Cricket: The old adapt-to-the-pink-ball trick

Remember when we used to still pay lip service to visiting teams deserving the opportunity to acclimatise to new conditions?

NZ captain Kane Williamson during a nets session at Perth’s Optus Stadium

“The old day-night thing, eh?” said Kane Williamson levelly at the weekend, managing to sound a bit like Maxwell Smart (“The old bulletproof-cummerbund-in-the-tuxedo trick”; “The old double-agent-with-two-faces-in-the-twin-locker trick”; passim).

“It’ll be interesting,” continued New Zealand’s captain of the prospect of the First Test in Perth. “It’s just another thing to adapt to, I suppose.”

Those things, eh skipper? On December 3, New Zealand finished a red-ball Test against England amid showers, after five days of pale sunshine and picnics on grassy slopes at picturesque Seddon Park in Hamilton. Their next fixture, commencing on Thursday, will be a pink-ball Test three zones to the west amid the uncompromising corporate gigantism of Perth Stadium with 40C temperatures forecast.

Remember when we used to still pay lip service to the idea of visiting teams deserving the opportunity to acclimatise to new conditions? It’s not so long ago.

In June last year, in fact, Cricket Australia’s head of operations Peter Roach committed to setting “an example for everyone else to follow” by providing tourists with “good warm-up games, suitable conditions and standard of opposition” which could “play a real part in helping international teams prepare as best they can”.

Corporate memory, of course, is hardly Jolimont’s strong suit. But, to be fair, it’s not anyone’s anymore. As Williamson reflected: “Such is the international schedule — we fly out, have a little bit of training and are straight into another match. The perfect preparation? It’s always hard to know what that is.”

Which it is, and the question has become an increasingly fascinating one. Every now and again, someone tries to perform a comparative analysis on the amount of cricket played, pointing out that some lion-hearted past master not only played this many innings or bowled this many overs in a first-class season but paid his own bus fare to the ground and received nought but the thanks of a grateful nation.

It leaves out the massive growth in our time in practice and preparation, skills-based and physically focused, which Greg Chappell used to evoke by a simple ratio: where the cricketers of his generation spent 80 per cent of their time playing and 20 per cent training, he had watched the ratios being gradually reversed.

The reason? Flexibility. Compared to a full-scale game of cricket, a training session can be adapted to the time and scope allowed. It can be monitored and adjusted, concentrated and lengthened, prescribed and individualised. To the modern cricket economy, which also puts a premium on “freshness”, it is fit for purpose.

Couple this with the influence of the infrastructure itself — cricket, never wealthier, has so much more to spend than it did on high-quality practice facilities, specialist coaches and sports scientists — and you have all the preconditions of a kind of practice bonanza.

You could even throw in the sway of technology: there’s the availability of video, which is as far away as your phone; there’s the evolution of the bowling machine, with its mutations into ProBatter and Merlyn; there’s the spread of the sidearm, which turns the coach into a kind of throwdown cyborg.

In this sense, Steve Smith is the quintessential modern cricketer. He probably has netting on the interior walls of his house, so comfortably familiar does it seem. The phenomenon’s linguistic outgrowing is the spread of “great work ethic” and “coachable player” as the ultimate terms of approbation.

What might be the implications of this? At first glance, the scenario looks advantageous to batsmen, in the sense that they will find it easier to build volume than bowlers, often workload restricted.

But volume is not everything. It might even be deceptive. After all, the best bowlers being routinely on short rations will tend to take the edge off the quality of batting practice. In a 10-minute net against Josh Hazlewood and Patrick Cummins, an Australian batsman would learn a great deal more about the state of their game than in hours against net bowlers and wangers.

In a thoughtful article about the evolution of practice in the latest issue of The Cricketer, Simon Wilde notes that while nets are excellent for honing short-form batting skills and scenario responses, match conditions are still difficult to replicate: “One of the biggest problems for batsmen playing little first-class cricket outside Test matches is retaining the ability … to concentrate at the crease for long periods.”

Jason Roy had only once batted longer than three hours in a first-class fixture when he was picked to open for England this year, though he would have crunched a lot of throwdowns.

There arises also the risks of overcoaching, in the exposure of players to multiple different analysts, and of rewarding conformist behaviours, in the conflation of coachability with character.

Look at this bloke. Jeez he works hard, doesn’t he? Always listens to us. Always wants extra volume. Always last out of the nets.

Not … errr … actually very good, and not really improving … but, y’know, does what he’s told and then some. Fits “the culture”, yes?

But how does the youngster with a bit of flair who finds training a chore or the mid-career player who knows their game already, fit into this regime? We can’t all be Steve Smiths. We shouldn’t even want to be.

So the Perth Test is both the contest between Australia and New Zealand, and an intriguing test of the adaptability of the modern player in the age of preparation lite. It does not help the visitors that, there being no recovery time between series, Trent Boult and Colin de Grandhomme are still feeling the effects of injuries barely a fortnight old. It’ll be the old patch-some-blokes-up-have-three-training-sessions-with-a-pink-ball-drink-a-lot-of-fluids-and-hope-for-the-best trick. Good luck skipper.