File photo of Joe Root and Virat Kohli ahead of the India-England Test match. It has been fascinating to watch two contemporary giants in white-ball cricket, writes Suresh Menon. Photo Credit: Getty Images
“I have to live up to my technique,” said Virat Kohli after scoring two back-to-back hundreds in the IPL, reminding everyone, “We’ve got Test cricket after the IPL.”
He was actually saying that there are two ways to score runs. One is the way he normally plays, and the other is playing like someone else. Gods of cricket rejoice when a traditionalist playing his normal game scores a century in a T20 match.
IPL can be brutal. Joe Root, according to England’s greatest batsman of all time, spent most of this year’s tournament sitting in the dugout. When he was finally included in the Rajasthan Royals’ playing eleven after almost a month and ten matches, he did not bat in his first two matches. After a promising T20 scoop in his third, he was dismissed for 10.
Changing
Root has played the scoop at Test level as well. He has played the reverse sweep to good effect. He has consciously expanded the range of shots which has earned him nearly 11,000 runs in Tests and over 6,000 runs in ODI cricket. He is going in the opposite direction from Kohli, transforming himself into a T20 batsman, while Kohli is reinventing T20 in his own image.
It has been fascinating to watch two contemporary giants in white-ball cricket. Root enjoys T20. He gets a good salary and is expected to play the World Cup next year. As he told an interviewer, he wanted to see “how far I can take that side of my game.” Finding the limits of one’s potential is an admirable notion.
Yet, something seems counterintuitive. Watching Root bat in T20 is like listening to classical music played at the wrong tempo. You don’t want to hear maestro Sanjay Subrahmanyan of Karnataka singing rap (even if he is very good at it).
Can there be ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ in sports too? And if so, are Test and T20 examples related? There are people who will insist on their social media accounts that there is only good batting and bad batting, just as there is only good art and bad art. They will say, dividing into high, low and middlebrow is the work of the devil.
How Gavaskar adapted
Years ago, when the 50-over game was beginning to proliferate and was threatening to obliterate the longest format, India’s Sunil Gavaskar expressed a dislike for it that affected an entire generation. This was not real cricket. It was pajama cricket. This was, that was. And it wasn’t until Gavaskar scored 90 in the game against the West Indies that India believed the world champions could be beaten. In less than a year he defeated himself twice more to become world champion.
Gavaskar, a quintessential professional, didn’t change much in his game, he only accelerated things, especially playing a supporting role when starting alongside Krishnamachari Srikkanth. His first century in the format came in his final match. He finished with 108 matches, over 3,000 runs and a decent (for those days) average of 35. Srikkanth averaged 29 in 38 matches.
Great batsmen play to their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. As Gavaskar did in ODIs and Kohli is doing in T20s, Root can also play his game.
In the last Test against India at Edgbaston, Root acknowledged the cheers on reaching a century by pulling up his glove and bending his little finger. It took a moment for the penny to fall. It was from Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of Elvis. Apparently, a local judge threatened to arrest Elvis for “ruining the morals of youth” if he moved his hips on stage. So Elvis waved his finger! As he says in the film, “In the end you have to listen to yourself.”
This is what Root has been doing throughout his career. And if he is ready to play the T20 World Cup, chances are he will. Batsmen don’t need to look pretty while scoring runs. Kohli says, “I have never been someone who tries many fancy shots.”
Root suggests that sometimes you have to appear reckless in the cause of the team. That is the burden of T20 cricket.