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After two years of cancelled fixtures due to the pandemic, the England Visually Impaired cricket team is using the downtime to regroup and refocus

Andrew Miller03-Dec-20211:40

Meet England’s Visually Impaired Cricket team

“There’s so much danger in your local high street, even around your own home,” Nathan Foy says of his day-to-day existence. “Where else can I run around in any direction, and the worst that’s going to happen is, I run into an umpire?”Foy is a blind cricket legend. He has been the central personality of England’s Visually Impaired Cricket team for two decades and counting, including a period in the mid-2000s when he was indisputably the best player in the world.And now here he is conducting a fielding drill at Edgbaston, flinging himself bodily this way and that, pouncing on a stream of plastic balls filled with rattling ball bearings that offer his only sensory clue as to what is coming towards him.Foy is taking part in a two-day training camp in the indoor school, as the VI squad continues its re-emergence from a period of stasis during the pandemic. It’s clear from his commitment, there is nowhere he’d rather be, even if – at the age of 41 – he’s beginning to creak at the seams.Related

• Blind cricket struggles for recognition in India (2014)

• No sight, no problem (2012)

• Lots of cheer as India win T20 World Cup for the Blind (2012)

“I used to be able to do things with my body,” he says. “Now I do them in spite of my body. I used to do the long jump and the triple jump when I was younger. From the waist down I look like an Olympic athlete, but up top I’ve just got a dad bod now.”Right up at the top, however, in the mind of a man who has attained alpha status in his extraordinary, and extraordinarily nuanced, sport, Foy enjoys a freedom that he doubts he could have replicated in any other walk of life.”Throughout my life, cricket has been a real rock to me,” he says. “I struggle to walk down the street without my guide dog, he keeps me safe. But here I can roll around on the floor, and just feel a real part of a team. Not everybody gets that opportunity.”

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For the past year and a half, however, nobody in the VI community has had that opportunity. Covid may have wreaked havoc with mainstream sporting schedules, but it was nothing compared to the blanket debasement of the disability programme. England’s VI squad suffered the postponement of the Ashes in consecutive summers in 2020 and 2021, and while there are tentative plans for another World Cup in 2023 – at which the squad hope to improve on their run to the semi-finals in India four years ago – nothing so ambitious can yet be set in stone.And so, despite some optimistic noises about next summer’s schedule, there’s not yet much expectation that normality is returning in a hurry. “We got our hopes up briefly earlier this summer,” says Justin Hollingsworth, the team’s vice-captain and opening bowler. “Everyone got back together for a couple of outdoor training [sessions], and then it was all called off again. But it is what it is.”The England Visually Impaired squad gather for a training session•ECBAnd yet, for John Cook, England VI’s head coach, the enforced downtime hasn’t been entirely without its benefits. Excellence may be the benchmark by which he and his team ultimately seek to be judged, and bridging the gap to the subcontinental titans, India and Pakistan, will be crucial if blind cricket is ever to take the sort of mainstream leap that the Paralympics managed at London 2012, and become recognised as an elite sport in its own right.But the void that Covid created in the VI schedule has provided a chance to re-evaluate the human aspect, and to broaden the base of a game that – with its oversized rattling balls and underarm bowling actions – has always seemed one step removed from the more familiar versions played by England’s Physical Disability, Learning Disability and Hearing Impaired squads.”Most people in society can be engaged just by taking some care and consideration,” Cook says. “It might be a simple case of communication – saying hello and goodbye, being polite and encouraging – but for us it’s also about the environments that cricket is played in. We’re not trying to say it’s easy to spread the game and make it more accessible, but actually it’s easy to find a way, and we’ve just got to go about finding that way.”The route that Ed Hossell, England’s captain, took to VI cricket epitomises how haphazard opportunities in the sport can be. As a teenager Hossell was diagnosed with Stargardt’s disease, a degenerative condition that affects sharp, central focus. It meant that his involvement with mainstream cricket was inevitably going to come to an end, but a chance encounter with a small advertisement in Sainsbury’s transformed his relationship with the sport.”Cricket was the last thing on my mind, really,” he says. “But then my mum found this flyer for Somerset’s visually impaired cricket team: ‘Trials here. Give us a call.’ So I turned up, and I loved it, and I’ve never looked back… excuse the pun.””It’s not heresy, it’s just different,” Cook says of the sport’s obvious alterations. “These are cricketers, looking to play cricket in cricket grounds. It really ought to be as simple as that. But what can be complicated, as we’ve found out, is that some players might live a mile away from a club but logistically it can take them three-quarters of an hour in the opposite direction on public transport before they can find their way in.”To that end, Cook has invited 40 community coaches along to Edgbaston, to observe the training session and absorb the sport’s nuances, and ultimately to indulge in a bit of myth-busting when they return to their local clubs with ideas for broadening the sport’s base.”Previously there were just two of us trying to prepare the team for a world tournament,” he says. “But with the help of 40 other people, surely that can only be a better thing – not only for the inclusion of people with disabilities, but for those who want to support them as well. It’s mind-boggling to think of the possibilities.”

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England vice-captain Justin Hollingsworth bowls with a plastic ball filled with ball bearings•ECBA VI cricket team comprises players from three sight categories – ranging from the partially sighted B3s and B2s to total blindness, B1. There need to be four players of that last kind in any given XI.The quickest bowlers in the format tend to reach underarm speeds of 65-70mph, and each delivery is required to bounce at least two times, once in each half of the pitch, thereby causing the ball bearings to rattle and give off aural clues to the waiting batter.However, as assistant coach Jason Wood notes, there’s no quarter given in the cut-and-thrust of a contest – the tactics, in fact, are almost refreshingly discriminatory. When batting, for instance, there’s a clear advantage in tailoring your shots to pick out the rival B1s in the field. And for bowlers, if you can impart enough centrifugal revolutions to force the ball bearings to grip the outer casing of the ball, it effectively goes silent for crucial split seconds and increases your chance of deception mid-flight.”It’s a ruthless, sneaky game,” Wood says. “And some of the guys are very, very good at it. We’d love to develop a see-through training ball with multi-coloured ball bearings, so that we could really see what goes on inside and get properly scientific about it. But really it’s no different to mainstream cricket, where the ability to swing or spin the ball means that the batter is unable to judge where it’s going visually.”Not that any such trickery ever seemed to hold back Foy in his pomp. In this format, runs scored by B1 players count double, which means that any team that can build its strategy around its most disadvantaged players can secure itself a considerable head-start. At the Blind World Cup in 2002, Foy proved just that with two mighty centuries, including a career-best 232 against Pakistan and an unbeaten 152 against India, which sealed what remains England’s only victory over the most decorated team in the format.”I hold loads of world records for run-scoring in blind cricket, and a lot of that comes down to training myself very specifically to listen to the ball,” Foy says. “People talk about hand-eye co-ordination. Well, I believe in hand-ear. I’ve taken catches too, which is really hard for a B1, but when the ball’s in the air, it’s like I can almost see it in my mind. And you don’t just want your hands to be co-ordinated, you want to feel it in your whole body, because that’s so important for the game.”Foy’s prowess hasn’t been without controversy, however. In the 2008 Ashes, accusations started flying around in the Australian media that he “wasn’t blind enough”, despite the fact that all B1s wear blackout glasses to ensure a level playing field. But to hear his own life story is to be reminded of the extraordinary hardship that goes into creating disabled champions.”I have a congenital version of glaucoma,” Foy says. “Most people get glaucoma when they’re 60-plus, it’s a gradual build-up of pressure in the eye and it starts to damage the optic nerve. But I got that in the womb, so by the time I was a teenager, I was effectively blind. The world looked very, very bright to me, but at least I could tell the difference between shades of light and dark, so I was able to get around quite well.Nathan Foy has been England’s most prolific run scorer, with over 3500 career runs•ECB”But then, about three years ago, I detached my retina. And I went from a world that was far too bright to just dark… really, really dark, almost black. I had swapped one kind of blindness for another kind of blindness, and it affected things like my balance, and my ability to be a parent. And I found that really hard.”And yet, in spite of such apparent helplessness, Foy keeps pressing on with his place in the sport – not only because of the sense of liberation it still gives him but also because his refusal to be defined by his limitations is exactly what takes the sport beyond being a pastiche of able-bodied cricket, and lends it an identity all of its own.”Everyone in blind cricket looks to the B1s for guidance,” says Wood. “Sometimes, when you look at other impairments, it’s not always obvious what the difference for those players is. But here, you very quickly realise, wow, these guys can do stuff that we just cannot do, because of the skill base that they have developed. If we can turn that perception on its head, and make our B1s into match-winners, that gives us a massive advantage.”

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Part of the secret of Foy’s long-term success is his homespun batting technique, which involves staying low to the ground – primed for the sweep-dominant technique that the underarm trajectory demands – but then chopping at the ball, almost as if wielding an axe.”At that moment when the bowler bowls, there’s such a small amount of time to decide the line of the ball and how fast it is going,” Foy says. “I use my bat like I’m chopping down a tree, and try to hit the ball at the very end of my bat with maximum acceleration. If I mistime that and the ball’s hitting the stumps, that’s it.”To build up his resilience at the crease, Foy’s regime includes sessions in which he is pelted with plastic balls to ensure that he’s not scared of being hit, and that wholehearted approach manifests itself in his goalkeeper-style fielding too. “If you don’t get down quick, you can leave a gap under your armpit,” he says. “For me, fielding is half the fun of the game. If you use your entire body, nothing’s going to get through.”It’s a far cry from the traditional backgrounds that many of England’s B2s and B3s brought with them to the sport. But it’s inspirational too, because for several of these players their sight loss is a journey with only one destination. Therefore, to absorb these lessons now will hold them in huge stead, as and when they progress to B1 status too.Take Hollingsworth, for instance. At the age of 12, he was part of Warwickshire’s youth set-up, competing alongside the likes of current first-team squad members Henry and Ethan Brookes. “But there came a point during a night-game, the bowler kept hitting me on the thigh pad and I realised, ‘I’m not seeing this at all,'” he recalls. “So I had to walk off and that was the end of that.”England captain Ed Hossell got into blind cricket after his mother saw a flyer for Somerset’s visually impaired cricket team at a Sainsbury’s•Getty ImagesWithin three years Hollingsworth was playing for England’s VI team, initially as a B3, but he’s now categorised as a low-end B2. “That comes with its own challenges,” he says, “as people get used to the fact I’m no longer so good with the bat or in the field. I’m more of a bowler these days.”When I first started playing, I started out with front-foot drives and forward defensives, but that’s just not going to work in this format,” Hollingsworth adds. “But catching and fielding is pretty much the same with minor adjustments, so you can generally tell the guys who’ve come from a cricket background, because they have that basic knowledge.”It’s just a really interesting game,” Hossell adds. “I think it’s a great spectacle, irrespective of being a disability sport. It’s very tactile because you can really hear the noises off the bat on the ball, and the scoring rates are really high. But above all, it makes you view your sight in a very positive way, not to get too sentimental about it. All the guys will say we’re so lucky to do this.”

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Hossell’s seven years as an England cricketer have encompassed two World Cups, in South Africa in 2014 “where the pitches were close enough to Table Mountain even for us to see it”, and, most memorably, in India in 2017, where the crowds were so passionate – not least for India’s victory over Pakistan in the final in Bangalore – that they had to be asked to be silent at the point of each delivery.”That tour was an unbelievable experience,” Hossell says. “It was non-stop. And that is exactly the kind of experience that we could never have dreamt of having without so much support for disability cricket. They are some of my most cherished memories, and long may they continue.”Covid spikes notwithstanding, it’s hoped that those memories could yet be added to in the summer of 2022. That delayed Ashes series is due to be reinstated, and though the ECB endured a painful round of funding cuts in the wake of the 2020 lockdown, the proportional scaling back of the disability programme has been mitigated by the sport’s sheer lack of overheads in the intervening 18 months.The stasis certainly didn’t hit the players in the pocket – all of whom are amateurs with a range of diverse occupations, from university lecturers to financial analysts to policy writers. Foy works full-time for Guide Dogs for the Blind Association – “Most of the services don’t involve the dog at all,” he says. “We’ve got more children’s services than adult’s services, so that keeps me busy.””The pandemic has given us a chance to take a really massive deep breath,” Cook adds. “We’ve recomposed the way that we want to try and win, and the style and philosophy that we want to develop. So now we just wait with bated breath to see those opportunities return to our timetable, and be ready and prepared to take them off.”

Having been widely derided for the squad they assembled at the auction, they now sit near the top of the IPL table

Hemant Brar22-Apr-2022In February, all the talk about Gujarat Titans revolved around how they had messed up at the mega auction. Their batting looked thin, the overall balance awry, and some of the players they picked had underwhelming IPL records. On top of that, they had an inexperienced captain who was coming off an injury. But as we approach the halfway stage of the season, Titans are at the top of the table with five wins from six games. Here are some of the factors that have played a part in their success.Strong bowling attack
Rashid Khan, Lockie Ferguson and Mohammed Shami make Titans’ bowling unit one of the strongest in IPL 2022. With the new ball, Titans have been incisive as well as frugal. Their powerplay strike rate of 15.4 is the best in the tournament and translates to 2.33 wickets on average in the first six overs. Their economy rate in this phase is 7.33, the second-best among the ten teams.Their seamers, especially Shami, have benefited from early-season grass on the pitches. “It’s important to use the new ball well,” he told . “And when you have got multiple options for the back end, it becomes almost imperative to look for wickets up front.”Titans have dominated the back end too. In the death overs (17-20), they are by far the most economical side, conceding only 8.41 per over. To put that in context, Delhi Capitals, the second-best side on that table, have managed an economy rate of 10.15, while Mumbai Indians, currently the most expensive side in that phase, have conceded 13.05 runs an over. On average, Titans have conceded 18.56 runs fewer than Mumbai per game in just those last four overs.Shubman Gill 2.0
In IPL 2021, Shubman Gill had a strike rate of 118.90. This despite Brendon McCullum, his coach at Kolkata Knight Riders, insisting on the need for aggression. This season, though, Gill seems has found that extra gear while still maintaining his silken touch. He has scored 200 runs in six innings at a strike rate of 151.51. Among openers with at least 100 runs this season, only Prithvi Shaw, Jos Buttler and David Warner have scored at a quicker rate.Gill started the tournament with a duck but in his next match he posted his highest T20 score: 84 off 46 balls. He bettered it against Punjab Kings, scoring 96 off 59. Titans won both those games.Multiple match-winners
Five different Titans players have won the Player-of-the-Match award in their five wins: Shami against Lucknow Super Giants, Ferguson against Capitals, Gill against Punjab Kings, Pandya against Rajasthan Royals, and David Miller against Chennai Super Kings.With multiple players stepping up, Titans have been able to make up for the poor form of Matthew Wade and Vijay Shankar. Wade has managed only 68 runs in five innings at a strike rate of 107.93 and Vijay 19 in four innings at 54.28. Against Super Kings, they won even when Pandya was unavailable and Gill fell for a first-ball duck.When all else fails, send in Rahul Tewatia•BCCIFinishing on the right side of close games
In T20, a single over can change the result of a game, and Titans have been on the right side of that equation on two occasions. In their game against Kings, Titans needed 13 from the last three balls. At that stage, ESPNcricinfo’s Forecaster gave them a 6.85% chance of winning. A needless throw by Odean Smith made it 12 required from two balls, and Rahul Tewatia smashed back-to-back sixes to take Titans over the line.Similarly, against Super Kings, Titans had only a 4.20% chance of winning at the end of the 17th over in the chase. Rashid then whipped Chris Jordan for three sixes and a four in a 25-run over to make Titans favourites, before Miller wrapped up the win off the penultimate ball of the match.”We could have probably lost four out of six [matches], and we won five out of six,” Miller said after the game. “The dice has definitely rolled onto our side.”Abhinav’s contributions
Abhinav Manohar, who is playing his first IPL, might not have won games on his own, but he has played important cameos in almost every other match. Against Super Giants, when Titans needed 11 from the final over, he hit Avesh Khan for two fours off the first two balls to all but seal the game. Against Royals, he struck 43 off 28 balls, taking on Yuzvendra Chahal in the process and adding 86 for the fourth wicket with Pandya to set the platform for a big finish. In five innings so far, he has batted everywhere from No. 4 to No. 7, lending the team flexibility to adapt to various situations.

Widespread use of the helmet has saved dozens of lives, but concussions in the game are now more common than before

Tim Wigmore and Stefan Szymanski01-Jun-2022After Phillip Hughes’ death in 2014, Peter Brukner, the Australian team doctor, and Tom Gara, a historian at the South Australian Museum, conducted an analysis, funded by Cricket Australia, of how common fatalities were in the sport. Until then, no national boards had ever compiled numbers on how many players were killed while playing the game, either at amateur or professional level. Gara spent weeks labouring over newspaper archives from Great Britain and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, going back to 1850. Brukner swiftly learned that “deaths were more common than I thought”.The authors identified 544 cricket-related deaths in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and Ireland: an average of around 3.25 per year. The true figure is likely to be considerably higher: their search only covered three cricketing nations, and the Australian coverage was incomplete. The deaths were split about equally between formal and recreational games.The macabre list of deaths in cricket the researchers compiled included a spectator being killed by a ball hit into the crowd by his son; a fielder killed by the impact of a bat hitting their chest; and a boy killed by standing too close to a teacher demonstrating a shot. But about 80% of the fatalities recorded were caused by the impact of deliveries striking batters above the waist, with a significant majority of these hitting the heart or higher. Gara, a committed club cricketer “expected to find perhaps 20-30 deaths” sustained playing cricket in Australian history. Instead, he found 176. “I am still playing cricket and will continue to do so for as long as I can, but I am much more careful.”

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Batting for Marylebone Cricket Club against the touring West Indians in a first-class match at Lord’s in 1976, England opener Dennis Amiss received a blow on the back of the head from Michael Holding, one of the world’s most ferocious quick bowlers. Despite the blow, Amiss continued to bat. He hit 203 against West Indies in a Test later that summer, defying Holding and underlining his status as one of the finest players of fast bowling in the world.Related

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Yet he retained uncomfortable memories of being hit. After World Series Cricket – the breakaway competition featuring many of the world’s leading players that launched in Australia in 1977 – signed him up, Amiss, who was 34, feared the consequences of suffering another blow.”I knew that I would be facing a lot of Australian and West Indies bowlers who would be delivering the ball at 90mph,” Amiss recounted to the . He reached out to a motorcycle helmet manufacturer in Birmingham and asked him to make an adapted helmet to absorb potential blows, using conventional fibreglass with a polycarbonate visor. “He came up with something lighter than the fibreglass motorcycle helmets around in those days. It had a visor that could withstand a shotgun blast at 10 yards,” he recalled. Initially, the design covered a batter’s ears with unforeseen consequences – “we had a spate of run-outs”. A later model solved the problem by incorporating an equestrian design.In the hyper-violent NFL, it is estimated that about 20-45% of professional players are affected by Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a degenerative brain condition caused by repeated blows to the head•Getty ImagesWhen Amiss arrived in Australia at the end of 1977 with his customised motorcycle helmet, he became the first player to wear a helmet in a professional game. A month into World Series Cricket, the Australian batter David Hookes was struck in the jaw by the Caribbean quick Andy Roberts. He crashed to the ground, dripping blood.It was the moment the helmet went from eccentricity to necessity. As Hookes had surgery – depriving World Series Cricket of one of its most attractive cricketers for the next five weeks – Kerry Packer, WSC’s backer, ordered a batch of Amiss’ helmets to be flown out from Birmingham, hoping that they would help protect his other assets.As word of Hookes’ accident got out, Tony Henson, the owner of Sydney and Surfers Paradise, a company specialising in equestrian caps, sensed a business opportunity. Henson asked a colleague, Arthur Wallace, to arrange a meeting with World Series Cricket representatives, as Gideon Haigh recounts in . Wallace returned from his meeting saying, “It can’t be done, Tony. They want us to make something that can withstand half a house brick at a hundred miles an hour.”But it could be done: helmets could at least deflect blows and lessen their impact. In the months ahead, helmets – most initially without visors to protect players’ faces – became ubiquitous at the top levels of the game, and rapidly spread through cricket’s ecosystem as they became more affordable.What began as an emergency solution to the dangers of facing the quickest bowlers in the world turned into one of the biggest improvements in player safety in sport. “Helmets basically wiped out the most common cause of fatality, which was a blow to the head,” said Brukner. “Since the advent of helmets, I don’t think there’s been a death from a direct blow to the head. Helmets are very good at protecting you from death. The reason people die when they’re hit in the head is that it causes a bleed in the brain, and that’s the thing that kills them – that’s the thing that you’re protected from by a helmet.”Graeme Wood was felled by a Michael Holding bouncer in a 1983 World Cup game and was taken off the field and to hospital unconscious•PA Photos/Getty ImagesResearch conducted by Brukner and Gara shows how much safer helmets have made players. Over the course of the 1970s, there were nine recorded fatalities in Australian cricket – five in organised games and four in informal ones. Over the following 36 years, from 1980 to 2016, there were only ten recorded fatalities, with just five in the 26 years from 1990, when wearing helmets became the norm even at recreational level. And so the growth of helmets ought to be acclaimed as World Series Cricket’s most important legacy – an innovation that has saved dozens of cricketers’ lives since.

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The next catalyst for cricket to take head injuries more seriously was the death of Hughes. StemGuard helmets were developed swiftly after: these have a neck-guard made from foam and plastic that is attached to the helmet.In an Ashes Test at Lord’s in July 2015, eight months after Hughes’ death, the Australian opener Chris Rogers was struck by a short ball from Jimmy Anderson. It hit him behind his right ear and landed on his StemGuard. Rogers was one of the few players then wearing the new protection. Brukner told , “We both said to each other afterwards, if he hadn’t been wearing it, who knows what would have happened?”Yet neck guards are still not compulsory around the world. “It still amazes me that some cricketers don’t wear them,” Brukner says. When Steve Smith was hit on the neck by Jofra Archer in 2019, he was not wearing a StemGuard.Alongside a change in technology, changing the laws of the game can also help to protect players. The introduction of concussion substitutes – first used in Australian domestic cricket in 2016, and in Test cricket in 2019 – may have reduced the number of concussions indirectly. In many cases concussions are thought to be caused not by a single blow but by repeated ones. Concussion substitutes help to destigmatise a player retiring hurt after a head injury, ensuring their teams aren’t penalised. In this way concussion substitutes help to reduce the risk of second impacts after an initial concussion, which could be very serious or even fatal.Australia team doctor Peter Brukner: “The reason people die when they’re hit in the head is that it causes a bleed in the brain – that’s the thing that you’re protected from by a helmet”•CA/Cricket Australia/Getty ImagesYet, with neck guards and concussion substitutions alike, the puzzle is why safety measures that mitigate risk have not been embraced the world over. Domestic competitions in most Test-playing nations still do not allow concussion substitutes.

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While direct fatalities in cricket remain extraordinarily rare – less than the chances of dying in the car on the way to a game, Brukner notes – death is not the only risk associated with suffering a blow to the head. Across American football, football, rugby and a range of other sports, recent years have highlighted the long-term effects of repeated blows to the head. These may be related to “sub-concussive” events: blows to the head that do not directly lead to concussions. Repeated impacts to the head – from heading a football to collisions with opponents in American football or in rugby – can lead to degenerative brain injury.In July 2017, a study examined the brains of 111 deceased NFL players; 110 of them showed signs of a degenerative disease, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head, of the kind that routinely occur in NFL games. About 20-45% of professional American footballers may be affected by CTE during their lifetime, explains Thomas Talavage, a concussion specialist at Purdue University. In 2015, a class-action lawsuit settlement between the NFL and more than 5000 former players provided up to $5 million per retired player for serious medical conditions associated with repeated head trauma. A range of other sports have also faced lawsuits.Cricket has been warned. Just because players are rarely killed by bouncers, there is no guarantee that bouncers will not have catastrophic repercussions for these players later in life. A 2020 study by a group of scientists, including John Orchard, Cricket Australia’s chief medical officer, identified situational factors associated with concussion in cricket based on video analysis of elite Australian men’s and women’s matches. It found that 84% of head impacts occurred to a batter on strike against a pace bowler, with most of the others sustained by close fielders. No deliveries by spinners in the study led to batters sustaining concussion, showing how lower ball speeds reduce risks.The evolving science has shown that, even as the number of deaths has declined, the ultimate danger of head injuries in sport is greater than previously assumed. The trajectory is unmistakable. “Concussions have become much more common in cricket over the last ten or 20 years,” says Brukner. This is not simply the result of increased focus on concussion. “Since the advent of helmets, a lot more people are being hit in the head.”Graham Yallop, seen here in the Barbados Test in 1978, was an early pioneer of the DIY helmet•The Cricketer InternationalThere are myriad theories for the increase in head impacts and concussions. Batting technique against short bowling is said to have deteriorated; the protection offered by helmets – and the extra time it takes to move their heads while wearing them – has been blamed for batters being less adept at ducking. Limited-overs formats are blamed for encouraging batters to hook the ball more compulsively. Helmets also may have liberated bowlers to use the short ball more aggressively. Worldwide, improved strength and conditioning, some believe, has enabled players to bowl up and around 90mph now more frequently than before. And there is simply more cricket played now.

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The experience of Australia suggests that concussions have been systematically underreported. In the men’s professional game, there was on average only one concussion per season recorded in the decade until 2014. Following Hughes’ death, Cricket Australia commissioned a study by La Trobe University, whose findings were published in 2018. They counted 92 head impacts in men’s matches in Australia between 2015 and 2017; 29 of them were diagnosed as concussions. As the authors of the study observed, “The rate of concussion in cricket is higher than previously appreciated.”The La Trobe figures equate to a head impact every 2000 balls and a concussion every 9000 balls in male domestic cricket. These figures suggest more than one head impact per Test match that runs the full five days, and more than one concussion for every four such Tests. Assuming head impacts and concussions were sustained at the same rate in international cricket as the Australian domestic game, we would have expected there to be 39 incidences of concussions from 2015 to 2018 in Test cricket alone, an average of 9.75 a year. Overall, we could expect an average of 16 concussions and 75 head impacts a year throughout all men’s international cricket involving the 12 Full Member nations.BloomsburyMedical officials argue that, per ball bowled, Australian domestic cricket is likely to produce more head impacts and concussions than the average across the world. There are a number of reasons for this: pace bowlers in Australia tend to be faster, spinners deliver a lower share of overs, and the pitches tend to be quicker. As such, they estimate that, per delivery bowled, the number of head impacts and concussions per ball in all first-class cricket is about one-third of the Australian rate. Using this ratio, and the fact there were 1,012,160 deliveries in all first-class cricket in 2019, implies that there were around 169 head impacts and 37 concussions sustained in men’s first-class cricket in 2019.
Brukner does not think that cricket will witness the same prevalence of CTE in retired players as in sports such as American football and rugby, because there are fewer sub-concussive blows to the head in cricket: “We believe that cricketers are therefore not as much at risk of that long-term issue as those other sports.”It will be many decades until it becomes clear what damage, if any, Will Pucovski suffered from his ten concussions. “We really don’t know whether he’s at risk of long-term damage,” said Brukner. “There’s so much we don’t know about concussion.”Crickonomics: The Anatomy of Modern Cricket

There’s a new hierarchy among the quicks, the expectations from the team are low, and the think tank appears out of ideas

Mohammad Isam14-Oct-2022Taskin the leader of the pack
Having recovered from a back injury, Taskin Ahmed returned to form during Bangladesh’s disappointing Asia Cup campaign in the UAE, and bowled with fire in the tri-series.Taskin did not finish with great numbers – just two wickets at an economy rate of 7.58 in three games – but he is quite clearly the leader of the attack along with Hasan Mahmud, who has been impressive despite injury problems this year. Mahmud finished as Bangladesh’s leading wicket-taker in the tri-series – four wickets in three games with an economy of 7.91.Strange as it sounds, Mustafizur Rahman might not be in Bangladesh’s first-choice XI at the World Cup. After an excellent 2021, Mustafizur has had a mediocre year so far, with eight wickets in 12 games. Following a wicketless first game in New Zealand, he was benched for the rest of the tri-series.With time still left to make tweaks to the World Cup XI, it’s not inconceivable that Bangladesh might bring in Shoriful Islam, with either Mustafizur or Ebadot Hossain going out, even though Mohammad Saifuddin’s all-round abilities appear to be on the wane.Shakib Al Hasan can be expected to do his job, but he needs support•Getty ImagesShakib holds the middle-order key
Shakib Al Hasan struck two fifties in the tri-series, attacking innings that threatened both New Zealand and Pakistan. But, not for the first time, he lacked support.Shakib is likely to bat at No. 4 in the World Cup, giving him enough time to build his innings, attack or consolidate as the situation demands – and he can do both. He must be the bridge between a misfiring top order and a capable but off-colour middle order. Afif Hossain, Mosaddek Hossain, Nurul Hasan and Yasir Ali will have to support Shakib, something they largely failed to do in New Zealand. Afif has been in form leading up to this stage, while Mosaddek showed his abilities at the Asia Cup, but it all needs to work in tandem.Death-overs trouble
Bangladesh are an ordinary T20 team, and their death-overs batting has been super-ordinary. This year, they have the lowest run rate [minimum 15 innings] in the last five overs, and it doesn’t improve even in the last three overs, with the designated finishers Nurul and Yasir failing more often than not.As such, Shakib, Yasir and Nurul all have strike rates of over 160 in the last five overs, but there’s a severe dearth of boundary-hitting ability there, particularly when they walk out in the death overs. Bangladesh have hit a total of 15 sixes in the last three overs in T20Is this year, compared to India’s 51 or even Zimbabwe’s 25.Soumya Sarkar’s return is an indication of the selectors’ lack of ideas•AFP via Getty ImagesThe opening conundrum
Bangladesh have used 12 different opening combinations in 19 T20Is since the last World Cup, including four in as many games in the tri-series. They have all struggled, and the team management appears to have run out of ideas.That Bangladesh have gone back to Soumya Sarkar – who looked like he was out of the picture after the 2021 T20 World Cup – gives an idea of the confusion. In the interim period, Sarkar had scored 164 runs at a strike rate of 109.33 in the BPL, but it’s clear that the selectors are desperate now.Litton Das has been the best opener during this difficult time, while Mehidy Hasan Miraz has stepped up too. What will their opening combination be for the T20 World Cup?Preparations good, expectations nil
Bangladesh beat Australia and New Zealand 4-1 and 3-2 respectively before last year’s T20 World Cup. But both those opponents had left out first-choice players for the tours, when games were played on awful pitches in Mirpur. Australia and New Zealand went on to contest the final in Dubai; Bangladesh lost all their Super 12s matches.This time, Bangladesh took a slightly better approach, playing the tri-series in New Zealand instead of at home, and against top sides with their best players in the mix. The results have been poor, but they might be better prepared compared to the last T20 World Cup.There, however, is very little expectation from this side. Bangladesh have won just four T20Is this year: two against UAE, and one each against Afghanistan and Zimbabwe.

They have 15 players and a fair bit of money in their pockets, so there’s enough elbow room for them

Himanshu Agrawal21-Dec-20225:06

Super Giants could go for Brook or Rossouw

Who they’ve got
Super Giants head into the auction with 15 men in the line-up, with a squad headlined mostly by Indian domestic players.

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Current squad: KL Rahul (capt, wk), Ayush Badoni, Karan Sharma, Manan Vohra, Quinton de Kock (wk), Marcus Stoinis, K Gowtham, Deepak Hooda, Kyle Mayers, Krunal Pandya, Avesh Khan, Mohsin Khan, Mark Wood, Mayank Yadav, Ravi BishnoiWhat they have to play with
They have to fill up at least three – and at most ten – slots in their squad. That includes a maximum of four overseas players. They do have money in their pockets – INR 23.35 crore (USD 2.8 million approx.) – so there’s enough elbow room for them.What they need

• Their priority would be to find a genuine allrounder after releasing Jason Holder, who didn’t do much with the bat but grabbed 14 wickets at 27.92 in 2022.
• They would also want to find a replacement for Dushmantha Chameera. Although they have Mark Wood, he is injury prone and might want to manage his workload ahead of a home Ashes campaign. Mohsin Khan, who had such an outstanding season in 2022, has also been out of action for a while – he has not featured in any cricket since the last IPL.
• They also wouldn’t mind adding a left-arm wristspin option to their existing combination of offspin, legspin and left-arm orthodox.The likely targets
  Super Giants might plan to buy Holder back at a lower price. Ben Stokes, Sam Curran and Cameron Green are obvious options too.If Super Giants want back-up for Wood, Adam Milne, Sean Abbott and Chris Jordan could come into the picture. They can consistently bowl at high pace, apart from Jordan offering useful lower-order runs and agile fielding. And in case there is an injury cloud over Mohsin, Jaydev Unadkat might emerge as the best alternative.Left-arm wristspinner Ramesh Kumar, known as the “Sunil Narine from Jalalabad”, could also interest Super Giants.