Sport | Cricket
Quick thinkers are most likely to prosper
With so many new stadiums and pitches providing uncertainty until a ball is bowled, bottom-handed batsmen and quick thinkers are the ones most likely to prosper.
- By Derek Pringle, Telegraph Group
- Published: 23:37 May 3, 2009
London: England's one-day team flew to the Caribbean yesterday for the World Cup.
If they planned to drink the plane dry, as happened en route to the 1987 tournament, they should have used their dominant hand to raise a glass and incorporate cerebral drinking games.
With so many new stadiums and pitches providing uncertainty until a ball is bowled, bottom-handed batsmen and quick thinkers are the ones most likely to prosper. The need for these qualities is likely to be most pressing in the second stage, the Super Eights. Assuming England get that far, and they would need to lose two games in a group containing New Zealand, Kenya and Canada to fail, then every one of their six Super Eight matches will be played on squares either made or re-laid in the past year.
The experience of new grounds like Durham and Hampshire's Rose Bowl suggest the pitches need years not weeks to bed in, and both experienced irregular pace and bounce early on in their development. The Caribbean, with its different soils, hotter climate and strong breezes, may prove different.
In Barbados, club pitches are soaked and rolled in the morning, baked by the sun, and played on at noon without ambulances being placed on standby. If the strips are iffy (it will be a miracle should all play well), batsmen like Kevin Pietersen and Paul Collingwood, both with bottom-hands like Popeye, are liable to be more effective than touch players like Ed Joyce and Ian Bell.
Unless, that is, the latter pair can adapt — something county-raised players, often seem reticent to do. Bowling on slow surfaces of variable bounce also needs a rethink. England's likely new ball pairing, Liam Plunkett and James Anderson, have swingers to nobble the best, but stray wide and they will be caned.
In such conditions, a tight off-stump line is more vital than an extra yard of pace, but it requires discipline and control, qualities only Andrew Flintoff guarantees. The new grounds in the Caribbean should have bigger boundaries than the old ones, so often a disincentive to slow bowlers in the past.
If they do, and there is no guarantee given the International Cricket Council's habit of insisting that the rope is set well inside the advertising hoardings, spinners could prove valuable, especially those like Sri Lanka's Muralitharan and Jayasuriya, the latter able to get the ball to grip despite a bowling arm that barely exceeds the horizontal. Monty Panesar lacks their experience but is learning fast. Variations can often tether batsmen too, but you still need to bowl them with sleight of hand.
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