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On a tricky surface at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium, a change of pace may help Mitchell McClenaghan solve what has been a season-long problem of leaking runs in the end overs

Deivarayan Muthu18-May-20172:57

Have Mumbai’s bowlers lost steam lately?

Twenty20 cricket is a freakish format, where your best-laid plans can go to waste if the execution is marginally wrong. Ask Mumbai Indians fast bowler Mitchell McClenaghan. In the first Qualifier against Rising Pune Supergiant, McClenaghan clattered through the defences of Rahul Tripathi with a big inswinger in his first over. His first three overs went for 20, and he came on to bowl the 19th over with Rising Pune at 121 for 3 and desperate for a late dash. McClenaghan had sound plans against MS Dhoni and Manoj Tiwary, but his execution was awry. He leaked 26 runs and suddenly the game changed.McClenaghan began that 19th over aiming for a yorker first ball but overpitched and watched as Tiwary swung the beamer to the long-leg boundary. The next ball – a free-hit – offered plenty of width, and Tiwary hoisted it over the bowler’s head for a six. When Dhoni got the strike, McClenaghan finally nailed a yorker, which whooshed past the batsman’s feet. The fourth delivery was a length ball, which was swatted over the midwicket boundary. McClenaghan then switched to Plan B: bowl short and wide, and make Dhoni fetch it. While it appeared logical, McClenaghan ended up bowling two consecutive wides and then panicked and bowled two more length balls, one of which was taken for six. It allowed Rising Pune to run away with the advantage and barge into their first IPL final.McClenaghan is the third-highest wicket-taker this season with 19 wickets in 14 matches, but is prone to leaking runs in the slog overs. His five most expensive overs have all come between overs 15 and 20, and he has an economy rate of 9.50 in this phase of the innings, the second highest among bowlers who have bowled at least 15 overs. He has also bowled 15 extras in the end overs; only Bhuvneshwar Kumar (17) has bowled more.In the middle overs, his returns are worse: one wicket at an economy rate of 12.60. McClenaghan has been most penetrative in the Powerplay, claiming 10 of his 19 wickets in this period at an economy rate of 7.95. In fact, no bowler has taken more wickets than McClenaghan in the Powerplay this season.Mitchell McClenaghan: Decisive in the Powerplay, expensive in the slog overs•BCCISo, perhaps, a case can be made for Mumbai to extract the best out of him with the new ball. Remember, he opened the bowling in the first 22 ODIs he played for New Zealand, and claimed 48 wickets at an economy rate of 5.82 and strike-rate of 23.5.But, with Lasith Malinga himself missing his lengths and conceding at an economy rate of 12 in the slog overs, Mumbai have needed McClenaghan and Jasprit Bumrah. Of the pair, Bumrah has easily been the more impressive, giving away only 8.91 runs an over in this phase.McClenaghan’s regulation pace has allowed the batsmen to line him up better this season. Perhaps he could do well to mix up his pace more, like he did at the World Twenty20 in India last year. His accurate lengths and cutters were so effective that Tim Southee and Trent Boult did not get a game, and New Zealand ultimately made the semi-finals, where they were knocked out by England. Against Australia on a slow track in Dharamsala, McClenaghan cramped the right-hand batsmen with slower short balls, and fooled left-handed batsman Ashton Agar with legcutters. With Australia needing 22 from 12 balls in a chase of 143, McClenaghan took the wickets of Mitchell Marsh and Agar in five balls while conceding just three off a stellar penultimate over. Corey Anderson eventually closed out the eight-run win for New Zealand.Much like that tricky Dharamsala pitch, the M Chinnaswamy track hasn’t allowed batsmen to time the ball this season. Some balls have stuck in the surface, while others have skidded on. Many quicks have taken advantage of this with cutters and cross-seamers. A return to Bangalore might trigger happy memories for McClenaghan: only last month he dismissed Virat Kohli and Mandeep Singh in two slog overs in his side’s four-wicket win over Royal Challengers Bangalore. He nabbed Kohli with a wide ball – possibly wider than a set of stumps outside off – for 62 and then had Mandeep dragging a back-of-a-length ball onto the stumps for a duck.McClenaghan has the skills and the smarts. He might even have a bunch of plans at the death against Kolkata Knight Riders on Friday. But, it all boils down to execution. This time, though, there will be no second chances for him and his team: it’s boom or bust.

Captaining Yorkshire is not a task for the faint-hearted. That honour has now been passed to Gary Ballance, a very different character to his predecessor

David Hopps06-Apr-2017In one patch of the Headingley outfield, Joe Root was reiterating to a steady stream of interviewees that the England captaincy would bring out the best in his batting. A few yards away, as the new captain of Yorkshire, Gary Ballance was saying pretty much the same thing.Two captains, two different career shifts. Root, at 26, is England’s golden child and will barely be seen by Yorkshire all summer; Ballance, a year older, feels a long way from an England recall and played the last of his 21 Tests against Bangladesh in Dhaka last October. But both know that the only currency that really matters is runs.That may be a surprise to some, considering the currency joke flying around social media that the new pound coin has been designed with 12 sides to help spanner it out of a Yorkshireman’s hands.Root certainly thinks that Ballance, whom he has played cricket alongside for much of the past decade, has what it takes. It even led him fondly to imagine playing for Yorkshire which won’t happen often these days but at least cheered everyone up with the thought.”I’m looking forward to working under Gaz because he’s a natural leader,” he said. “I’ve heard people saying he’s quite softly spoken but he leads by example and when he does speak he holds a room and everybody listens to what he has to say. I think he’ll do a fantastic job.”A decade since he left Derbyshire to sign academy terms with Yorkshire, Ballance says he “counts himself as a Yorkshire lad”. He has trekked through the Dales and says he “likes a Yorkshire pudding”. Further investigation revealed that he meant eating one, rather than cooking one, so he has a little way to go yet.The Zimbabwean accent still largely remains, although he claims he can “put on a bit more of a Yorkshire accent” in the dressing room now and then. Probably when he needs to be emphatic. “I’ve served my time,” he said.Few would disagree. Ballance, highly regarded, was the obvious choice as Yorkshire captain, especially once Andrew Gale, who has stepped up from the captaincy to become the county’s new head coach, decided he preferred someone to skipper in all three formats.Gale is first to recognise that Ballance will bring a change of style. “Gary is passionate, but a lot more of an introvert than me,” he said. “I think I was probably a bit more aggressive and in your face, quite vocal, around the dressing room. He has already got the respect of the lads. When he does speak, people listen. He has a lot of experience and he knows the game inside out.”Both captain and coach presented Middlesex, who pipped Yorkshire and Somerset to the title on the last day of the season in 2016, as an obvious danger to their ambitions of winning a third title in four years.It was educational to suggest that Surrey would also be in the mix. Both Gale and Ballance held their own counsel on that one, thereby staying true to the tradition forged when these two counties dominated English cricket that neither would volunteer praise of the other except in the most unavoidable circumstances.Gale, as a recently retired captain with an up-and-at-’em character, could easily stumble into the trap of still wanting to run the show, but he sounded too wise to make that mistake. He valued the independence allowed by Jason Gillespie, his predecessor as head coach, and the director of cricket Martyn Moxon and wants to give Ballance the same room to run things his way.”The best thing for me was that Jason and Martyn let me have a free run, let me pick the team that I wanted, didn’t intervene much and if Gary is going to be successful I have to allow Gary to do that. Ultimately, he has to be happy with the team he takes out on the field.”The only question surrounding Ballance’s appointment was whether England calls would become so common that they would prove disruptive. But he has slipped down the pecking order and, if he gets so many runs as captain that England regain interest, then Yorkshire will have benefited in the meantime. If that happens, it is unlikely to happen this side of the Ashes.”I don’t think the England situation will affect me one bit,” he said. “I will still want to be scoring runs. I still want to play for England but if you focus upon playing for England too much you forget about the task in hand. Hopefully the added responsibility will bring the best out of my batting. I just want to focus on winning games for Yorkshire and if I ever get the call again great.”When Yorkshire won the first of back-to-back Championships in 2014, he was raucously cheered by the supporters who had made the trip to Trent Bridge to see them lift the trophy, a fact not unconnected by his happily topless appearance in the tabloids who captured a night out in a Nottingham nightclub, Pandora’s Box, at the end of a drawn Test against India at Trent Bridge.The Yorkshire captaincy has been a Pandora’s Box for many, becoming more complicated with every decision, but he is equipped for the challenge: he is a more serious thinker about the game than that nightclub malarkey suggested and, asked if it gave a faulty impression of him, remarked that: “If you thought about cricket all the time you would go mad”.This then is a man whose leadership qualities Yorkshire supporters will happily put their shirt on. Just watch out for the counties on both sides of the Thames. Even the one they don’t like to mention.

He may not be seen in the same light as the legendary quartet of allrounders from the 1980s, but Shakib’s contributions towards raising Bangladesh’s game and sustaining their progress is reason enough to consider him one of the greats

Mohammad Isam in Mirpur30-Aug-2017Some people might never agree to put Shakib Al Hasan in the same league as the legendary quartet of allrounders from the 1980s. For starters, he doesn’t bowl pace. He has played too many matches against Zimbabwe, and a series against a depleted West Indies. Even his position as the No. 1 allrounder in the ICC rankings is a result of the side he plays for, as he constantly gets more rating points by playing against higher-ranked teams.Not that Shakib has tried to force the issue on anyone, but the numbers and list of achievements are growing. He played a central role in Bangladesh’s thrilling 20-run win in the first Test against Australia. In Bangladesh’s first innings, he struck a fifty and strung together a counter-attacking partnership with Tamim Iqbal to lift them from 10 for 3. He was then a constant threat in both of Australia’s innings, and finished with a second 10-wicket haul.Before Shakib, only Richard Hadlee had achieved a ten-for and fifty in a Test more than once. Shakib also became the fourth bowler to take a five-for against nine teams. Three years ago, he became the fourth cricketer to score a hundred and take 10 wickets in a Test. Shakib took the fewest Tests to achieve the double of 3000 runs and 150 wickets, and is one of a rare group to have a bowling average lower than the batting average.Maybe comparisons to Jacques Kallis and that 1980s quartet are excessive. But what an allrounder brings to his team is more important. And in the last 10 years, there haven’t been many cricketers who have served their team as well as Shakib has.His quest for excellence has taken him from being Bangladesh’s sole match-winner to being the best performer in a team with a growing number of match-winners. There was a time when he had to take the entire bowling load and also ensure the middle-order didn’t collapse. With the emergence of a number of dependable batsmen and new bowling sensations, the idea that he no longer needs to contribute as much can be broached. Shakib isn’t having any of it.”I want to contribute equally with both bat and ball,” he said after the win. “It is my job and responsibility to contribute as a senior player in the side. The best feeling is to contribute to the team’s win. It was an important Test for us since we hardly play against Australia. It worked as an inspiration for us.”This year he stands as Bangladesh’s leading scorer and wicket-taker. It is a year that includes a double-hundred against New Zealand in blustery Wellington, and a match-winning hundred in Sri Lanka. In the same Test, in Colombo, his four-wicket haul was pivotal to Bangladesh bowling out the home side cheaply, and setting up an achievable fourth-innings chase.There have been lows. He has routinely thrown his wicket away at crucial moments and his bowling was overshadowed in Mehidy Hasan’s honeymoon period. In Hyderabad against India, he went 24 overs without a wicket. So a ten-wicket haul against Australia will provide more meat to his status as the attack’s leader.As a batsman, he hasn’t always found the time for big scores in limited-overs cricket, but still produces match-winning knocks when the chips are down, as in Cardiff against New Zealand during the Champions Trophy. In Tests, he is a freewheeling No. 5, happy to thrash anything wide and always keen on bumping spinners down the ground.It is the attitude that gets him into trouble at times; even in this Test, he got out to a poor shot in the second innings. But he feels that his team-mates should follow his courageous lead. “Aggression is important, but I know you must have questioned my shot yesterday. Some of these situations are tricky. I want everyone to have this courage. If you are positive about the team, it helps the cause. It works most of the time.”As much as Shakib has grown into a world-class cricketer, his team-mates haven’t stayed behind for too long. They have taken inspiration from him and slowly tried to match his level of performance. At the same time, Shakib has raised himself too, using his experience to become a more focused bowler and an impactful middle-order batsman.Raising Bangladesh’s game and helping them maintain their progress over ten years is reason enough – as much as the numbers and records – to consider him one of the great allrounders. With or without pace.

A baby-faced defender of Australia’s homestead left England’s unwelcome intruders looking like Christmas movie villains

Daniel Brettig in Perth16-Dec-2017Steven Smith’s Ashes torment of England recalls nothing quite so much as Kevin McCallister’s encounter with the burglars Marv and Harry in . It’s the lead-up to Christmas and the unwelcome visitors intend to ransack the house, but the baby-faced defender of home territory has all manner of dastardly, unorthodox genius to unleash upon them.Like the McCallister’s multi-storey Chicago home, the WACA Ground, with its rock-hard pitch and pristine outfield, provided ideal circumstances for Smith to deal out punishment, something he relished with a simple sense of hungry glee that is childlike in its purity. In raucously celebrating his 100, then 150, then 200, Smith could almost be heard shouting “you guys give up, or are you thirsty for more?” By the end of day two, Joe Root and his deputy James Anderson looked as bedraggled as Marv and Harry, their ownership of the Ashes slipping away just as surely as the wet bandits headed for prison.The monumental nature of Smith’s achievements are matching Home Alone’s astronomical box office takings (US$467.7 million against a budget of $18 million) in ways that are placing him in the rarest of company. After 108 Test innings, no-one has made more runs, leaving Sir Garfield Sobers in the shade. Among Australians, only Sir Donald Bradman has taken fewer than Smith’s 59 Tests to reach 22 Test hundreds. At 229 and counting, this Perth innings is Smith’s highest in Test cricket.McCallister, of course, did not seal the fate of Harry and Marv alone. He had important help from a figure considered sinister and unwanted for much of the film’s duration – “Old Man” Marley. Derisively accused by Kevin’s older brother Buzz of murdering his family with a snow shovel, Marley’s presence is forbidding until the pair meet in church, and he then shows up right on time to apply the final blows. He does so, naturally enough, with the aforementioned snow shovel.In the remodelled hands of Mitchell Marsh, his cricket bat became just as damaging, and his arrival on the scene just as helpful for Smith. Australia still trailed by 155 runs when Marsh replaced his brother Shaun at the crease, with plenty of questions still hanging in the air about his capabilities as a Test batsman. But five hours and 181 unbeaten runs later, both Marsh and Australia sat back with a sense of confidence greatly enhanced and domination of England ruthlessly maintained.Reflecting on the problems created by Smith, England’s assistant coach Paul Farbrace outlined the kinds of headaches he had created for opponents around the world. “We’re trying very hard to get him out,” he said. “We’re trying to bowl lengths to get him out, trying to set fields to get him out, but he’s played exceptionally well over the last two days.”Every team will talk about where to bowl at him, you try to bowl a fifth-stump line, you try to drag him across his stumps, but the way he’s playing at the moment – he seems to get into some awkward positions – but the thing he does do is get his head back into the ball and he keeps the bat face open. He hits the ball from what seems like strange positions but he seems to hit the middle of the bat on a consistent basis. We’ve had plans for him and been thinking about them for quite some time, but we’ve come up against a player in the form of his life playing absolutely fantastically.Steven Smith averages 75.25 in Tests since 2014•ESPNcricinfo Ltd”Anybody who moves around the crease, it is very easy to start following them, so when someone moves across the stumps you can easily think we can attack the stumps and his pads a little bit more, but that’s exactly what he wants. We’ve tried to be disciplined and hit a good length and get the ball through somewhere around a fifth-stump line, but he does get into positions where he’s able to score both sides of the wicket. One thing he does do, which all the best players do, is they score off your good balls and put you under pressure to bowl bad balls, and he doesn’t miss.”While Smith’s abilities to score runs right around the ground are well known – tiresomely so for England – the approach to be taken by Marsh was a source of far more intrigue. In his previous 21 Tests, reaping only two half-centuries and both of those in Asian conditions, Marsh had struggled to find the mental application and technical proficiency to survive in the middle for extended periods, offering an approach where he often propped on the front foot and threw hard hands at the ball, creating the possibilities not only for edges but also bowled and lbw dismissals.However an extended period out of the game due to shoulder surgery allowed him the chance to reset his mindset and his method away from the spotlight of the international game. Working quietly with his batting coach Scott Meuleman and also the Western Australia coach Justin Langer, Marsh was able to build a more three-dimensional game, better utilising both front and back feet to be more secure in defence and versatile in attack.Two years ago in England, James Anderson and Stuart Broad glimpsed Marsh’s firm feet and hard hands, and this time around offered the sorts of deliveries that might well have undone him early. One of Marsh’s key drills with Meuleman was to deliver throw-downs of an “in-between” length to press the batsman to make more decisive decisions about moving forward or back. Over numerous weeks and hundreds if not thousands of throw-downs, Marsh built confidence in better weight distribution, and when challenged early on by bouncing balls around off stump offered sure-headed leaves of the ball and solid defence to straighter deliveries.Frustrated by this newfound security, England’s bowlers then floated up fuller, more tempting stuff, which drifted handily into what has always been Marsh’s “kill zone”, the cover and straight drives. At times it seemed Marsh had murderous intentions for the umpires at the bowler’s end, so straight and powerful was his driving straight back down the pitch as to cause Marais Erasmus in particular to take the sort of evasive action he would have required in his playing days. Anything short, particularly wide of the stumps, was then attacked with plenty of enthusiasm, including the forcing stroke that took Marsh to a first Test hundred in his 22nd match – four fewer, incidentally, than it took Steve Waugh.The emotion of Marsh’s subsequent celebration, charging towards the dressing room and screaming with the purest of joy, demonstrated the pent-up emotion he had channelled so effectively throughout, showcasing a pre-ball routine that has allowed him to more effectively “switch on” and “switch off” between deliveries. As the day wore on and England’s bowling and fielding slackened, it was a lapse in concentration alone that was likely to bring a wicket, but Marsh refused stoutly to offer it. At the same time he was able to take some scoring pressure from Smith’s shoulders, allowing the captain to preserve some of his remaining energy for further run-making on day four: it was that sort of mutually supportive partnership.In captaining WA against Smith’s New South Wales recently, Marsh empathised with England. “I think he’s certainly got an aura,” Marsh said of Smith. “I know what its like because I’ve captained against him a couple of months ago and it’s not very nice. You come up with all these plans and none of them seem to work. He’s a special player for Australia, he’s a great captain, leads by example, and hopefully he and I can keep going tomorrow.”It would be unkind not to conclude theparallels without mentioning the men whose roles most closely mirror those of the film’s producer and screenwriter John Hughes and its director Chris Columbus – Australia’s selectors. Faced with plenty of questions about their thinking when choosing Shaun Marsh and Tim Paine for the first Test, then recalling Mitchell Marsh for the third, the panel comprising the chairman Trevor Hohns, the coach Darren Lehmann, Greg Chappell and Mark Waugh have had their decisions handsomely vindicated with a series of vital displays by the players they ran against popular opinion to choose. In each case they have chosen players feeling comfortable in themselves and their games, ready to perform under pressure.As Marsh put it: “The whole build-up for this game I’ve been a lot more relaxed than in the past, quietly a lot more confident in my game because I’ve worked so hard. When you go into a game knowing you’ve done everything possible to try to succeed then you can hopefully just relax and enjoy it, and that’s what I’ve been doing the last couple of days.”Those successes, then, raise the possibility for England thatmay well be followed by and in Melbourne and Sydney. Perhaps fortunately for those cast as the wet bandits, there is no plan to extend this Ashes series any further than that.

Representing India at the Under-19 World Cup, there was already enough on the minds of Kamlesh Nagarkoti, Shubman Gill and Prithvi Shaw. And then, the IPL auction came along

Shashank Kishore in Christchurch28-Jan-2018What do you do when your name is up for bidding at an IPL auction?Keeping a close eye on the TV screen or the internet perhaps seems the most logical thing, right? For Rajasthan’s Kamlesh Nagarkoti, who is now an India Under-19 sensation currently working up speed guns in New Zealand at the World Cup, the anxiety levels had hit the roof.On one hand, his phone was buzzing with messages. On the other, his room-mate’s inquisitiveness was making him anxious.” (I was a little nervous from within),” Nagarkoti says as he traces the events leading into his eventual bid of INR 3.2 crore (USD 500,000 approx) by Kolkata Knight Riders. “My friends kept calling non-stop, but I didn’t pick up the phone. I didn’t watch my bidding.”When my room partner Pankaj Yadav turned on the live stream, I couldn’t take it. I said ‘ (mate, I’m off). I went and sat inside the washroom even as my bidding kept going on.”He came out once the hammer went down and reached out to his phone to speak to his parents, who were equally overwhelmed with emotion. They, along with his childhood coach Surendra Singh Rathod, had received multiple requests for interviews from the local news channels, which they were patiently obliging.It was, in a way, a coming together of a trio – along with Nagarkoti’s older brother – who decided to invest their savings on his cricket. Nagarkoti’s father, a subedar in the Indian army, bought a one-bedroom apartment in Jaipur from his retirement corpus so that his son could play cricket.”TV channels were home to interview them, so I couldn’t talk for long, but they were happy,” Nagarkoti says. “Later, someone tagged them being interviewed on Facebook. They were very happy. I’d only ever watched one IPL match at the stadium before this. To be playing now is a great feeling. I was watching Chris Lynn batting in the BBL on TV. Now I’ll get a chance to bowl to him in the nets. It’s quite unbelievable.”Nagarkoti, who was a “big fan of Rajasthan Royals” because of the franchise being from his state, went to sleep soon after, but remembers waking up at 4am and being unable to sleep since.Half an hour prior to his frenetic bidding, though, Nagarkoti and Abhishek Sharma were having fun at Shubman Gill’s expense, even as his name came up for bidding. Gill’s was the first among members of the India Under-19 team at the auction table. Even as the marquee set of players were up for grabs, Gill’s phone kept constantly buzzing: he knew why.It was well past 11pm in Christchurch, the time they’ve all generally been going to bed every day. But this was different. Gill finally gave in and switched on the live stream.”When I finally saw online, my bid was at INR 1.2 crore,” Gill says with a sheepish smile. His first reaction was: “I’m in the IPL.” The price didn’t matter, so he switched it off. Ten minutes after the hammer went down, Gill received a call from his mother. He had just been sold for INR 1.8 crore (USD 281,000 approx).”I haven’t yet thought about who I will get to play with or who all I can learn from,” Gill says. “It feels very good to get a chance, but it’s important to live in the present and focus on the India-Pakistan semi-final. [Rahul] Dravid sir had a meeting with us. He said IPL auction will keep happening every year so we shouldn’t worry about being picked or not and to just focus on the Under-19 World Cup because we won’t have this opportunity again in our lives.”Gill, the more reserved of the two, remembered the sacrifices his father made early in his career. The family had agricultural lands in Fazilka in Punjab, where Gill’s father deployed helpers at his farm to throw balls at him and keep him engaged. They would bowl tirelessly for hours, unable to satisfy Gill’s thirst for more.When his father was convinced of his talent, he moved from Fazilka to Mohali, where they rented a house in the vicinity of the PCA Stadium, not because Gill would get a chance to train there yet but because he would be able to visualise himself training at the academy there and perhaps one day play on the centre pitch.” (dad has already given them a party last night),” Gill laughs, when asked if his father’s staff deserved a sham share of the Knight Riders contract. “When I moved to Mohali, there was an India-Pakistan Test around then. I wanted to go and train there as a kid. I knew if I play well, I’ll get a chance.”Gill and Nagarkoti come from the smaller towns, the unbridled joy and innocence shining through as they remembered how things transpired. For Prithvi Shaw, who grew up in Mumbai and was touted a child prodigy at 14, living with high expectations on his shoulder isn’t quite new.”I was expecting a question at the press conference [on the auction] the other day itself. The wry smile was about that,” Shaw says when asked about his INR 1.2 crore (USD 187,000 approx) contract with Delhi Daredevils.”I’m happy, but really it doesn’t matter which team I’m part of. Being in that environment will help my game. But for now, the focus is here and to be in the present. If we keep thinking about the auction, mentally we will be in that zone.”That’s three happy people with different responses, some instinctive, some thought out. But they all share some common themes: a passion and love for the game, wanting to live in the present, and a focus on winning the Under-19 World Cup.