Singles in the last over? No thanks, I’ll hit them out of the park

RCB’s Chris Gayle may have spanked the ball out of the park on numerous occasions but he didn’t get the chance to do so in the final over. (IANS Photos)

The big hits have reduced, the wild slogs are less fruitful, the bowlers have gotten smarter and you still call it a batsmen’s game? I bet you don’t. A string of low-scoring nail-biting encounters have dramatically shifted the tide in favour of the bowlers this IPL.

What is the reason for this change? Some say better surfaces assisting the bowlers, some say the bowlers learning to bowl better in the conditions available to them and some say better planning and strategising before a game by the support staff.

That brings you to the question of the support staff. Every other team has roped in a former superstar to coach their team. The teams also have coaches for every different role like batting, bowling, fielding and what not. So you expect the team to be better equipped to tackle any situation on the field before even they get on one. The coaching staff plan every minute detail starting from whom to bowl when, how to bowl to a particular batsmen and how to set a field for different batsmen.

When the planning is done to this effect, I find it difficult to digest the fact that the last two overs of an innings for a batting side is not planned well enough, like it should actually have been done. After all, the coaches are paid for planning and making sure the team executes it. They cannot anyways step on the field and set an example themselves, even if N Srinivasan would wish to let them do that. So their planning has to be spot on.

What any team ideally wants in the death overs is their best batsman to face as many as the 12 balls that are available to the team. Also with the game dominated by big hitters who can dispatch the world’s best bowlers out of the park at will, it becomes even the more important to make sure the big hitter faces most of the final 12 balls, if not all 12.

So why would an RCB and Ray Jennings let Chris Gayle take a single when batting on 165+ and let a certain Saurabh Tiwari or a Ravi Rampaul take strike? Ideally what the team needs is for Gayle to face all 12 remaining balls since it is a known fact that he can hit the ball out of the ground at will, than take a single and rot at the non-strikers end helpless. This is not a one off case but for most teams with big hitters batting at the end with relatively average strikers of the ball at the other end.

Cricket has always been a gentleman’s game and the purist will still claim that every run that is available needs to be taken immaterial of who is on strike. But the matter of fact is that the T20 game is far from the normal stereotype and calls for innovations at every given moment of the match, even if it makes the batsmen look selfish in doing so. So the big hitter who might look selfish by refusing the singles might end up scoring 30 runs of the last 2 overs, instead of him taking a single and the team ending up with a mere 10 runs in the same period. In sport, a team comes ahead of individuals and if certain individuals being at the crease selfishly can add more value to the overall team score, which ought to be the team’s strategy to maximise their available resources.

I would love to see coaches instruct their power players to avoid singles at the death and take the battle to themselves and responsibly get the big hits to compensate for the lost singles. This would add so much more to their overall total specially when batting first. After all, the few extra runs scored, is eventually going to be the difference between an emphatic winner and a rank loser. And from a spectator’s point of view, who does not want to see Gayle bat the last 12 balls ahead of Tiwari or Rampaul taking strike. Nobody.

Till then, the gentlemen of the game can wait.