How to Bat with the Tail - The Tendulkar Edition

Scene: It is the final game of the first class season in India. You are the greatest batsman your country has ever produced. You are batting on 109 off 164 balls when your team - the recently crowned domestic champions, lose their 7th wicket still 166 runs short of the opposition score. It is your job to try and get your team the first innings lead which is likely to be enough to win you the match. What do you do?

You face only 33 of the remaining 87 deliveries (38%), although you score 31 runs off them. Breaking it down partnership-wise, you face 28 of 66 balls (42%) for the 8th wicket, 4 of 19 (21%) for the 9th, and 1 of 2 (50%) for the 10th. You take a single off the 1st ball of the over 6 of the 11 times you are on strike to start the over, with your team losing two its last 3 wickets in those 6 overs. Also, only once in four times that you are on strike for the fifth ball of the over do you take a single so that you might face the first ball of the next over. What's worse, two of these times are when you cross over during the fall of a wicket.

I am not going to go into the reasons behind this since I don't know what goes on in the minds of people who are not me. There are still two days of cricket left in the match & although Mumbai are 144 runs behind, they can win this match should they take the 9 remaining wickets with an hour or more to go in Day 4. All I'm going to say is they didn't give themselves the best chance to get close to or surpass the total put up by Rest of India.

Shooting Yourself in the Foot

A few months ago I wrote a post on a parameter to gauge how efficient a partnership is. Yesterday was a classic case of a team getting it wrong and losing a chance to gain an advantage.

Virender Sehwag set out like a house on fire like he always does, scoring 64 off 63 before close of play on Day 2. India were chasing a mammoth score of 642 on a flat pitch and needing to win this test if they wanted to win the series. The only way it could happen was if Sehwag batted through the day, and even then the odds for an Indian win would have been tall.

Well they certainly didn't help themselves in trying to shorten them. The pair did decently well on Day 2, working at an efficiency of 54 percent. However, for some inexplicable reason Vijay ended up taking a lot more strike on the third morning. He faced 62 of 90 balls from the start of the 21st over to the end of the 35th. His scoring rate (32 off 62) during this period was decent by test standards Sehwag at the other end was scoring much faster (21 off 28). The partnership efficiency for this passage of play was just 31 percent.

What it also did was slow down Sehwag's charge as he was getting hardly any strike. Even before he got out on 99 he had been dropped at backward point when he was on 89 and had offered a half chance to backward short leg. The man likes to see runs being scored and the opposition always looks to get him out by cutting off his boundaries, although he's smart enough to keep his tally going by taking the singles on offer. However, he can't do anything about the score if he doesn't get the strike. It sounds very simplistic and obvious and yet if you see most of his innings you'll see he invariably ends up facing less deliveries than his partner(s).

I'm not privy to what was discussed in team meetings or on the pitch but if I were Gary Kirsten I'd instruct my batsmen to look for singles when they're batting with Sehwag. Put away the odd bad delivery but the first instinct should be find a gap and get Sehwag back on strike. Not only will it increase the scoring rate, it will also get the other batsmen going and they won't be stuck when Sehwag is finally dismissed.