Jack Fairs

17/04/2013

The IPL has returned in 2013 with all its usual glitz and glamour, but it has not been such a spectacular start to the world’s biggest Twenty20 tournament for its resident Test Match legends.

The Indian Premier League boasts such names as Tendulkar, Ponting, Sehwag and Sangakarra but their illustrious careers on the Test Match stage have not brought them success in this, the shortest format of the game. Ricky Ponting, after 4 games and a $400,000 wage, has scored only 48 runs at a strike rate of 72. To put this into perspective, the high scorer in this year’s IPL, Virat Kohli, has already scored 321 runs at a strike rate of 140.

If cricket is a game of numbers then Twenty20 cricket is doubly so. It doesn’t matter if you have 13,000 Test runs, as Ricky Ponting

does, if you are not scoring at least 120 runs per 100 balls then you are underperforming. Kumar Sangakarra is experiencing similar woes as captain of the Sunrisers Hyderabad franchise, striking at 95 per 100 balls and averaging just 17.

So why is it that these prolific Test run-scorers are struggling to display the class we all know that they possess? Test match batting is by nature very risk adverse in style. You wait for the bad ball and then you send it relentlessly to the boundary. In Twenty20 you can’t always afford to wait for the bad ball to come, you have to take a risk and turn good deliveries into bad ones. Twenty20 rewards considered risk taking.

There is one unlikely Test match veteran who has bucked the trend. 40 year-old Rahul Dravid has been retired from all forms of cricket, except the IPL, since March last year but has clearly not been using the time off to work on his handicap. After 4 games Dravid has already scored two half centuries and is among the top 10 run scorers in the tournament, showing that neither age nor a Test background should be a barrier to success in T20.

Dravid had prepared himself so that he has risk-rewarding shots to play even when the bowling is good, something Ponting and Sangakarra should try and emulate. Too often the problem for them has been facing too many dot balls and creating pressure on themselves, forcing them into an inappropriate shot.  The key to success, it seems, is preparation. These are the last of the generation who have not grown up with Twenty20 cricket. Rahul Dravid has shown that this generation have all the required skills, they just need to develop a method for using them.