Bat on it: Proper batting belongs in T20
Yet his batting is a magnetic target for criticism
AS JP Duminy was flipping pancakes at one end of the pitch during SA’s innings in their World T20 match against New Zealand in Chittagong on Monday, at the other Hashim Amla was getting on with the relatively stoic business of batting.
Amla’s 41 off 40 balls wasn’t the stuff Quinton de Kock or David Warner are made of, but it was as important to SA’s victory as Duminy’s unbeaten 86, which whizzed and banged off 43 balls, and Dale Steyn’s Godzilla act, which earned him figures of 4/17.
Without Amla, the whizzbang would have been fun, but futile. Godzilla, meanwhile, would never have made it to the final over to knock over the tall buildings.
Three days later, against the Netherlands, Amla tuned his batting to a frequency that yielded 43 runs off 22 balls. Without that, SA would have stumbled to a total much more embarrassing than their 145/9.
Even Amla’s 23 off 26 in SA’s first match, which they lost to Sri Lanka by five runs, was not what Geoffrey Boycott would have come up with were he beamed into a T20 time warp.
And yet Amla’s batting is a magnetic target for criticism about what is in need of fixing in SA’s performance at the WT20.
Somehow, West Indian Chris Gayle escaped similar questioning of his suitability for the format after taking 33 balls to score 34 against India and making a run-a-ball 48 against Bangladesh. His 35-ball 53 against Australia on Friday has buried those memories forever.
“Hashim is vital,” former SA batsman Peter Kirsten said. “He’s an important cog, and he’s a senior player now after all the retirements.
The best way to hit a cricket ball hard and far and into the gaps is, usually, to hit it properly
“His best formats are test and one-day cricket and, if he plays T20s, he has to open. But people are getting melodramatic about him; they’re overreacting.
“There is a place for proper batting in T20 cricket. Hashim should stay there and bat better.”
SA coach Russell Domingo was adamant that Amla was going nowhere — slowly or fast.
“In our domestic T20s, Hashim had the second-best strike rate of all players in SA,” Domingo said after the match against the Netherlands.
“His strike rate for me is not a major concern. He is a quality player and he is always going to find the gaps and the boundaries when it’s his day.”
For Kirsten, what SA needed was stability and consistency in their approach.
“It’s confusing when Albie Morkel comes in up the order ahead of David Miller [which happened against the Dutch], and after batting so beautifully at No 5 against New Zealand, JP Duminy comes in at six against the Netherlands.”
Like an office full of giddy executives on dress-down Friday, T20 cricket makes sensible people do strange things. Call it the “Wolf of Willow Street” syndrome. One of the symptoms is to forget that the best way to hit a cricket ball hard and far and into the gaps is, usually, to hit it properly, which means with the help of a stroke designed for the purpose, not some hoik fetched from down on the bayou.
There is plenty of innovation in T20, and some of it has crept into one-day and even test cricket. This is healthy, but it is just as healthy that the game remembers what it is, rather than contorting itself into unrecognisable forms.
For instance, knee-jerk thinking would have it that Herschelle Gibbs is a better T20 batsman than Amla, and that Jacques Kallis would finish third in that race.
But after they had each played 23 innings for SA in the format, Gibbs had scored 400 runs, Amla 479 and Kallis 666.
Mix enough flour into the batter and it will be strong enough to flip the pancakes as many times as you like.