Champions Trophy

Meet cricket’s Ronaldos

Imagine the situation. It is the last over of the Champions Trophy final. You have 14 runs to defend, six balls to bowl. Land those deliveries in the right place and you will be a hero. At the other end is Jos Buttler. You know he hits 30.59 per cent of deliveries in the last 10 overs for a boundary because the team statistician has told you so. In fact, with a strike rate of 199.5, no other batsman in the world is so effective at the end of a one-day international. So, what to do?

This is what makes the art of ‘death’ bowling cricket’s ultimate examination of character and nerve – one that prompted Ben Stokes to claim “the whole world had come down on me” after he was clobbered for four sixes by Carlos Brathwaite in the World Twenty20 final when he had 18 runs to defend.

Starting today, when England’s one-day series against South Africa begins, and then in next month’s Champions Trophy, other bowlers will feel that choking pressure, when their skills will be subjected to the most searching examination.

Sports psychologist Steve Sylvester compares the job to taking a penalty in football. He knows one England international who could never take a spot kick. “He knew his emotional world could not tolerate missing a penalty,” he explains.

Some bowlers are the same. Sylvester’s job is to help overcome those emotional obstacles. “I try and understand a player’s tolerance to negativity from the crowd, the media and other cricketers,” he says. “I make them understand the context. You say it is pantomime. It is not you personally, it is the role you are fulfilling. You can either be a hero or a villain – either way, you are there to fulfil a role. You have to have a special character to cope because if you do your job long enough you will end up experiencing both roles.”

England have been reborn since their disastrous display in the 2015 World Cup, and are now hugely dangerous in the final stages of an innings, hitting more boundaries and at a better strike rate than any team in the world.

Sylvester believes the death bowlers, those who can stop the likes of Stokes and

Buttler, will be the “Hazards or Ronaldos” of cricket – in other words, the ones most wanted by franchise owners.

This is good news for the likes of Jasprit Bumrah, the brilliant yorker-bowling Indian, who could be a star of the Champions Trophy, and more familiar faces, such as Lasith Malinga and Mitchell Starc. Another is John Hastings, the Australian all-rounder, who has the lowest average and the best strike rate in the last 10 overs of ODIS since the last World Cup, according to the number crunchers at Cricviz, the cricket analytics app.

“The first thing is embracing it and then coming up with a range of balls to keep the batsman guessing, which, for me, meant developing three or four different slower balls, bowled either short or in the middle of the wicket,” Hastings explains. “The boundary sizes come into it, too, and so does which way the wind is blowing. It’s quite intricate.”

A perfectly delivered yorker, which is what Stokes was aiming for in the World T20 final, is still very hard to hit. Malinga is the master, and he trains by bowling at a boot placed on the length he is aiming for. England’s bowling coach, Ottis Gibson, lays out three coloured cones as targets: a red one wide of off stump, a yellow one aiming at the stumps, and a green one down the leg side. As the bowler enters his delivery stride Gibson calls out a colour. It is designed to replicate a batsman moving around his crease and makes bowlers learn to think and change plans at the last moment.

Another drill is to place a bar on two bricks and get the bowlers to try to send the ball underneath it to learn the right length to bowl. Unorthodox bowlers such as Malinga and Bumrah have a natural advantage. Malinga has a low release point, so if he bowls short, the ball does not bounce so high, leaving the batsman with little elevation to use to his advantage. If a bowler has an upright arm, like Chris Woakes, and bowls short by a couple of inches, the batsman can get underneath the ball.

“If you are nailing a really good yorker, not many batsmen around the world, possibly only three or four, can hit it,” Hastings says. “Nine out of 10 times, the batsman will only get one run or a dot. A dot ball is almost as important as a wicket. Bowling a yorker is a massive effort ball. It has to be the fastest ball you bowl because if you

do miss your length and it becomes a low full toss instead, the pace will mean the batsman is not ready to hit it. Going into a tournament, I will do a lot of work on it.

“You need to be able to know your skills and have confidence in them. When you are under pressure at the end, a lot of things run through your mind, you need to slow down. You have a think about what is going on.”

Of course, coaches do not want the same drama as the rest of us. They want their team to have done the job before the death overs. “Everyone talks about death bowling but no team has mastered the art of death bowling, most teams are travelling at the back end, so if you can pick up wickets up front, your death bowling is always going to be good,” says Russell Domingo, the South Africa coach. “If the opposition is only two or three down with eight overs to go, your death bowling is going to be poor. So, picking up wickets in the middle overs is crucial.”

Domingo stands and falls by winning matches – and is currently having to reapply for his job – but the rest of us want close finishes. We want to see bowlers, such as Adam Milne, of New Zealand, having the balance of the match in their – probably sweaty – palms as they bowl the last six balls of a final.

Milne has the best economy rate in the final 10 overs since the last World Cup, having played all around the world for New Zealand and in the Indian Premier League. He has also been captained by two of the best batsmen around, Kane Williamson and AB De Villiers. Communication is key.

“AB at mid-off would say to me, ‘Decide what you bowl and be confident’,” Milne says. “If you have any doubts, that is when it might go wrong. It can be hard when a batsman is moving around and getting into different positions. But you have to be calm and make sure you have a ball in your mind.”

“We are not talking cricket skills,” adds Sylvester. “My view would be, how can you blend your emotional world into your ability to execute the skills that are well honed at the death. The work to be done with death bowlers is when it is not going right. You want them to say, ‘It does not stop me as I have a big role to play as a death bowler’.” Possibly the biggest role of all over the next few weeks.