All posts by h716a5.icu

He’s no Shoaib Akhtar but one had to watch him close to notice how good he was, and his very few magic balls

Andrew Fidel Fernando10-Mar-2022Did you watch Suranga Lakmal bowl? No, really. Did you watch him closely? It’s ok. It’s human. Be honest. If anyone wouldn’t really mind, it’s Lakmal.Our man captained five Tests for Sri Lanka. In the third of these, he did not bowl at all in the first innings. In the second innings, he sent down just two overs.Related

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Why? Because he is who he is, and felt largely surplus to requirement. In this 2018 series, South Africa had surrendered en masse to Rangana Herath and Dilruwan Perera in the first Test. They were nosediving spectacularly again on a bone-dry SSC pitch, until, inside 35 overs, they were all out for 124, three spinners having bowled right through the innings. Lakmal’s two overs in the second dig were mainly to give the spinners a break.That’s Lakmal concentrate. Rational. Ego-free. Almost invisible. Bring a great ball of his to mind? Yeah, neither can I. Great bowling performances, though, there’s the thing. You don’t have to bowl magic balls to bowl a good spell. And that is where Lakmal lived. Draw a venn diagram. The space common to “bowls line and length”, “swings it a bit”, “seams a little”. Colour that segment in. That’s Lakmal territory.Perhaps, you’ll look at that Test average of 36.38, and think he was just a plodder. If you were being unkind, you’d say he one. Long of hair, longer of face, a gangly tumbling of over-long limbs – he’s no Shoaib Akhtar. He’s not even on that spectrum. He never tried to be. A gentle away-seamer, a smirk when the batter misses it. A turning of the heel, returning to his crease, a doing of all of the above again. You had to watch him to notice how good he was. Otherwise, he was almost invisible.Almost invisible to the Sri Lanka public, because his bowling only really got to really fly overseas, where Sri Lanka generally lost. A 5 for 63 in Port Elizabeth, 5 for 54 in Christchurch, 3 for 25 in Bridgetown, 4 for 39 in Port Elizabeth again, 5 for 47 in North Sound. Since 2016, he’s averaged 28.74 away from home.In that 2019 series that Sri Lanka won in South Africa, which perhaps should go down as their greatest Test triumph ever, there he was, averaging 25.5, keeping a lid on the opposition scoring while the younger bowlers hunted (successfully) for wickets around him. Not a man for the glory spells. The hard ones. In Galle, when nothing was happening, and there was a mild hope the ball would reverse. At the SSC, when the batters have started sweeping well, and the runs are flowing too quickly, and you need a guy to bring the rate down again, even if there’s no real chance of a wicket.When all you want is for balance to be restored, which for Sri Lanka, is a lot of the time in overseas Tests, it is where he shines. Those are the Lakmal overs.He probably would have got more overs if other fast bowlers had stayed with him. Sri Lanka would have prepared some slightly seamer-friendly tracks, if they had a seam attack, instead of a lone, reliable seamer. What could have he been if Nuwan Pradeep didn’t injure his hamstrings that often, or Shaminda Eranga didn’t have a kink in his elbow, or Dhammika Prasad’s shoulder hadn’t fallen apart, or even if Lahiru Kumara had delivered on his early promise?Instead, what Lakmal got at home were intensively spin-friendly pitches, on which he, and most others who bowled at more than 110kph, were sometimes redundant. In some ways, it is typical that Lakmal is right at the centre of an intentional erasure of seam bowling in Sri Lanka’s home Tests.He may get a fair showing from the pink ball, though. Across the two day-night Tests Sri Lanka have played, the first in Barbados, the second in Dubai, Lakmal averages 19.13, playing a significant role in winning both matches.At 35, he’s choosing to look after his financial future, moving to Derbyshire, instead of staying with the Sri Lanka national side, who pay him less than $60,000 a year, not including match fees. Here, for the first time, he appears to be acting in (understandable) self-interest.But in this last Test that he will play – against India – however, remote Sri Lanka’s possibility of pulling off an upset, we should do something most of us don’t really do with Lakmal. Watch him. Watch him close. There are very few magic balls. Only good spells. We can meet him there. He deserves that much.

Watching him put aside ego and get down with the grind in poker provided a reaffirmation that he was for real

Andrew Miller05-Mar-2022When you think of Las Vegas, you probably think of the desert heat, the neon lights, the replica landmarks and the revolting glitziness of the endless, tinkling casinos. You almost certainly don’t think of the world’s greatest legspinner, standing by some piss-infused bins, sucking on a “smoko” and ruing the one that got away.If there’d been an alley cat or two in the vicinity, Shane Warne might well have kicked them into the Nevada night too. For it was the dinner break on the first evening of the 2012 World Series of Poker main event, and Warne had just snuck out through the hotel kitchens after overplaying his final hand of the session to damaging effect.It wasn’t a tournament-ending setback – that would come some days later, after the initial 6598-strong field had been whittled down to the hundreds – but in cricketing parlance, it was quite literally that loss of concentration before an interval, all that hard graft squandered in a moment of avoidable rashness.Related

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“The flop came eight, jack, deuce, rainbow…” Warne would later tell me, in eye-glazing detail, as we shared a cab back across Vegas at the close of that day’s play. Every time he lost a hand, it was due to someone else’s good fortune, of course, rather than his own dumb miscalculation, but the sheer nerdery in Warne’s love of poker was never less than joyous to behold.For I genuinely believe that, in those otherwise awkward years between Warne’s retirement from cricket and his discovery of a true life after sport, his love of cards gave him a purpose and belonging that he simply could not have replicated elsewhere in his extraordinarily A-listed life.In a world where Warne could speed-dial personalities as polarised as Ed Sheeran or David Hasselhoff, and where – as Nick Hoult, his ghostwriter at the Telegraph, has memorably related – he was obliged to use code words and pseudonyms at hotel receptions to keep the paparazzi at arm’s length, there was something reassuringly wholesome about sitting anonymously at a poker table, for sometimes days at a time, re-channelling that extraordinary blend of bluff, grind and raw skill that had marked Warne out as one of the greatest sporting champions of any sport and any era.Personally speaking, however – having marvelled as a teenager at his seemingly fully formed arrival on cricket’s world stage – Warne’s all-consuming new passion offered an entry level insight into his remarkable psyche, as he attempted to translate his proven genius in one field to another, entirely different, mindgame.”[Poker]’s about skill, it’s about patience, it’s about not getting tired in the course of a 12-hour day,” Warne told me during that Vegas trip, for which – in an impressive bluff of my own – I managed to persuade the bean-counters at the Cricketer that an all-expenses-paid week of gambling was exactly what the magazine needed for its reboot.”You need serious powers of concentration and an understanding of when to push and when to sit tight,” Warne added, conferring the game with all the glamour of a day in the dirt in Rawalpindi. “You have to manage your frustration when you’re being dealt crap cards, or being forced to play safe because other guys are going mad. And sometimes you have to create something that’s not there…”Ah yes. The bluff. Was there any player in cricket’s history better at sowing doubt in his opponents than Warne? The knowledge of the moments in which he genuinely had the best hand and played it to perfection – and most things in that regard stemmed from the Ball of the Century at Old Trafford in 1993 – made his years of grift and bluster possible; those times in the late 1990s and early 2000s when his shoulder appeared to be held together by stringy pizza cheese, and only his multi-layered connivances were able to hoodwink a succession of opponents into tame and match-sealing surrenders.Mindgames R Us: Warne gets stuck in in Perth, 2006•Tom Shaw/Getty ImagesFor Warne was playing poker on the cricket field long before he turned to his cards for that post-career adrenaline shot. Unlike the quick bowlers who had ruled the roost before his arrival, there were rarely any route-one options when it came to outwitting the batters in his sights. He often needed to get his fish on the hook before he could reel them in – perhaps with a diet of ripping legbreaks, followed by the slider, as Ian Bell discovered to his cost at Lord’s in 2005, or perhaps with some expertly detonated verbals, the likes of which lured both Mark Ramprakash and Nasser Hussain to their doom in the 1998-99 and 2001 series.He seemed to find a personalised strategy for all calibres of rival. In a one-day final in Melbourne in 2000-01, Warne even greeted Brian Lara with a first-ball bouncer, a tactic that hit instant pay dirt when a riled Lara slapped a wild drive to cover in the same over. And then there was his long and storied rivalry with South Africa’s Daryll Cullinan, a batter who was so fazed over the course of so many setbacks that he turned for help to a psychiatrist – some two decades before they were accepted as a recognised part of a sportsperson’s preparation.That innate willingness to graft may have been at odds with Warne’s showman persona, but it was a key part of the deceptive image that he was able to present throughout an astonishing 15-year career. And when it came to poker, his new rivals may have known little of cricket, but most of them were better than average people-readers, and could see and respect the efforts that he was willing to put in to cut it on the tables.”He’s a guy I can introduce at events and say, ‘Hey, Ben Affleck, here’s a guy who’s more famous than you!” Phil Hellmuth, one of poker’s greats, told me during that trip.”Some of these sportsmen are really good at poker because they are competitive by nature,” Hellmuth added. “If you’re good enough to channel that and become great in your first career, it figures that some of these guys know how to relearn that and get good at something that will make them a new career.”As things turned out, Warne fell short of the money “bubble” on that 2012 trip – “I always overplay my jacks,” he admitted in a moment of post-elimination candour, while watching Hashim Amla rack up a triple-century at The Oval later that summer. And overall, he rarely got closer to a payout than in 2009, when his deep run in the tournament caused him to turn up a week late for his hugely hyped Sky Sports debut in that summer’s Ashes.But his love of the game was absolute. He kept putting himself through the glamour-free yakka of these vast deep-stack tournaments because there was nowhere he’d rather be – even if those games tended to be in vast aircraft-hangar-style conference centres, light-years removed from the penthouse glamour that poker projects on late-night TV, and where the all-pervading vibe was the fierce concentration and mild terror of a school exam-hall.2:03

In 2018, ESPNcricinfo’s Andrew Miller faced an over from Shane Warne

And in watching Warne put aside the ego and just get down with the grind, it was a reaffirmation of that sense we all had had beamed into our living rooms throughout the course of his matchless career – that in spite of the artifice of his art, and the apparent superficiality of his bleach-blond image, Shane Warne was entirely for real.In 2018, I was privileged enough to witness the truth of Warne in its full majesty. A chance, at the Kia Oval, to face a full over in the nets from the greatest bowler of my lifetime, and – at the behest of his old Ashes rival, Michael Vaughan – to “smash him out of the park”.Inevitably we talked poker while I was strapping on my pads – it’s how we always communicated in our intermittent meetings, with Warnie always keen to unload about some lucky sucker who’d cleaned him out the previous week – but two moments in particular stand out now, as I look back on a career highlight that is laced with more poignancy than I could ever have envisaged at the time.Firstly, there was his generosity of spirit, as he played along with my inept efforts to take him to the cleaners while imploring me not to hold back because I “probably [wouldn’t] get this chance again”. How devastatingly final that now sounds.But then, right at the end of the session, while signing off for the cameras, there appeared on Warne’s features a flicker of apparently genuine hurt, as I joked about how he had “ruined my childhood” with his routine dismemberment of my England heroes.The moment passed as quickly as it appeared, but it’s strangely haunting nonetheless, for it spoke to Warne’s most basic desire to be a people-pleaser – which, when you think about it, ought to be a given for one of sport’s great entertainers.It’s not always quite as linear as that, however. Not many megastars are quite so devoid of pretension as Warne remained to the end – even allowing for a hectic, jet-set lifestyle that only a man who burned at his wattage could have kept up with.But that glimmer of a tell does perhaps explain why Warne never quite raked in the poker millions that he always believed were his for the winning.

All the stats and records from the high-scoring opening T20I between India and South Africa

Sampath Bandarupalli10-Jun-202212 Consecutive wins for India in T20Is before the seven-wicket defeat against South Africa. It is the joint-longest winning streak for any team in men’s T20Is.212 Target chased by South Africa in Delhi, their highest successful chase in the T20I format. Their previous highest chase came in the inaugural World T20 game in 2007 against West Indies, where they chased down 206.126 Runs scored by South Africa in the last ten overs, the most by a team in a successful chase in that period (11-20) of a T20I. The previous highest was 125 by Australia against Pakistan in the 2010 World T20 semi-final, as they chased down the 192-run target from 67 for 4 after the tenth over.ESPNcricinfo Ltd1 India lost a T20I after posting 200-plus for the first time. They were successful while defending a 200-plus total on each of the previous 11 instances. The previous highest successful chase against India was exactly 200 runs, also by South Africa in 2015.131* The partnership between Rassie van der Dussen and David Miller. It is fourth-highest stand by any pair for the fourth or a lower wicket in men’s T20Is and the best for South Africa. Their previous highest was 127* between Faf du Plessis and van der Dussen for the fourth wicket against England in 2020.2 Number of partnerships against India in T20Is, which is higher than the 131-run stand between van der Dussen and Miller. Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan shared an unbeaten 152-run opening stand in last year’s T20 World Cup, while David Warner and Shane Watson put on a 133-run partnership for the first wicket in the 2012 edition.ESPNcricinfo Ltd14 Shreyas Iyer’s drop of van der Dussen in the 16th over cost India 14 runs. He was then on 29 off 30, and finished on 75 off 46, scoring 46 off 16 after the drop (including the run he scored off the ball he was dropped). According to the Luck Index, the other batters would have scored 32 off 15 had the chance been taken.75.76 % Percentage of runs scored by batters in this match through boundaries. It is the third-highest % in a men’s T20I with 300-plus runs coming through the bat. The highest is 76.1 % during the Auckland T20I in 2020 between New Zealand and West Indies, while 75.85 % of runs scored by the batters came via boundaries during the T20I between India and Sri Lanka in Indore in 2017.12.17 Economy rate of spinners in this match, the fourth-worst in a men’s T20I where they bowled ten or more overs. The four spinners – Keshav Maharaj, Tabraiz Shamsi, Yuzvendra Chahal and Axar Patel – collectively bowled 11.1 overs, conceding 136 runs for two wickets. All the four bowlers ended with an economy rate of ten and more.

He has played in just 14 of India’s 44 ODIs since the start of 2020 but remains crucial

Deivarayan Muthu21-Jan-20231:42

Shami on workload management: ‘I prefer playing matches’

The seam is bolt upright. Not even a hint of wobble. Finn Allen topples over like a house of cards. The ball clunks into the top of middle stump via a deflection off the back pad. Inducker after three outswingers. The perfect set-up. This is vintage Mohammed Shami. He strikes in the first over of the first-ever international game in Raipur to rouse a sellout crowd.Sure, there’s a smattering of grass on this pitch, though nothing as generous as a green seamer on the first day of a Test match in Hamilton. Shami keeps landing the ball on the seam to maximise the early juice. He keeps threatening both the edges. He doesn’t present width. He doesn’t offer the drive ball that New Zealand are searching for.Daryl Mitchell tries to manufacture that drive ball by shimming out of his crease, but Shami still beats him in length and has him weakly plopping a return catch. Mitchell throws his head back in despair. Shami throws the ball up in the air and wheels away in celebration.Replay – Ind vs NZ, 2nd men’s ODI

You can watch the replay of the second ODI between India and New Zealand on ESPN Player in the UK and on ESPN+ in the USA.

The drive ball never comes from Shami in the powerplay. Just one of his 24 in the powerplay was full, but even that wasn’t really hittable. Mohammed Siraj and Hardik Pandya back Shami up beautifully as New Zealand fall to 15 for 4 in ten overs. They are eventually rolled over for 108 in 34.3 overs.”Conditions were not as helpful to the bowlers as it may have appeared,” Shami said at the post-match press conference. “They got out early but conditions were not overtly bowler-friendly. We dismissed them cheaply by bowling a testing length. It was a damp wicket but it was important to keep good line and length. All the bowlers were disciplined and the result is for all to see.”New Zealand captain Tom Latham admitted that the unwavering accuracy of Shami and Siraj handcuffed their batters in the early exchanges.1:39

Jaffer: Shami unlucky in previous games, deserved his wickets today

“They obviously bowled fantastically well,” Latham said. “And like you said they were pretty relentless with the lines and lengths they bowled and that didn’t give us any easy scoring options and then obviously to be five down reasonably early on, I think just after the 10th or 11th over… Yeah, it was hard to come back from there. When you get bowled out for just over a 100 obviously makes things pretty difficult. So, unfortunately it was just one of those days where everything India did turned their way.”New Zealand briefly threatened a fightback through Michael Bracewell (who else?) once the ball grew older and softer. Shardul Thakur finally gave Bracewell the drive ball, and the batter drilled him down the ground for four. Then, when Shami returned to the attack, Bracewell carted him for three fours in six balls. Bracewell had laid into him in the first ODI in Hyderabad too but here Shami beasted the Beast. He ditched his attempted yorker, which disappeared to the boundary, for the big bouncer. He switched his angle from around the wicket to over the wicket and let rip a head-high lifter close to the off stump. Bracewell had very little time and room to work with and ended up top-edging it to the keeper. Game over for New Zealand.Prasidh Krishna or Umran Malik have been India’s chief enforcers in the middle overs of an ODI in the past two years. However, Prasidh is now on the sidelines, still working his way back from injury while Malik can’t find a place in this XI because India want some batting insurance at No. 8 in the form of Thakur. In their absence, Shami has stepped up with the old ball too and kept himself in India’s World Cup frame and Raipur couldn’t have been happier. The city had waited for a long time for its first international game and Shami ensured it was worth it, despite the match lasting just 55 overs. After the game ended early, a laser show kept the fans entertained. The show ended with a message to the crowd: “Chhattisgarh thanks you”. Perhaps, that was a message to Shami as well.India’s bowling depth is as unprecedented as their batting depth these days. Just like how Ishan Kishan made way for Shubman Gill immediately after smashing a double-century, Shami might have to make way for Jasprit Bumrah once he regains fitness. Which isn’t anything new. Shami hasn’t been an ODI regular for India – he has played in just 14 of their 44 games since the start of 2020. Siraj’s emergence has pushed him into the background a bit. But Saturday’s events proved he’s not the kind of player who goes quietly into the night.That means advantage India because how many teams can say they have a bowler like Shami as their plan B?

The recent Harshal Patel example tells us why players need to train for these dismissals

Aditya Prakash12-Apr-2023It is not often that you see a run out at the non-striker’s end. It is even less often that you see a failed run out at the non-striker’s end. Perhaps it is yet more uncommon to be in a situation where five runs are needed off the last over and it is a challenging ask for the batting team in a match where only one other over has gone for fewer runs. We got two out of three of these unlikely possibilities in the last over of the game between Royal Challengers Bangalore and Lucknow Super Giants on Monday.At the core of it lies a trite sentiment expressed by understandably shocked spectators: how on earth could Harshal Patel have missed that run out? That surprise might obscure a more complex, embedded, question: given that Harshal had uncannily perfect execution in that over, how could the run out be the thing he messed up?Let us start by regarding this situation from a more empathetic perspective, borrowing from the study of task-switch costs in psychology.Related

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In day-to-day life we often perform more than one activity at a time, such as watching a cricket match and tweeting about it. One can easily see how there is an impairment in the performance of either task that results from attempting to multitask. You may miss a magnificent six because you were too caught up in looking at your phone. It may take you several more minutes than usual to compose a tweet because you were distracted by a series of pressure-building dot balls in the match. In cognitive psychology, these different modes of activities are called task sets – representations of associations between information in the world and relevant responses to this information. As one swaps from one task set to another, there are initial impairments to performance – task-switch costs – while the existing task set is inhibited and the new task set is activated.Look back at the final over of the India vs Pakistan T20I World Cup game in 2022. One can think of Mohammed Nawaz’s unprecedented switch to medium pace from his previous three overs of left-arm fingerspin and his subsequent execution failures as a task-switch cost.Pressure can add to these switch-cost effects. In a losing situation – despite a rich history of a tactic or plan working successfully – a player or team might shortsightedly underestimate the effectiveness of existing plans and adopt alternative tactics that might seem relatively appealing under pressure. Moreover, research shows that time pressure itself (caused by a nervous bowler hurrying their rhythm, for instance) amplifies the effect of a switch cost. So pressure impairs performance by making alternative plans more attractive, forcing switch costs and amplifying these costs by causing bowlers to rush.A more fine-grained example of a task switch is the use of bowling variations, which often demand drastic changes in motor coordination. With disciplined practice, good bowlers can disguise variations and switch between deliveries with few flaws in their execution. Bowlers can train themselves to minimise or eliminate the effect of these switch costs between variations by bowling different types of deliveries a lot in net sessions. But in high-pressure situations, switching between different balls, which was so effortless in the nets, can suddenly prove challenging to execute. This is seen in the death overs of just about any T20 game when an intended yorker or flighted, wicket-seeking delivery becomes a full-toss.

Research shows that time pressure itself (caused by a nervous bowler hurrying their rhythm, for instance) amplifies the effect of a switch cost. Pressure impairs performance by making alternative plans look more attractive, forcing switch costs and amplifying these costs by causing bowlers to rush

Harshal has built his name on his death bowling, as was borne out by the fact that the match was not already won in the four balls preceding the failed run-out attempt. Like Dwayne Bravo, his success in this phase of the game rests on his signature dipping, slower yorker. Both these bowlers’ resounding success in the IPL (three purple caps between them) can be attributed not just to the difficulty batters have in hitting their signature deliveries but to how even the failed execution of this delivery – the dipping full toss – is difficult to hit. These players are not necessarily beasts under pressure; their success rests on even their “mistakes” having utility. In other words, just because Harshal can be effective at the death, that does not necessarily say he is invulnerable under pressure and to pressure-mediated switch costs.So, after concentrating his attention on the tasks of clinically bowling yorkers and short balls, Harshal readies himself for the final delivery of the game. Ravi Bishnoi had not been a non-striker to that point in the game, and there was no strong reason for Harshal to proactively keep an eye open for the possibility of Bishnoi leaving his crease early. Of course, Harshal will have had a non-specific awareness that this could occur, given how crucial it was that Lucknow Super Giants took the single.At this point perhaps Harshal simply plots another yorker in light of the relatively tighter field and the conditioning imposed by the previous delivery, which was short. As he gets into position for his run-up, he may well have got into “dipping yorker mode”, a rehearsed, finely tuned choreography – saunter, sprint, leap, release – that he has performed countless times in the nets and in match situations like this one with success.At some point during this sequence of actions, he catches a glimpse of intent from Bishnoi to run early, or perhaps he doesn’t see Bishnoi but quickly decides that there is no risk at this point in attempting a run out. Either way, given that he has already begun his bowling action, there is difficulty inhibiting dipping-yorker mode and therefore difficulty in efficiently adopting “non-striker-run-out mode”. As a result, an execution error occurs and the ball is declared dead.What if the run-out attempt was premeditated? The underlying switch-cost logic still holds. In this case, Harshal is aware that Bishnoi may leave his crease early in light of the game situation. In order to sufficiently fool Bishnoi into believing the ball will be bowled, Harshal launches into a general “bowling mode”, replicating most of the choreography mentioned above. In trying to realistically bait the non-striker, he devotes his attention to bowling mode. This makes the eventual inhibition of this mode difficult and subsequently leads to a failure in executing the secondary non-striker-run-out mode. The magnitude of this cost is perhaps amplified further by the implicit time pressure caused by rushing when nervous. In a sense, the razor-sharp focus on execution that preceded the run-out attempt amplified its error rate.The run-out action is not similar to anything else a bowler does routinely on the field, which is why it needs practice to effect smoothly•Patrick Hamilton/AFP/Getty ImagesWhat distinguishes the run-out attempt is that it is likely not something Harshal has practised to the extent he has practised actually bowling. More specifically, it is unlikely that coaches ever have had players practise disengaging from their run-up for a purpose beyond just stopping. As a result, most players likely do not have the required training required to switch without cost between the task of bowling and the task of running out the non-striker.Effecting a run out at the non-striker’s end is mechanistically among the most anomalous actions in a bowler’s repertoire. It is the least similar to any other action he routinely performs. This further amplifies the difficulty in switching from bowling mode to non-striker-run-out mode, relative to, say, switching from yorker mode to bouncer mode. Most (but not all) recent prominent examples of run outs at the non-striker’s end were effected by spinners, who have relatively modular and slower run-ups compared to fast bowlers. This provides them more time and opportunity to disengage from bowling mode and engage non-striker-run-out mode. In the heat of a game – especially for fast bowlers with quick, highly linear, stereotyped run-ups – run outs at the non-striker’s end are hard and should be practised like any other skill within the game.Unfortunately, this need is hindered by prominent coaches, captains, and other authority figures in the game not recognising non-striker run outs as a legitimate form of dismissal, to the point that it is suggested that should a player effect such a dismissal, the captain can opt to void the appeal.This confusion within the cricket community – which exists despite how clear the laws of the game are on the issue – may discourage players from training for a legitimate form of dismissal, leading to errors in execution during the moment of truth. Harshal’s own hesitation reflects the hesitation many in cricket have towards non-striker run outs generally. An event like this botched non-striker run out can indirectly serve as a reminder that teams need a full commitment to the laws of cricket, not to some nebulous “spirit of cricket”. This sentiment should not just be reflected in words and thoughts but also in training regimes and strategies, just like with any other element of cricket play.

Key questions for India during their three-match ODI series against Australia

Shashank Kishore16-Mar-2023After retaining the Border-Gavaskar Trophy by winning a challenging Test series 2-1, India switch focus to the ODI against Australia, their last three 50-over fixtures until July. And with the World Cup at home in October and November, every series is an opportunity to fine tune their best combination.India began 2023 with ODI wins at home against Sri Lanka and New Zealand and a number of regulars who missed those series, such as Ravindra Jadeja and KL Rahul, are back now. Others like Shreyas Iyer, Jasprit Bumrah and Rishabh Pant are out with injuries, with no definite timeline on their return.Here are some of the key questions regarding India’s team combination in the ODI series against Australia:Related

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Will Shreyas Iyer’s absence open up a spot for Suryakumar Yadav?Shreyas has been prolific at No. 4 – 805 runs at an average of 47.35 with two hundreds and five half-centuries in 20 innings – but injuries have been an issue lately. He missed the ODIs against New Zealand because of back stiffness and is now out of the Australia series with a recurrence of the same problem.Suryakumar Yadav took Shreyas’ spot during the New Zealand series and scored 31 and 14 in his two innings. However, he hasn’t been able to carry his explosive and consistent T20I form into ODIs. In 50-over cricket, Suryakumar averages only 28.86 with just two half-centuries in 18 innings. If India are determined to unlock his potential in ODIs, they could look to give him three more games against Australia.Ishan Kishan back to being reserve opener?Suryakumar will compete with Ishan Kishan and Rahul for places in the middle order. Kishan batted in the middle order during the New Zealand series, but wasn’t able to build on his record-breaking fastest ODI double-ton against Bangladesh in December.After that knock, Kishan was widely expected to become India’s first-choice opener, but the team management backed Shubman Gill in that role, a move that has paid off. While Kishan is likely to open with Gill in Rohit Sharma’s absence in the first ODI, he could slip back into being a reserve opener once Rohit returns.