How batsmen have evolved to dominate T20
Devaluing wickets and improving lower order has led to higher scores, writes Tim Wigmore
In professional sport, there tends to be a natural equilibrium between defence and attack. Any tilt in one direction will beget an equalising counter-reaction; in 26 Premier League football seasons, for instance, the average goals per game has always been between 2.45 and 2.81.
Something different appears to be happening in Twenty20 cricket. Here, the balance between defence and attack – bowling and batting – is being shattered, leading to a significant rise in scores in the T20 Vitality Blast and leagues throughout the world.
One of the dictums of one-day international cricket is the notion that nothing slows down the scoring rate quite like taking wickets. In T20 in the past five years, the opposite has happened. Wickets have been taken more frequently on average – and yet scoring rates have risen, too.
In 2013, teams batting first in T20 on average made 154 and lost 6.1 wickets. In 2018, sides batting first make an average of 167 and lose 6.8 wickets.
Two shifts in the past five years explain why scores are rising.
The first is that teams are becoming shrewder in T20 strategies. The most fundamental divergence from Tests and ODIS lies in how much less valuable a wicket is, because a team would need to lose a wicket every 12 balls to be bowled out.
Sunil Narine averages a paltry 14.35 with the bat in T20, yet can be regarded as a seminal figure in the evolution of T20 batting. He had never batted in the top four until 2017; now he opens in the Indian Premier League and beyond. Narine fails a lot but it does not matter – he is picked mostly as a bowler – and, because he attacks so brazenly from his first ball, even a brief innings can make an outsize impact.
In the IPL this year, Narine played innings of 50 off 19 balls and 75 off 36 balls; he had a ludicrous strike rate of 189. Somerset, who play Sussex in the second semi-final on Finals Day, have embraced treating the value of each wicket with less respect. A T20 aphorism is that sides who lose three wickets within the first six overs lose three-quarters of their games. Yet, as ESPN Cricinfo’s Matt Roller has observed, this season Somerset have lost three wickets within 6.1 overs seven times. In six of those, Somerset have won anyway. They trust in the depth and quality of their batting order, with belligerent captain Lewis Gregory often batting at seven, and accept the evolution of hitting renders stodgy rebuilding after early wickets futile.
If better strategy is one strand of T20 scores rising, the other is that batting has improved. And, most saliently, batting has evolved at a faster rate than bowling.
Batsmen have a basic physiological advantage: they can practise far more than bowlers without risk of injury. So, as cricket becomes more professional, the gap between how much batsmen and bowlers train is increasing.
This advantage is exacerbated by T20 specialisation – with more players becoming specialist T20 players, or at least benefiting from more specialised T20 training.
Improvements in the hitting ability of lower-order players has elongated batting orders. That there are power-hitting coaches speaks to how six-hitting is now regarded as a skill to be nurtured.
The evolution of skill and strategy both point to batting’s domination becoming greater, and a new equilibrium not being found until average scores have stabilised in the region of 200. So radically different is T20 to longer versions of the game that more wickets falling can even be regarded as a sign of batting teams playing the game more intelligently.