When 20-over cricket began, it was seen as a game that was a bit of a hit-and-giggle (not unlike when the 50-over game made its bow), with the odds heavily in favour of the batter. You went out, you hit out, and that was that. Subtlety was for the birds.
In the early years, that pretty much summed up team strategy. Both players and coaches were working things out as they went along. Tactics that seemed to be working in one match came a-cropper in the next. But a hierarchy of dismissals soon evolved.
Given the choice between getting caught near the boundary off a hefty hit, and being leg before in defence, there seemed to be something honourable in the former. You had died trying. It was the romance of the heroic failure.
Then came the phase where strategy included taking a delivery or three to get your eye in (as even the kingpin Chris Gayle did), and preserving wickets for the final onslaught. This seemed illogical at the time, an idea borrowed from the early days of the 50-over game. The difference was that batters developed the instinct to get the front foot out of the way to give themselves a wider swinging arc. But T20 had yet to find its own, unique style.
Meanwhile, bowlers developed strategies too. This was not merely a case of survival, it was the way cricket had evolved with first one side, either the batter or the bowler, surprising with a new trick, and then the other countering to neutralise that advantage.
Knowledge and experience
Whether bowling or batting, you either defended or attacked — that was the essence of the game. But when to do what was knowledge that came with experience.
The yorker, the slower ball, and the varieties of deliveries developed by the spinners, all brought into the game the element of competition, with bowlers now coming into their own, something that was missing from the early days.
Teams discovered that the traditional approach often left them with batters remaining in the dugout who didn’t get a chance to throw their bats around. Sometimes these were batters who were the main hitters of the team, and at the end of the innings coaches and supporters remained frustrated.
They realised soon enough that a six-ball 20 could be more effective than a 60-ball 70, whatever the numerical difference. Just as 150 all out in 20 overs is a better score than 120 for no loss.
But no one has used this knowledge as effectively as Punjab Kings in this year’s IPL. In essence, it is simple. Batters go on the attack from the start and continue attacking regardless of the state of the innings. Every new batter looks ahead — to the potential total — rather than back at the number of wickets that have fallen. Or indeed the manner of dismissal.
When you have specialist six-hitters down the line from Liam Livingstone through to Odean Smith, the percentages tend to work in your favour. Things could go wrong, and spectacularly too, but the team trusts its six hitters to succeed more often than fail. Even the debutant against Chennai Super Kings, Jitesh Sharma, struck an early six and seemed to have absorbed the team philosophy well.
No dissenters or passengers
T20 calls for teams to pull together to a greater degree — there can be no dissenters or passengers. What might be seen as a ‘failure’ in other contexts counts as success if the effort is made. Coaches talk of ‘intent’ all the time, and in the T20 it is easier to detect a lack of intent and deal with it accordingly.
Often what is good for the team is not good for the individual (and vice versa), and this calls for an approach that needs necessarily to be unselfish and not focused on statistics.
There is a simplicity to Punjab’s tactics that connects the T20 game with its origins — go out and hit out. Wickets do not matter. A recent book worked out the following: A team could lose a wicket every 12 balls and could still bat out their full 20 overs. Chris Martin, widely regarded as one of the worst Test batters ever, was dismissed only once every 11.82 balls in Tests. The message was clear: defensive batting in T20 did not really matter.
It will be interesting to see how far Punjab’s hit-or-run tactics (keeping the dot ball count low is part of it too) carry them in this tournament. The strategy increases the impact of luck too since a batter is more likely to be dismissed by an average ball if he doesn’t get it right every single time. And no one, not even the greatest to have played the game, can get it right every single time.
