Grace Harris and the art of tuning a run machine to the right setting
With lessons aplenty from the recently concluded Women's Premier League and the white-ball tour of Bangladesh, Australia will hope Grace Harris nds the right rhythms in the T20 World Cup in the subcontinent later this year
March 7 2024. It was a few days into the Delhi leg of the Women’s Premier League’s second chapter. Alyssa Healy-led UP Warriorz locked horns with Harmanpreet Kaur’s Mumbai Indians; two fairly bitter international rivals now in the same tournament, albeit again at the helm of opposing sides looking to get two points and some bragging rights to boot.
A fairly measured bowling performance had helped restrict a rather trigger-happy MI to a gettable 161. Kiran Navgire and Grace Harris had whacked MI to submission in the earlier meeting between the two sides, scripting a seven-wicket win.
An encore, however, was not to be for the women in yellow and purple.
Big hitters Kiran, Chamari Athapaththu and skipper Alyssa Healy were gone within the rst ve overs with just 15 runs on the board. The stage was set for Harris, the Warriorz’s happy-go-lucky run machine, to come in and do her thing. The boundary fence, if sentient, would have clenched in preparation for the barrage of shots everyone knew this burger and pani puri-loving Australian is popular for. But something entirely unexpected transpired in the moments to come.
Zero o 15 balls
Harris saw out Hayley Matthews shakily, as she tried to gauge the movement of the ball and the tunes of the Kotla wicket. Three balls, no run. Shabnim Ismai took out Healy right after with Deepti Sharma joining Harris in the middle. Deepti got o the mark with a quick single. Harris then swung at the next three deliveries from Ismail, missing all three times. She managed to put bat to ball o the last delivery of the over, but ended up driving the ball straight to the mid o elder.
She then faced Matthews for four deliveries in the sixth over, connecting the ball but not able to grapple the lengths enough to push the ball much further from the 22-yard strip. Ten balls had passed and Harris was yet to score. Ismail returned and tormented her some more, setting her up with two deliveries scorching into the stumps and then tempting her with a length ball outside o — none of which she could negotiate for runs. Fourteen balls gone now, but no run.
Matthews returned and allowed Harris the mercy of a ball in the slot which she dispatched for six over long on, breaking the imaginary shackles slowly tightening around her as the deliveries came and went.
However, Harris’ struggles would continue. She couldn’t use Pooja Vastrakar’s pace to put the ball away. She couldn’t judge the lengths well or the height the ball would gain and was lobbing around the crease looking for answers. Eventually, it would take another slot ball from Saika Ishaque for Harris to breach the fence, again over long on. But the adrenaline boost it brought along lasted for barely a few seconds as Saika left her stumps in disarray. Harris, set to swing again, missed the ball which she assumed would either straighten or go in, as she helplessly discovered it had turned and knocked her o stump instead.
“It was certainly one of my poorer performances. I was batting with the idea to not lose more wickets at that stage,”
Harris told The Hindu after that knock.
“We'd come from very easy batting conditions and it took me a lot longer to adapt to conditions in Delhi. It was slower and lower too. It was probably the bounce. I bat quite instinctively, watching the length of the ball and the line and then want to play a certain shot. On that day, a couple of balls I played were the kind of deliveries I would traditionally want to pull because of the length they're at and the line, but on that surface, you had to play straighter. It was more a battle of instincts versus what shot the conditions dictated.”
Brain or brawn?
Why does that innings from a month ago still matter? Potentially because it exposed what a little uncertainty could do to someone as sorted as Harris, a vital cog in the Australian military tank ahead of a World Cup to be played in Bangladesh.
Being all brawn in the middle is not the unsavoury thing cricket purists will have you believe. It doesn’t mean you’re being mindless when in the hot seat, but that your crisis response is automated so you can focus on execution. Being all physical in the eye of the storm requires a taxing amount of strategizing in the nets something Harris thrives on and believed didn’t come through that night.
“It's between technical and competitive and that's the hard part about batting sometimes,” Harris explained.
“Firstly, you train and prepare for that kind of batting, so that when you get into the game, you're not necessarily thinking which area you're accessing, it's just about hitting the ball you're seeing. You need to be in a competitive mindframe which is not technical and not worried about specics. If I go back to the 0 (15), I had to battle a technique-point-of-view because the bounce coming o the wicket wasn’t naturally at the length I thought it should be, but when you align with conditions and you pick a short ball and it rises as it should, you simply watch the ball and hit it and because you've played that shot so much, you know you can hit it. Sometimes you have to battle it out or just get on the front foot at any length and drive at any length, because it's not rising as much as you need. So you get into a technical headspace as opposed to that auto competitive mode,” she added.
It’s not as easy as putting it all down singularly to mindset. Harris has always been a casual menace and caution might be the thread out of place in the knitting. If one has to allow anticipation to seep into