At the thick end of a batting evolution in cricket

Berserker batting style championed by game’s big hitters has been offset by dousing of wickets like what fans saw witnessed in Saturday's IPL matches in Abu Dhabi.

Virender Sehwag’s 37 was the highest individual innings in the IPL yesterday. Ravindranath K / The National

Former India international Sanjay Manjrekar recently provided illumination into how modern bats are helping batsmen perform the way they do these days.

In a video demonstration Manjrekar compared the edge of his bat, used in 1996, to the edge of a bat fresh from a factory today.

His old bat, and particularly its edges, looked “anorexic” in comparison to current versions. It was not just the increase in the thickness of the edge that was important, he said, but the lighter weight of the bats.

Batsmen do not have to middle a ball these days to send it great distances. With the amount of wood behind an edge, a miscued shot still travels to the boundary. This is not news but Manjrekar’s demonstration of how it has happened proved revealing.

More than anything else, this advance in bat-making has been responsible for changes in batting, although batsmanship seems to have evolved at a rate disproportionate to the technology.

The Indian Premier League (IPL) is the typical manifestation of that. Yesterday at Zayed Cricket Stadium, several of the game’s batting innovators were playing.

In the evening game there was Virender Sehwag, who can rightly be considered the first exponent of berserker-style batting.

There was a long period when Sehwag was the freshest thing to have happened to batting. Though his technique remains difficult to replicate, it was his thinking that was so new and influential: see ball, hit ball whatever the situation: intent, and bat, will carry it through.

In truth Sehwag never quite mastered Twenty20, but his thinking has wrapped itself around the format like a virus.

That was not so long ago, really, and yet everywhere you looked yesterday was someone who had made, or was making, Sehwag’s methods already look dated. This is how rapidly the changes have come.

In the first game, for instance, his one-time India teammate Yuvraj Singh was at the crease for Royal Challengers Bangalore. It was Yuvraj who, seven years ago at the first World Twenty20, took apart Stuart Broad in a 36-run over.

At the time, Yuvraj seemed to tear through bowling attacks. Against a bowler the class of Broad it was a rare six sixes in an over that, after the first three, somehow seemed inevitable.

Later yesterday came Glenn Maxwell and David Miller. They both batted alongside Sehwag for a period and, though he outscored their combined contribution, those two made him and Yuvraj look like dinosaurs.

The range of shots, the power behind their hits, the inventiveness and, above all, their intent dwarfed Sehwag and have done so throughout this season. So much so that his 30-ball 37 looked like a raggedy grind.

There was the occasional touch – a zinger of a boundary over extra cover – but Sehwag looked unsure and a little out of place, very much a man whom time has left behind. That he strides out to the crease these days bespectacled is appropriate. It is Maxwell and Miller – and players such as David Warner and Aaron Finch – who are the new frontier men.

Yesterday’s supreme irony was that Sehwag’s was the highest score of the day from 39 individual innings. It was somehow the most meaningful batting contribution, and that is the flip side of this evolution.

Another equally crucial development alongside improvements in bat technology has been the dousing of surfaces across the world. That has probably predated even the buffing up of bats.

So when they come across a surface that helps bowlers to any degree, as they did in Abu Dhabi, batting minds are immediately scrambled.

Yesterday, fast bowlers, such as Morne Morkel got pace and bounce. Others generated swing and enough movement off the surface.

The spinners had a time of it as well, Pravin Tambe and Piyush Chawla finding turn and grip. They must have loved as well that the boundaries were longer than the usual Twenty20 game; in Abu Dhabi, in fact, they have been as big as they usually are for Test matches.

The result of all this was a highest score across four innings of 132. One team was out for 70, the other lost four wickets chasing it and another scraped over 100 runs.

As much as some things change, they stay the same.