As this year’s IPL concluded, it is clear that every one of a paceman’s assets in T20 has been systematically stripped away. Short balls are dispatched over leg-side boundaries, full deliveries whipped or ramped to the fence and good-length balls bludgeoned into second tiers, coining the term “upper-decker”.
In IPL qualifier 2 - the match that determined who will meet Kolkata Knight Riders in the final - the South African mauler Heinrich Klaasen slotted the first ball he faced from Trent Boult straight over the sightscreen. Batsmen even have a deft response to the bowler’s last resort, the wide yorker: steering or slashing it behind square on the off side. Anything remotely out of the striker’s reach is a wide or no-ball. And a sluggish over rate costs the bowler a boundary fielder for the last few overs. In T20 fast bowlers are in effect running in naked.
Last week's County Championship Hampshire’s young opener Toby Albert ground out 20 (unbeaten) off 100 balls. Before that Gujarat Titans openers, Shubman Gill and Sai Sudharsan, slayed the Chennai Super Kings attack for 14 an over in a stand of 210 off 17.2 overs. With teams registering unprecedented totals in the IPL, the 1,000 sixes mark breached for the third successive season and in record time - one every 13 balls - and the World T20 on the immediate horizon, bowlers are being ritually humiliated.
A quick glance at their report card from this year’s IPL demonstrates that even pacemen of the highest class - Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc - as well as one day specialists such as Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Sam Curran have been brutally spanked. The unorthodox and consistently brilliant Jasprit Bumrah is an anomaly, conceding just more than six an over. Most others are going at nearly double that. It is why England have been so desperate to reintroduce their Bumrah equivalent, Jofra Archer.
The Indian crowds appear not to care about the bowlers. But the administrators should, because this IPL has become basically a firing range, with the bowlers rather than the batsmen as the targets. The victims have had enough. This is from a seasoned coach (and former batsman) in the IPL: “Bowlers are in shock. They have not encountered anything like this batting onslaught.”
