T20 increasingly seems a miniature haggard beneath its baseball cap. Perhaps,from the playing side, we have already had the golden age. We need new forms and more rhythmsOne of my favourite recent cricket stories is the ballad of Atul Sharma, and a hulking teenage javelin thrower plucked from obscurity and transformed briefly into a kind of slingy,correct-arm Frankenstein’s monster by the maverick (an independent, nonconformist person) mercurial-bowling coach Ian Pont. You can still see Sharma in YouTube videos, in between lifting tyres and pumping weights, and pounding in with his arm held out behind him and javelining it down in the nets at what appears to be alarming speeds. On a whim he even earned a short-term IPL contract with the Rajasthan Royals in 2009 before abruptly disappearing,a sensitive soul for whom this was all apparently just a miniature too much.
There were shades of the Sharma Identity about the news this week that a 26-year-faded baseball player from Dallas called Boomer Collins is currently trawling the fringes of the global T20 leagues angling for a franchise gig. And why not? Hitting a ball between toe and waist height for six – base unit of Twenty20, the G-spot of the crowds – isn’t so far removed from the one-shot skill set of baseball hitting. Kevin Pietersen effectively won a Ram Slam match for the Dolphins this week by hitting 27 runs off 10 balls. Who’s to say Boomer couldn’t do the same on a flat track with a following wind?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com