An overconfident approach

It is not a matter of losing a game and getting that bad game out of the way. In cricket, like in any other sport, one can win and one can lose; after all, that’s why players are participating and that is to see who is the better team on the day.

Nicholas Pooran, captain of the Trinbago Knight Riders, made the following statement at the completion of their match against St Lucia Kings:

“In hindsight, you want to get the bad game out of the way, but for me, I’m really pleased.” Pardon me? Is he serious? This was a game in which his team, TKR, were bowled out for 109 runs and were wiped away when SLK ambled to 112 for three wickets inside 12 overs.

Losing is not the point here, but being brushed aside in an embarrassing manner. A winning side, top of the table, together with SLK, and being blown away like a junior team, is completely out of character. A leading team, to fold like a bottom-of-the-table side and be so completely overwhelmed, is humiliating.

Pooran continues, “We played five games in a really short space of time here in Trinidad. And it’s very difficult, mentally and physically. We have an aging group in our side, so I must commend the guys for being professionals both on and off the field to get themselves in position to play this game…”

I suppose the players he’s referring to as an aging group are Andre Russell, Kieron Pollard, Sunil Narine, Colin Munro, Darren Bravo that come to mind. However, the skipper cannot be criticising the players who are long in the tooth when they are the main ones who brought his side victory. Then again, if he’s complaining that their workload is too heavy, well, whose fault is that? The SLK?

What is so difficult for professional cricketers to have problems playing T20 cricket? After all, it’s only twenty overs a team. To play any form of sport, one has to be fit to be able to stand the grind.

In the game of cricket, there are three basic formats: a) Test cricket, in which a bowler can bowl endless overs, b)One-Day-Internationals, when a bowler is limited to ten overs an innings and c) T20s, where a bowler is only allowed four overs. Hence, in a T20 tournament, for a bowler to bowl four overs a day for even four or five consecutive days is nothing at all for a fit cricketer. Also, the maximum number of overs a batsman can bat is twenty overs an innings, which I submit is “chicken-feed” for any fit cricketer.

When asked if the likes of TT Legions’ Breakout T20 league title-winning captain, Joshua Da Silva, may get a chance to play before the play-offs, the skipper says everyone deserves a chance to play. He remarked: “We want to give everyone an opportunity on the team and we feel like in order for us to be successful, everyone needs to contribute. For us as a group and a franchise, we are big on development as well. It would be really nice to give the guys who haven’t played yet an opportunity. But our first priority is getting enough points to finish in one or two.”

Apart from the silly, nonsensical excuse of aged players with too much cricket heaped on them, Pooran, at no time, attempted to explore the real reasons for the failure of his team in that game against SLK. If he had applied some knowledge of cricket, he might have been able to analyse the game and recognise the reasons why the batting of TKR failed so badly.

No cricketer learns the game of cricket by playing T20 games only. He has to have a basic foundation in the game and study why various things take place and how it can be rectified. The best T20 players have all had some success in first-class cricket. Many of them don’t seem to understand why it should be so.

The main reason lies in the essence of the game, which is the pitch. The pitch determines the way a game unfolds. However, batsmen and bowlers need to know how to use their skills on respective pitches that they would encounter in various games. In the TKR/SLK clash, the pitch was slow with variable bounce and height. The overconfident batsmen, without any concern, went about playing their strokes as if it were a perfect wicket, much to their dismay. Newsday