Tail Tale

A classical shot from Sachin Tendulkar is no big deal. He is expected to do so, all the time. Poor performance from such experts hurts like criminal offence – “Oh damn! How could he do this!” However it becomes a big deal when someone who isn’t expected to face any balls stands through overs and even scores runs – “Wow man! How could he do this!” A tailender could make you feel as happy as a dog is when it is wagging its tail. Interestingly these days tails wag quite often.

Well, this doesn’t have to be a tongue twister of a read. It is a simple observation that lower order batsmen are no more afraid of being at the crease. This courage could be because of the T20 culture which has brought out the pinch hitter in the likes of Harbhajan Singh. The cheekiest remark that he has made in the press was before last year’s India-Australia series – “watch out for my batting” is what he had to say to his favorite rivals. He almost pulled it off along with Praveen Kumar in a recent match.

Praveen Kumar doesn’t only swing the ball both ways but he swings himself too, between the ball and bat I mean. He has been an all rounder for Uttar Pradesh. If I was collecting only Indian specimen then choicest of the current lot would be Amit Mishra for redefining the role of a night watchman. On both the occasions that he has been sent for this task he has batted like a true batsman with some classic shots in his armor. I once asked an old veteran bowler how it feels to be assigned the task to bat ahead of specialist batsmen, to which he replied that only the players with some batting capacity would be sent in as a night watchman and thus it becomes a good opportunity for them to score. Of course no one would’ve asked Courtney Walsh to do so. No matter how entertaining it could’ve been.

Nowadays even the eleventh man doesn’t put up a dramatic display of nerves, except for a little fumble by someone like Ashish Nehra. I think I once saw him take a sigh of relief when he took a single to rotate strike. However in the previous India-South Africa ODI he put up a brave show. Sadly he gave away the runs he scored while defending.

These are just a few instances of substantial efforts by tailenders, that too from recent Indian matches. This makes me question how many of these have translated into wins for their teams. I can’t think of any such scenarios. Contribution of tailenders is at best a bonus for the team’s score. Sometimes it could be a saving grace, but it is far from being the case of a tail that can wag the dog.

This post was published on my blog HOOKed! at Cricket Aakash