Drives and Scoops

If I were as uninitiated as anyone could be about the game of cricket while watching the first ever twenty20 world championship, I would have been gullible enough to believe if anyone told me that ‘footwork’ is all about batsmen walking across the stumps before they attempt to scoop the ball over fine leg. Fortunately, that’s not the case and my observation of the game for the past few years reminds me that this over-use of feet has nothing to do with footwork and that the number of players opting for such a shot is proliferating with every match, especially, of the twenty20 variety.

It’s not only that the display of such a shot is displeasing to the viewer who is aesthetically inclined; it leaves batsmen with much higher chance of them losing their wickets. There is little time to pick up the length and play such a shot against the fast bowlers and therefore on almost all occasions when the shot is played, it is pre-meditated. Sometimes batsmen tend to walk across to the outside of the off stump even before the ball leaves the bowler’s arm thereby allowing the bowler an ample amount of time to direct the delivery at the stumps. In such a case there is a higher probability of the ball hitting the stumps or the pads of the batsman directly in front of the stumps if he were unable to connect his bat with the speedy ball. Then there is the risk of getting caught at short fine leg even if the batsman manages to scoop the ball up in an attempt to send it sailing over fine leg. A classic example of which is the Pakistani batsman Mizbah-ul-Haq's offering of the Twenty20 world championship to Team India despite all his efforts to save the final day of the tournament.

True that twenty20 offers zero tolerance for dot balls and the batsmen are subjected to immense pressure to score runs off every delivery, preferably in boundaries and sixes. Improvisation is a term that is being used more and more by commentators and columnists to refer to the scoop shot and others of that nature incorporated by batsmen to put more runs on board. Of course, one has to devise methods to find runs when the going gets tough and, ultimately, the number of runs scored is what that matters than the way it was scored. But is it necessary for batsmen to play such cheeky shots (another term popularized by the media) most of the times at the cost of their wicket? Shouldn’t they stick with what they were taught in school and hold the bat straight while playing a ball pitched outside the off stump?

Maybe it's the number of runs scored and wickets taken is what matters at the end of the day, but there are some things beyond the plethora of statistics that circumscribe the game and good cricketing shots are some of those that remain in the minds of the viewer forever.