Batting for Twenty20 cricket
Published:Friday | January 13, 2012 | 12:00 AM
by Orville Higgins
The regional Twenty20 tournament is on, and once again, this exciting, fairly new format of the game is dominating the sports pages.
The purists might not like it, and several ex-West Indies cricketers have derided it as "just not cricket". Those same 'experts' feel that Twenty20 cricket is a bad way to introduce youngsters to the game, and that early exposure to this format will do more harm than good. I wholeheartedly disagree!
Think about it. Cricket has five pillars. The four major disciplines are batting, bowling, fielding, and wicketkeeping. The fifth pillar is captaincy. The skipper, unlike any other captain in all of sports, runs the show and makes all tactical decisions. Many a cricket match has been won because one man outcaptained the other.
Twenty20 cricket can actually help youngsters with four of the five core pillars. Let's start with bowling. The skills a Twenty20 bowler needs are subtle variations of pace, firing yorkers, and deadly accuracy. These skills will also prove useful in other formats of the game, including the longer version.
We go on to fielding. Everybody will agree that Twenty20 cricket places great premium on fielding, so the youngster will learn about the value of performing well off the pitch.
Same thing with wicketkeeping. There is absolutely no difference to the skill sets that a wicketkeeper will need in Twenty20 cricket as opposed to the ones he will need in Test cricket. He does virtually the same things. Twenty20 excellence should easily extend to one-dayers and Tests.
We go to captaincy. More than any other form of cricket, the Twenty20 game places a great responsibility on the man who tosses the coin. In Twenty20 cricket, he has got to be thinking hard on virtually every ball. He has to be razor sharp in his field placements and has to be more strategically astute in deciding on, or changing, lines of attack.
Overs allocated to each bowler is also more crucial in this ultra-compressed version of the sport: one bad over can make a huge, or decisive, difference in the result. So the Twenty20 captain has no room for error in allowing the game to drift.
Developing skills
The repertoire of skills developed in Twenty20 captaincy will augur a world of good in any other format.
So with batting, bowling, fielding and captaincy, the youngster who is exposed to Twenty20 cricket early will learn skills that will be useful in any other type of cricket.
Critics of swashbuckling batting, the only one of the five pillars I've excluded as critical to the Twenty20 training ground, tend to have concerns that the quickfire genre fails to teach youngsters how to bat properly. There may be some merit to their arguments.
However, detractors must consider that the game forces the batsman to put bat to ball more urgently, and to ceaselessly have his eyes on the scoreboard. There's no time to block, block, block.
Those who say that early exposure to this 'swipey-swipey' cricket will damage his technique don't remember how the average West Indian boy in our heyday was introduced to the game. In the '70s and '80s, 'windball' cricket was at its peak. If that couldn't be had, any thing that was fairly round would do.
When we started playing, at eight or 10 years old, we weren't overly concerned with a 'high left elbow'. We wanted to belt the living daylight out of the ball.
Cricket was fun to the Caribbean boy because of the cavalier approach we had. In time, some of us learnt the finer points of batting, but in the beginning we were attracted to the game because we like to lick the ball.
West Indies cricket will go nowhere unless we increase the number of youngsters playing the game regularly. And there is no more exciting way to introduce youngsters to the game than Twenty20.
Those who say Twenty20 cricket has come to
Orville Higgins, a sportscaster, is the 2010-11 winner of the Hugh Crosskill/Raymond Sharpe Award for Sports Reporting. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.
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