How Head & Co are outmuscling cricket

This isn't about Virat Kohli's deficiencies as a T20 batsman or about Travis Head, Heinrich Klaasen and Jos Buttler proving to be game-changers. It is about cricket's slow walk towards the exit in the game’s shortest format with traditional skills passé

THERE WAS a time when Virat Kohli was the proud owner of that rare all-format batting template. Tests to ODI to T20 and back - he would change his jersey and gears but he was always Kohli. A child of the 90s, he had seen Sachin Tendulkar for far too long to give up on correctness. The celebrated Australian cricket writer Gideon Haigh would sum up Kohli's commitment to cricket's ethos with an iconic line: “Much as the marketers would love to take cricket out of T20, Kohli keeps putting it back in.”

Finally, it seems Kohli's long resistance is waning. This isn't about the batting great's deficiencies as aT 20 batsman, more about cricket's slow walk towards the exit in the game's shortest format. A proof of these tumultuous transitional times is this puzzling contraction that is floating around this IPL. Despite being the highest run-getter for the first-half of season's IPL, questions are being asked about Kohli's place in the Indian side for the T20 World Cup.

For most of this month a bunch of batting buccaneers — Travis Head, Heinrich Klaasen, Jos Buttler — have been making the Indians aware that while they were busy in the deification of their batting Gods, the T20 format tumbled far away from the tree it fell from. They are the disruptors. They are normalising taboos, they are also making Kohli look inadequate.

It will be unfair to single out Kohli, because there is no Indian batsman currently, including Rohit Sharma, who can match the powerhitting bludgeon of Head or Klaasen. The Aussie and South African have been threatening to take their team, Sunrisers Hyderabad, over the 300 barrier any day now. In their 7 games so far, SRH have had scores of 277, 287 and 266. No T20 batting record is safe when Head and Klaasen are at the crease. The two took their team past the highest IPL score.

On Saturday at Kotla, with Head again leading the charge, SRH scored 125 in the 6 overs, a new Powerplay high. The Aussie scored a 32-ball 89. In reply, Delhi seemed in with a chance till another budding T20 buccaneer was at crease. Jake Fraser-mc Gurk, 22, hit a 18-ball 65 with a strike rate of 361.

SRH opener Abhishek Sharma seems to be the only Indian using the same batting grammar as Head. In the Top 10 run-getters this season, he had a strike rate of 300-plus today. However, he is now herein the discussion for aT 20 World Cup opening spot since that's where Kohli and Rohit bat.

India need to turbo-charge thei rt 20 tactics or dilute the cricket bit from their T20. After virtually the half-way stage of this IPL, there are 7 Indian batsmen in the Top 10 but none can match the firepower or the impact that Head and kl a as en had on games. they lack the audacity of the two. India is still old school.

Carrying the bat through was once a virtue for an opener. Keeping wickets in hand for an all-out assault later was a time-tested white-ball tactic. Coaches and commentators insisted on rotating the strike, converting ones into twos. Run-making graphs were supposed to be inverted bells — fast-slowfast. All that seems archaic, so 90s.

The other day, Kohli ticked all those ODI boxes. He played a classic white-ball inning against Rajasthan Royals. Starting as an opener, he remained unbeaten on 113 (72 balls, Strike Rate 156). He helped RCB reach 183/3. Rajat Patidar and Dinesh Karthik didn't get a chance to bat. Batting first, opener remaining not out, specialist hitter not getting a chance and team failing to reach par score - this is a fatal sequence in modern-day T20. RCB would pay for it. RR would canter to a win. Kohli should have read the winds of change. With 7 wickets in hand, he could have thrown caution to the winds.

With bowlers becoming increasingly irrelevant to T20s, the only fool-proof plan that works is to bat out the rivals. Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) this season have cracked the maths of setting up a tall score. Head and Klaasen are the masterminds. The two foreigners think like high-rollers at a casino but are meticulous in the planning.

Against RCB, SRH scored IPL'S highest total of 287. Head doesn't carry ODI baggage to T20 games. Fully aware that this was a format where 11 players get to share 20 overs, he seems to have a death wish after he has survived the Powerplay.

In the 12th over, he hit 4 fours to get to his 100 and the next over he was out, caught on the fence attempting another six. He got 102 from 41 balls, much faster than Kohli's 72ball 113. In the middle overs, Kohli had gone into ODI mode. He was doing what Tendulkar would do in the 90s — milk singles from the 25th to 40th overs. He hit just one six in the 10-to-15 overs bracket.

Meanwhile, Klaasen's T20 approach is far more evolved than even Head. After the game against RCB, Klaasen said he hardly jogs for 40 metres and his gym training too is limited. His training regime is in contrast to Kohli's.

Utilitarian methods

Klaasen's training methods are utilitarian. Bat swing and mental peace — are his two primaryworries.tooptimisehisswing,thesouth African looks to baseball. T20 coaches these days are busy peeling the layers of cricket to strip it down to its basic core. They have understood that it all boils down to the swinging bat, middling the ball to send it over the fence. This simple pursuit has seen T20 cricket move closer to baseball — the far more scientifically -analysed sport. That is why out-of-the-box thinking coaches like Julian Wood are seen in dugouts of national teams and franchise sides.

Wood calls himself a power-hitting coach. The home page on his website has these lines: “Having spent plenty of time in the USA observing the training methods and biomechanics associated with baseball, Julian has devised his own patented, cricketspecific training programme ..” He sounds very different from India's batting coach Vikram Rathour and Virat's mentor since childhood Rajkumar Sharma.

This Kohli vs Klaasen ideological batting duel is another of the many old vs new tugs of war that are part of every churn. The grip of the traditionalists might be loosening but they are still in the game. In about a month's time, the T20 World Cup will kick off. The marketers and the buccaneers will be aligning to announce T20's independence from cricket, declare it a republic where the traditionalists will look like outsiders. Here's hoping Kohli rotates strike, converts ones into twos, keeps wickets in hands and, as only Ravi Shastri says, finishes it off in style. All for the sake of cricket.