Cricket writer Peter Miller chatted to Glamorgan\'s Dean Cosker about the changes to one-day cricket over the past couple of decades.
As Heraclitus of Ephesus told us, the only constant in life is change. This is never truer in cricket than with one-day cricket and that constant change has accelerated as the implications of Twenty20 has spread to the 50-over game.
For most of its life one-day cricket had a very similar make-up. A side would look to steadily accumulate for the first 70 per cent of the innings while keeping wickets in hand to launch at the back end of an innings, hoping to get close to a run-a-ball by the end. And for the first 20 years that ODI cricket existed, this worked brilliantly.
Things changed at the 1996 World Cup when eventual winners Sri Lanka created their own method that was quickly replicated the across the globe. Opening the batting with Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana the Sri Lankans decided that the hard new ball and the fielding restrictions in the early part of the innings meant they could go hard in the first 10 overs, risk a couple of wickets in the process and as a result set a total that was domineering.
Since the arrival of T20 cricket the speed with which the game has changed has accelerated rapidly. What teams thought was possible in 50 overs has changed. Now teams view making 100 runs in the last 10 overs as the expectation not the ambition.
As we have seen in the Royal London One Day Cup and One Day Internationals this year, whether it has been Jos Buttler and Chris Woakes for England or Colin Ingram for Glamorgan, teams are regularly scoring 10 to 15 runs-per-over in the closing stages of an innings.
In a way there has been a return to the old way of playing the game, keeping wickets intact and going big at the end, but it is a matter of scale. Teams are now using a run a ball as the base level of scoring and going from there. Run-getting that is both brisk and relatively risk-free has become commonplace.
One of those who has been best placed to see how the game has changed is Glamorgan spinner Dean Cosker who made his one-day debut in 1996 and has played more than 400 limited-overs games for the Welsh county.
“It is not only the stadiums that you play in have changed, but the pitches that you play on now, the boundary sizes, the bats, the different type of shots all these top order batsmen now play,” Cosker says. “Back in the day myself and Robert Croft would bowl spin in the middle of the innings and go for two or three an over.
"Now, especially in 50-over cricket with the extra fielder in the circle, you’re happy if you go at five or six and over and hope to pick up a few wickets.
“The game has moved on from a fielding point of view as well. I have always prided myself on my fielding and it has taken quite a lot of work to keep up with the youngsters, especially when they are taking these one-handed diving catches over the boundary and flipping it back and all that kind of razzamatazz.
“You have to keep an eye on that. It is all part and parcel of where one-day cricket has gone for bowlers and it is not going to get any easier.”
That carnage at the death has made it harder for spinners to bowl anywhere other than the middle overs; with batsmen looking to go big straight down the ground the conventional wisdom these days is that the slower men will not be able to able to hold their own in the latter stages of an innings.
For Cosker it isn’t quite that cut and dry, the extra fielder allowed on the boundary for the last 10 overs means that they can do a job.
“I’m not sure [spinners can’t bowl at the death] as come the 40th over it is the final PowerPlay and you can have five out of the ring. Myself and Colin Ingram and potentially Andrew Salter do have that luxury of an extra fielder outside the ring to bowl three or four overs from overs 40-46 and then leave it to the faster bowlers to finish the innings. It is always a little be tricky if you haven’t got a mystery ball as a finger spinner and haven’t got the ball turning the other way – you have to use all your wiliness and that comes from flight and field placings.”
Scores are going up and that trend isn’t going to reverse any time soon. Even if there was some misguided attempt to stop “big bats” that isn’t going to work. Bats have much less of an impact than strength and condition and range hitting training. The big scoring cat is out of the cricket kit bag and he isn’t going back in.
It is for bowlers like Cosker to remain competitive in the modern age. He is still finding a way to do that.
If you want to watch one-day cricket at the highest level there are still tickets available for England vs Sri Lanka and Pakistan at the SSE SWALEC – you can buy tickets here.