Asia

What India expected from Rishabh Pant, Ashwin delivers – an aggressive cameo

January 3, 2022
Henry Club

Didn’t tinker with batting technique and set-up as much as he has done in years. One of his flip-books at the crease would bring so much variation that he would be surprised: the bat is touching the ground, high in the air and parallel to the ground.

That’s just the bat. The knee has also been deformed to various degrees over the years. It flexes up and down at the crease, it remains a bit firm, straight. There are variations in the upper body as well. Straight, crouching, in-between.

So does the hand. He can move that batting back and forth at the crease as he does these days. The elbow can also be bent, as now, ala Imran Khan, also the angle of his posture; It’s been mostly side-on but he’s also tried the open-stance.

Obviously, he is someone who loves to bat; After all, as a child, batting was his first love, not only in gully cricket, but also in competitive cricket, until an injury opened the door to the world of offspin.
As mentioned above, overthinking can be quite entertaining and interesting to watch. It is not easy for a batsman to manipulate like this. In the past, through a series, he has had a different set-up as per the conditions and pitches.

Sometime in the last 18 months, she got the sense that she should stop fussing too much. Ajinkya Rahane Some straight talking helped.

“A lot of my batting was about me thinking internally about what was happening with the crease, the set-up, the technique and all that sort of thing. Whereas my batting was more about the hands, getting the ball through and thinking more like tactical thinking rather than technical,” Ashwin said last February.

“Ajinkya” [Rahane] It was instrumental in letting me know that I’ve been thinking a lot over this and have yet to get it done. All those things played a big role but that innings Sydney really set the tone for me,” he had added.

That innings is already a part of cricket folklore. The fight with the body, the fight with the Aussies, the intense focus to even imagine someone could defend for hours, and the discipline was usually enough for an innovative batsman to curb all those urges. .

In Johannesburg it was far easier to compose. Not in execution as there were not many runs from the top order batsmen, the pitch gave strange variable bounce but in terms of mental discipline. It was clear that an attacking cameo was the way to go and they wasted no time doing it.

He drives on-the-up, punched the infield but into the V, and drove every opportunity. He had the bat stuck in his hands at the crease, the elbows were crooked, and the swing of the bat was very fluid. He is one of the best timer of this Indian team.

Unsurprisingly, South Africa tried to get him out. Always a job done with him and always worth a try. His hip swivel can be a little slow at times, and he can pull it off laps in the air. He has also found it difficult to swing or duck and has not tried to bat the short ball more often. So in Sydney, he correctly decided that the risk-percentage was not in his favor and hit the body.

It has been going on like this since last one year. Not only in Australia but then he came back and acted in his hometown Chennai with a ton England, Tactically, he is very smart: he knows when to attack, when to defend. He identifies the right pace of batting better than many.

And so his overthinking has let him down in the past. “My batting was more about the hands”. He was taken aback by that realization and could not score consistently. In an interview with Cricbuzz a few years back, he talked about how he had become “defensive” in his mindset while batting. and intends to solve it by relying on his instinct. And great batting hands.

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