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Cricket : A Slow Game... Is It?

 

   Cricket : A slow game… is it?

        By Sayandeep Dutta

Cricket is a very slow game. A verdict that is universally accepted which I beg to differ with. According to me there are two aspects of the game, one is mental and the other one is the physical aspect.

F1 being one of the fastest sports of the world along with bike racing and some other forms of racing and if we want to take the horse power away, some of the fastest include ice hockey, basketball, table tennis, etc. When we are looking at sports only as a physical activity then yes, these are regarded as the fastest sports in the world.

If we divert our mind to individual sports we can see that it is all about the mind-set of the sportsperson. It is all about taking decisions. It is all about fraction of a second which separates the best from the rest. It is all about taking the right decision at the right time, and the right time only waits for a fraction of a second.

Every time a Formula One driver or a Moto GP rider sits on their respective vehicles for a race knowing at the back of their mind, one wrong decision and your soul may rest in peace. Yes, the time they get to take any decision is fraction of a second and the parameters they have to keep in mind are, the turnings, the required speed, the tire condition, the pitch condition, the opponents vehicles, the space, the regular commenting from the team members, etc.

Usain Bolt, the fastest man on the planet, gets 9 and half seconds to prove to the world how much he has put into his practice since childhood. At the IAAF world championships 2009, he had to go out of the race for making 2 false starts. Yes, even there the decision he had to make was within a fraction of a second and the parameters were, the race time, the speed gathering, the gun sound, etc. This incident also proves, no matter how great you are, it is all in your mind.

Coming back to cricket, if we can put ourselves in a batsman’s shoes and consider ourselves as the greatest of them all, playing at a big stage, we can somehow understand what are the parameters to cover while batting and what about the decision making time. A pitch length is 22 yards. A batsman stands probably one yard ahead of the wicket and the ball is delivered from the other side at least one yard inside the far end wicket. The total distance the ball travels is about 20 yards at a speed of 135-140 KMPH and even more leaving the batsmen only fraction of a second to decide which shot to play. The parameters batsmen have to consider are:-

1.      The length of the ball.

2.      The amount of bounce and carry.

3.      Direction of the ball swinging after it leaves the hand of the bowler.

4.      Amount of swing.

5.      Pace at which it is coming.

6.      Amount of deviation of the pitch.

7.      Direction of the deviation.

8.      Whether to play on the front or back foot.

9.      Whether to leave, play defensive or offensive shot.

10.  Fielder placement.

11.  Moving towards the ball.

12.  Lifting the bat and at which angle it should come down.

13.  Get yourself positioned

14.  Hit the ball

These are the decisions a batsman needs to make while playing a ball within a fraction of a second. Even a 10 second event like a 100 m dash gives you nine more seconds to recover from a bad start but for a batsman if the ball is good enough and the decision taken is poor then, you are back in the hut with no second chance to recover unlike a sprinter who even after a bad start can pick up pace and win it.

If you still think cricket is a slow game, think again, is it? And if we still think that physical speed defines the pace of a game, then I can definitely say somewhere across the globe someone or many might have clocked a 9.57 seconds or less to save his life while they are chased by a tiger but he will never be called the fastest man on the planet because he never calculated these parameters while running and not even waited for the gun to blow.

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