We’ve seen two seperate ways of playing spin bowling recently – Tendulkar plays in the classic modern way, with bat never going past the pad in defense, and tucked behind the pad for the leave. An inadvertent straight ball from Monty left him with no chance of defending off the pitch.
Matt Prior on the other hand, uses the current English theory of playing Kumble with bat in front of pad. I suspect this allows more late adjustment, but if you are not good enough to do it, someone like Kumble will tease you out, like he did with Prior, causing him to push out far away from his front pad for Dravid to snaffle the catch at first slip.
Probably tells you why batsmen have traditionally chosen not to play like Prior. In these two examples however, it turns out the neither method proved successful…. 🙂
India doing well. Ideal conditions for swing bowling, suggested that no batsman was on top of the situation. No surprises there, other than in “batsmen must fire” world, where batsmen make runs because they choose to do so and nothing else comes into it.
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