World Cup will change the way game is played

Glenn Maxwell’s stand-still-and-hit drill may soon become as much a part of practice as range hitting.

Glenn Maxwell reverse sweeps in the semi-final against South Africa. Picture: AFP.

Some things remain the same. Australia having beaten South Africa in another semi-final and will play in its eighth World Cup final on Sunday night against India at Ahmedabad’s vainglorious cricket stadium. There have only been 13 editions of the tournament

South Africa fell just short of playing in a final for a fifth time. That tradition, at least, remains.

Despite the almost universal agreement that the format is fading, the 2023 World Cup has captured cricket’s imagination and will inform the way it is played in the years to follow.

Pity the volunteer coaches at kid’s cricket dealing with wide-eyed youngsters high on Glenn Maxwell’s innings against Afghanistan at this tournament.

Australian coach Andrew McDonald reports that the impact of the double century was palpable at his son’s under-12s training the next night in Melbourne.

In nets across the country kids wanted to stand stock still and hit sixes with only the flick of a wrist. Footwork, previously god, is dead.

World Cups change all manner of things. Winning teams hand down a template for how the game should be approached, while losing teams realise the error of their ways. It was after India’s loss to the England in the 2022 semi-final of the T20 event that Rohit Sharma said to his side they had to reconsider its white-ball cricket.

Too tentative they had been, he said, bolder he promised from here on in, acknowledging that his run-a-ball effort at the top of the order was not good enough.

It was not surprising then to see the Indian skipper take the game on against New Zealand at Mumbai in the semi-final. As Nasser Hussain noted after the match, all the talk was of Mohammed Shami’s seven wickets and Virat Kohli’s 50th century, but the captain’s knock was also of the highest class.

“The genuine hero of this Indian side, the man who has changed the culture of this Indian side is Rohit Sharma,” Hussain said on Sky Sports. “We have DK (Dinesh Karthik) with us and he says that after that, we were all there for the semi-final at Adelaide, where they played meek timid cricket, plodded along in the T20 semi-final, got a below-par score and England knocked them off none down, he said “we’ve got to change”.

“It’s one thing saying that and it’s another thing to walk the walk.”

There have been moments in history when the ODI game appeared to have moved to a new dimension. The Sri Lankan openers in 1996 set a template that was advanced by the likes of Adam Gilchrist and Virender Sehwag.

The famous match in 2006 between South Africa and Australia where the latter posted the first ever 400-plus score and the former chased it down were moments when we felt the plates shift, but that was not to be the norm.

The 2023 tournament has somehow managed to not only remind people of the integrity of a 50-over contest but also nudge it toward that long promised new dimension. It has, at the very least, hinted at possibilities.

Much has been written and said about Maxwell’s hundred scored in the last 10 overs against the Netherlands and double ton scored against Afghanistan and those innings will ring down through the ages. The all-rounder has merged the formats and breathed life into a dying species.

McDonald, spoke about the immediate impact of the innings with Gerard Whateley this week on SEN.

“It rippled to my son’s under 12 training, at his cricket club the next night they all came in and they’re playing reverse sweeps and scoops and laps and all types of things when the coach is trying to set the foundations of a stable base and keeping your left elbow up. All that got thrown out the window and I think that will be thrown out the window for quite some time, so we feel for all the junior coaches out there, you may have to change your philosophy slightly.

“An incredible innings, one that we will talk about for the rest of time in cricket. It will be a moment in time and it’s not by chance he can do that … we always knew that he had something like that in him but he has gone and got the fastest World Cup hundred against the Netherlands and backed up in a really dire predicament for the team, from memory we were 7-91 (against Afghanistan) and to go out there under duress and deliver.

“If you look back on that, if we had lost that game I think the back end of the tournament might have been niggly and not as smooth as its been, in saying that, we’ve had some other key performances as well but that’s one for the ages.”

Now that it has been done every cricketer knows it is possible and some will attempt to replicate it, but it took a unique talent and the inning comes when Maxwell is 35-years-old.

Perhaps the first to rival the feat will be among the under 12s playing with McDonald’s son, but every cricket nation on this troubled planet will be attempting to find a player with a way to repeat it.

Maxwell’s stand-still-and-hit drill may soon become as much a part of practice as range hitting.

England realised, after a poor showing at the 2015 World Cup, that it had to change its approach and radically adjusted across the next few years under captain Eoin Morgan. The best side at the 2019 tournament, they found themselves market leaders but became too complacent.

The 2023 English campaign has, given they were the reigning champions, been a greater disaster than the Sri Lankan and Pakistan efforts which are already causing major adjustments to the cricket program in both those countries.

Cricket director Rob Key admits now that they had been so busy resurrecting the Test side that they had taken the white ball game for granted.

“Being completely honest, I made the mistake of thinking that it will be all right when we get there and that’s not been the case,” he said.

“We made the assumption that even without playing lots of 50-over cricket, that this is such a good team that it will just slip into old habits and we’ll be able to go out there and win

“In 2019 our batting was miles ahead of everyone else and the rest of the world was playing catch-up.

“And all that’s happened in the time that we’ve stood still – and actually got more conservative – while everyone else has caught up with the bat. What we needed to do was get out here and understand 50-over cricket out here better, which we didn’t.”