Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE, Melbourne
YEARS from now, we will call this the Henry Ford World Cup. As in, you can have any game you like as long as it involves a glut of runs.
Ten matches into the tournament, six of the first innings totals soared to 300 and more. More than 100 runs were scored in the last 10 overs five times. In three of them, just two wickets fell in those overs. In another, none went down.
“You can plan for every batsman, but they have that much ability that they can play opposite to your plans,” Virat Kohli said, which was rich coming from one of the outrageous exponents of super-batting.
Willing pitches and fast outfields - big and small - are one thing, and T20-fuelled inclination to hit the ball into the next hemisphere are understandable. But playing conditions as well as bats designed to rip the heart of the contest and hand it to batsmen on a plate amount to cruel and inhuman punishment of anyone who would dare mark out a run-up.
“We were discussing this the other day and AB (de Villiers) wasn’t too interested in the discussion because it chops and changes,” Russell Domingo said.
Easy for de Villiers to think, what with his habit of outdoing even Kohli at the crease. But Domingo could offer only an empathetic shrug: “That’s just the way it is and that’s what we’ve got to deal with, and it’s the same for all sides.
“The two balls might help the bowlers but under certain conditions maybe it makes batting easier because the ball stays harder for a lot longer.
“The (maximum of) four fielders out on the boundary (throughout the innings) has been the most challenging thing for the bowlers, particularly at the end of the innings.
“A lot of people have questioned us about our back-end bowling, but a lot of teams are travelling because of the four-fielder rule.
“It’s still a fairish contest, particularly in the first 15 overs. The last 10 overs, if a team have wickets in hand, can be lopsided.”
It is Allan Donald’s job to stop that from happening when teams bat against SA, but he did not seem confident of being able to do so.
“I’m not surprised that we’re seeing these big scores,” Donald said. “It’s going to come down to the bowling skills at the end if you’re chasing – and it is chaseable; a target of 320 or 330 is chaseable.
“If you’ve got enough ammo left at the end and you’ve got proper hitters at the end, that’s exactly what is going to happen.
“That’s what we expect from a bowling point of view, that we’re going to have a find a way to defend a target. No target is safe now.”
Except that it has not panned out that way. In five of those six 300-plus first innings, the team batting second has not come within 60 runs of what they need to win. Clearly, some targets remain safe. Better yet for bowlers, in those five games the chasing team have been dismissed.
“Teams who have tried to slog it out in the last 10 overs usually don’t pull it off,” De Villiers said. “Grounds here (in Australia) are big; you have to place the ball rather than hit for the boundaries.”
De Villiers and Kohli not swinging for the fences? As if ...
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