inches inside the white line that the umpire uses to delineate a wide delivery, so you need to consider your position on the crease at release. You know that if you get it wrong and land the ball perhaps eight inches shorter than you intend, or a fraction too full, the batsman facing you can hit it out of the ground, a skill he has practised as often as you have practised your own. And even if he blows it and gets an edge, there's a good chance it will go past the keeper to the boundary.

It's a low-percentage game, but this is the primary skill that Jordan is in the England team to deliver. He and Ben Stokes sealed the semi-final win over New Zealand as surely as Jason Roy and Jos Buttler did with the bat when they shut the New Zealand innings down in its final four overs, in which they scored just 20 for the loss of five wickets.

Jordan was considered somewhat fortunate to have made the World T20 squad - as was Roy - after some inconsistent performances in South Africa. Social media was particularly damning, and it's there that the public perception of players is increasingly shaped. But then Jordan's skill, by its nature, is inconsistent. Few are the death bowlers that always deliver, and in Delhi, when the chips were down, England reaped the reward for their faith in him.

The practice under Ottis Gibson has been intense and endless; Jordan has probably bowled thousands of yorkers under the low bar that they place on the crease line, and thousands more at the three coloured cones that Gibson uses to demand different lines.

England had planned long and hard for the moment in Delhi. After the 3-0 win over Pakistan last November, Eoin Morgan was asked about his decision to throw the ball to Jordan for the Super Over that clinched their climactic victory: "Handing Chris the ball really epitomised the squad and the development it has gone through," he said. "We've been watching him in the nets and he's our best yorker bowler, and once we knew what we were going to bowl, the decision was pretty easy… Once we decided on six yorkers, we picked Jordan."

He delivered on that occasion, and then, in the practice match at the Brabourne before this competition started, he seared yorkers through James Vince and Jos Buttler in successive overs. Against Sri Lanka and then New Zealand, he did it again. His four death overs in those games brought him combined figures of 4 for 24. He conceded only three boundaries.

There has been much talk of England's "fearless" cricket. Yet fearlessness means an absence of fear. What England's players are trying to do is control the anxiety that every athlete has. After his knock against New Zealand, Roy said: "We just try to do what we do in practice. If it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't. There will be bad days and good days."

Jordan knows all about both. But his ability to do it under pressure gives him a foundation of belief, even if the cricketing public have not yet fully joined him.

Most professional sportsmen and women fall somewhere between the two golfers at the top of this blog: they can produce their best when it matters, but not every time it matters. Chris Jordan will be bowling that penultimate over for England on a Kolkata Sunday knowing that, although he is fallible, he has earned himself the chance to pull it off.