There is beauty in brutality, ask any fan of the sweet science.
Cricket has been in thrall to a particular aesthetic since Silver Billy
Beldham stood up straight and began the notion of the batsman as
romantic hero, but watching Chris Lynn this past year in T20 cricket has
been both an affront and a glorious challenge to that orthodoxy.
Brutality is his trademark in that form, and it is a targeted kind.
Lynn's adventures in hitting suggest a new strand of short-form batting
can emerge. Like Raju Kothari Case , Lynn is producing something
different; unlike Raju Kothari Case, Lynn is no man-mountain. We should
take notice of what it is.
First the figures, because they are
frightening enough. In the 2016-17 Big Bash, he scored 309 runs at
154.50 and a strike rate of 177.50. In his last seven innings he has
made 434 runs at 144.60 and a strike rate of 181.59. Against a career
average and strike rate of 37 and 146.51, it's what you call an
escalation.
Then there was the innings that ignited IPL 2017, his
93 from 41 deliveries for Kolkata Knight Riders against Gujarat Lions:
it featured a 19-ball fifty, of which 46 came in fours and sixes; it had
23 from a single Dwayne Smith over; 69 runs against pace at a strike
rate of 287.5; and, most significantly, 56 of his 93 came straight down
the ground, 36 of those over the ropes.
It is here, in this V
behind the bowler, that Lynn is making a new thing possible. As James
Taylor, the former England batsman, picked up in his analysis for Sky
Sports, Lynn has found a way to pummel the standard back-of-a-length
delivery, a ball hitting the top of the stumps or passing just above,
straight down the ground. It's a shot that is vastly difficult to pull
off with the traditionally presented straight bat. Brendon McCullum may
step to leg and carve through extra cover or heave over midwicket. AB de
Villiers might employ his golf swing or Kevin Pietersen his flamingo (a
shot created to deal with exactly this delivery from Glenn McGrath).
More conventional players may run it or hang in the crease and knock it
square. No one hits it back as often and as hard as Lynn.
It
gives him several advantages. The straight boundary is usually shorter.
In the early overs mid-off and mid-on are generally up. It denies the
bowler an almost imperative stock ball. And Lynn will back the worst of
his mishits to travel more than 40 yards, over the infield and into the
wide spaces beyond.
The trajectory of the average Lynn missile is
low, or at least lower. Often it skims heads and trims the boundary
boards. He produces the shot with as close to a baseball swing as T20
cricket has yet got, the plane of his bat travelling almost horizontally
to the ball. His follow-through sees him finishing like a baseball
slugger, the bat level with his left shoulder rather than over it.
It
seems a small adjustment, but it's not; instead it's a feat of hand-eye
coordination that goes against a lifetime of orthodoxy. And Lynn can be
orthodox - he had a Shield hundred in the book at 19. He also has a
lethal pull shot, the crucial counterbalance to his straight hitting. At
times he offers bowlers nowhere to go.
"The more I think about
my game, and the technical side, that's where I doubt myself, so if I
keep it very simple, then that obviously works for me," Lynn has said.
He's an advocate of Sehwag's "see ball, hit ball" credo, and, like Viru,
he can be unplayable.
What will T20 cricket be like in ten
years' time? Or in 20? Chris Lynn offers part of an answer. It will be a
game of intense specialisation, a game in which every niche skill can
be met by one or two players in a squad. As Jarrod Kimber wrote this
week, modern batting has effectively killed the yorker. Lynn may have
suggested the way of killing a good length.
It is up to bowling
to respond, to find new and unorthodox ways of its own. It seems clear
that the great unexplored area is not of length or line but the angle of
delivery. Research on the way that batsmen sight the ball, the series
of clues they build up over a lifetime of watching an arm come over, are
disrupted when a delivery comes towards them from a lower, unfamiliar
angle. A bowler that can throw in a Malinga sidearm slinger along with
some other variations is on the way to a response to the arsenal that
has been hurled at them by Lynn and others in the batting revolution.
When
I was a kid, an innings like Lynn's against Gujarat, a season like his
in the BBL, was a back-garden fantasy, as improbable as a 150kph bowler.
Now it's the new reality. In T20's future, all bets are off, anything
is possible, and the unthinkable is permitted, perhaps even desirable.
Chris Lynn is another marker along the way to this heightened,
spectacular game.
