Kolkata: There was a moment during the Guwahati ODI on Wednesday night when the question was no longer whether India would chase 406. It was whether anyone was still watching the bowlers.
The match produced five centuries—three from West Indies and two from India—for the first time in ODI history. Safe to say that from the first ball to the last, it was just a one-way show. West Indies scored their first 400-plus total in ODI cricket, but India still chased it in 43.3 overs, losing only two wickets, crossing 300 in 29.1 overs and 400 in 43rd.
Even Fraser Stewart—the MCC’s head of cricket—has acknowledged that the game has increasingly tilted towards batters despite the 2017 attempt to limit bat dimensions as an effort to curb the dominance of bat over ball. The ICC itself noted when the two-ball system and revised powerplay arrangements were introduced that playing conditions materially altered the balance between bat and ball. “Because the margin is very small. Because besides that, with five fielders inside, two new balls, and the kind of power-hitting there is now, bowlers don’t really have many options, plus, I think you can only bowl in good areas.
He acknowledged that the records were outstanding and the entertainment value obvious, but argued that there had to be more of a contest. That is why, as a coach, as a support staff, the first thing you look at is, were they able to execute their bowling or their plans properly? The Guwahati match exposed that distinction brutally. Five individual hundreds in one ODI sounds like a celebration of batting abundance. It is also a warning that the currency of a century is being diluted when conditions make run-scoring this easy. But cricket is not supposed to be a collection of batting skills performed in isolation. Its fascination comes from interaction—the fast bowler trying to intimidate the batter in the opening overs, spinners changing pace and angle, the captain moving a fielder, the batter attempting to manipulate a field, the ball reversing, gripping or deviating just enough to create doubt. Remove too many of those variables and the game becomes something closer to batting practice with a scoreboard. This isn’t an isolated gripe. There was a time the one-day game was considered a format in which neither side had complete control. It was shorter than a Test, but long enough for conditions, tactics and fatigue to matter. The introduction of two new balls, successive changes to fielding restrictions and the expansion of power-hitting have steadily shifted the equation.
Gautam Gambhir, India’s head coach, put it more bluntly after the match: “This is not cricket, this is only batting”. Young bowlers, he said, need some “sympathy” and “margin” because there are occasions when their figures make them look worse than they have actually bowled. “Often you can’t be hard on bowlers, because sometimes bowling figures are such that they haven’t bowled as poorly as their figures suggest,” he told the broadcasters. “That’s helped to have an effect but we still see balls flying a long way,” he was quoted as saying at an umpires’ workshop at DDCA recently.
