With the football season now drawing to a close, the avid TV
sports fans are scouring the channels to find their next fix of entertainment.
Many would be daft not to take a look at the impressive road show that is the
Indian Premier League, now in its seventh season would you believe.
The IPL will claim itself as the innovator in the growth of
world T20 (the fact is it was in England that the game was first launched
domestically, albeit on a smaller scale), and it has now seen the birth of many
spin offs, Australia’s Big Bash, The Bangladesh Premier League and the
Caribbean Premier League to name but a few. In fact, it has now forced the
English T20 to look at a re-launch of its own domestic competition, which in
its craze for more games and money in the first few years, lost its real appeal
of the initial success, which was Friday night matches for all to enjoy. I for
one, am looking forward to taking in the T20 Blast this weekend.
There is no doubt that the growth of T20 has accelerated the
dominance of the bat over the ball. This may not be a bad thing necessarily, I
know. People pay to watch batsman score fluently, and smash the ball to all
parts.
Some of the more innovative developments have seen the
creation of new shots, particularly with regard to ‘switch hitting’ and
‘reverse bat shots’. Just like in my other sport of hockey, reverse hitting has
become a crucial component of the top level performer and has transformed the
game. The terms ‘reverse’ and ‘switch’ are often interchanged to mean the same
thing, but are they actually the same? For me, it is a distinctive one and it
is crucial.
A reverse shot is one which is played with the hands in a
traditional grip but the bat rotated as to alter the face of the stick. So for
a right hander, they would keep their left hand higher on the grip than their
right. A switch hit, will see the batsman swap their grip from a right hander
to a left hander. By switching, it enables the batsman to swing more natural
through the left hand side. A reverse shot, is a more difficult process and
while it can be developed, power is harder to come by, and the range of hitting
reduced.
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| Kevin Pietersen playing a switch hit. Notice how he effectively bats left handed. |
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| Ian Bell playing reverse, his hands remaining in the same position on the handle. |
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| Here Beeston's Heather Morris plays a reverse stick pass. |
For me, switching is an unfair advantage against the bowler.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a brilliant innovation and one that is of course a
risk for the batsman as it has to be a pre-meditation, but what is in effect
happening is the batsman is changing from being right handed to left handed at the
point of delivery. If the bowler does this, it is called a no-ball, yet the
batsman can do it without consequence. In my opinion, we can go two ways with
this.
Firstly, we could allow the bowler to bowl with their other
arm. Now granted, there won’t be many bowlers who could deliver effectively
with their wrong arm at the moment (although I know JT has been working on his
left arm delivery for 20 years), but what a great innovation that could be!
After all, nobody had really seen switch hitting a couple of years ago.
My second suggestion would simply be that as soon as a
person ‘switches’ then they are treated as batting the other way around. As a
result, the wide rule alters to the other side, as does the LBW law. This would
then add an element of risk to a switch hit, which puts the bowler on a more
even keel, and gives them an option to apply a tactical approach with their
line.
After all, why should it be that batsmen are the only ones
to get to innovate?
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