The ball was just fine. The speed gun clocked it at 89mph, which made it one of the quickest the left-armer Trent Boult would bowl all day. It landed short, in line with leg stump, and, delivered from over the wicket, shot on towards the top of off. Only this time, just fine wasn’t good enough. Jos Buttler was on strike and before Boult had even released the ball he had begun to move his right leg square across his
Ben Gedeon Jersey stumps, switch his grip, and bring the bat down and around to lift the ball over his left shoulder and away above the head of the wicketkeeper. Buttler turned to watch it fly, with the wind, up over the sightscreen and into the gantry, where a startled cameraman had to turn and stoop to fetch it and toss it back down below. Boult spun on his heel and walked back to his mark, head down. Boult, who takes his ODI wickets at 25 each, is ranked sixth in the ICC’s ODI rankings but before the Champions Trophy the BBC polled the team captains and asked them who is the best bowler in the world. Boult finished second behind Mitchell Starc. Mark Wood enjoying making the difference for England in Champions Trophy Read more Here, though, he was helpless. It was a breathtakingly brilliant bit of batting, premeditated because Buttler saw fine leg was up and had second-guessed the length Boult was going to bowl. It was a shot that would have seemed, still did seem, completely inconceivable to a batsman who played only a few years before. Nasser Hussain did a verbal double-take as he tried describe what he’d just seen. “What a shot that is,” he said, as if he were speaking to himself rather than the rest of us, “what an incredible shot!” Buttler flicked his bat as it made contact, like a chef tossing a pancake, to hoist the ball extra high. He had been quite restrained. He was 36 off of 38 balls when he played it and it was only the third boundary and first six he’d hit. But his bat works like a steel trap, so quick to snap into action it seems he has rubber sinews and springs in his wrists. It takes audacity to even conceive of such a hare-brained shot and bravery to
http://www.minnesotavikingsauthorizedstore.com/brett-favre-jersey-elite commit to it. This last quality, Buttler says, is key. “It comes foul when you’re thinking: ‘Shall I do it? Shan’t I do it?’ I say, at end of his mark: ‘Look, I’m going to take this on, 100% commitment.’” Advertisement These are fragile traits, easily depleted. England have been doing their best to build them up in Buttler and his team-mates ever since Paul Farbrace took charge in that watershed ODI series against New Zealand in 2015, when they ran up consecutive scores of 408, 365, 302, and 350. In the third of those games, England were all out with 28 balls of the innings left unused. Eoin Morgan, just last week singled out by Farbrace as the “biggest factor in England’s success in the last two years”, decided to defend his team and their approach from everyone else’s criticism. “From time to time we will get bowled out,” Morgan said, “so it doesn’t disappoint me that we didn’t bat the 50 overs.” As Farbrace said, before that series, Morgan “talked to players about going and playing your way – there’ll be no one getting stuck into you if you get out playing an ordinary shot.” It is a line Morgan has held to ever since and it explains why he and Trevor Bayliss stuck with Jason Roy even though he has scored 52 runs in eight ODI innings
Derek Watt Womens Jersey this season. Only five days before Buttler hit that six against New Zealand, Roy had tried a similar sort of shot against Bangladesh. He scuttled across his stumps and flicked the ball straight to fine leg. While Buttler had taken a little time to get his eye in, this was in the third over and Roy had faced only seven deliveries. It looked a damn-fool way to get out, which is precisely why you need to be so brave to play it. The Recap: sign up for the best of the Guardian's sport coverage Read more Most cricketers grow more averse to risk the older they get, as they come to better understand the stakes they are gambling with but Morgan wants his batsmen to feel that they are allowed to fail. And the best way to do that is by protecting them from the old culture of English cricket that saw batsmen be pilloried for playing the reverse sweep, or for failing to play themselves in before they started taking risks. As RC Robertson-Glasgow wrote of Harold Gimblett: “Some remarked that perhaps he is too daring for the grey-beards. My own view is he is also too daring for the majority of the black-beards, the brown-beards, and the all-beards who sit in judgment on batsmen; in short, too daring for those who have never known what it is to dare in cricket.” This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just
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