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Follow UsBeauty and elegance are thought of as the most facile human virtues. So much so that the acknowledgement of their existence is implied as the absence of substance and solidity.
However, sporting endeavours, especially cricket are slightly different. Here, if something looks beautiful while it’s happening, there’s a high chance that years of practice and experience have gone into fine-tuning every bit of it.
Sometimes, elegance and grace are not just an end in themselves in cricket. That’s when things stop being a function of their aesthetic standards. That’s when batters like Smriti Mandhana rise and show that the grace in their batting doesn’t only serve as eye candy for cricket romantics.
On June 16, against South Africa, Mandhana’s batting elegance became the means of her survival and the foundation over which she erected an innings of immense substance and grit.
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Have you ever thought why Rahul Dravid’s front foot defence looks so beautiful to the eye?
Just look at this picture by Patrick Eagar.
Every muscle of Dravid’s body has aligned itself in perfect synchronisation. A straight line can be drawn between the head and the bat, giving precise balance and composure. The left arm provides firmness as it is raised forward in a bow position, holding the top middle part of the handle. The right arm firmly holds the bat near the base, giving the scope of movement to his wrists if needed.
Then, the front foot points towards the covers. It helps the arms bring the bat down from just behind the pads by perfectly transferring the weight to defend the inswinging delivery from the 6 ft 5 inch English bowler Alex Tudor.
Effective, right?
And beautiful? OBVIOUSLY!!
The efficacy of batting techniques depends on how compact, symmetrical, and synchronised every aspect of a batter’s technique has to be. And it is this togetherness and symmetry that insinuates a sense of aesthetics in our heads.
Smriti Mandhana looks like an absolute goddess when she plays on the offside. Maybe this god syndrome makes her throw her wickets often as she looks to thrash the mere mortals bowling at her. And when she looks to thrash, all that elegance you associate with her batting disappears like camphor under heat.
Maybe that’s why she didn’t have a single hundred in the 35 ODIs she had played in India before the game against South Africa at the Chinnaswamy in Bengaluru. The lack of pace in Indian pitches becomes her foe, and her weaker game against spin is also exposed. That’s when you see her play expansive drives, wild slogs, and charging down the track to hit the tweakers away.
The Proteas had begun in great fashion in Bengaluru, bowling first on a track with ample seam movement and grip from the first over itself. Despite scoring 51 runs in the first 10 overs, India had lost Shafali Verma and Dayalan Hemalatha. Then, in the subsequent 50 runs, the spine of India’s middle order — Jemimah Rodrigues, Harmanpreet Kaur and Richa Ghosh — was back in the pavilion.
Until then, Mandhana easily played the pacers, scoring many runs through drives and pulls. With the team being 99/5, she had to change her approach, which happened at Chinnaswamy.
Along with Deepti Sharma, Mandhana cut down on risks and started playing almost everything close to her body, under her eyes. That same symmetry and synchronisation, which add aesthetics to her batting, allowed her to see through the tricky phase when the sun was out, and the spinners Nonkululeko Mlaba and Nondusimo Sanghase were getting the ball to turn.
Mandhana, who scored only 40 runs in 56 deliveries against spin on the day, aborted all attempts at charging down the track and taking down the Proteas tweakers. In fact, if you look at her interception points, she charged down the track only once (the small blue dot furthest away from the bunch). Otherwise, it was either going on the front foot with a small stride to defend the ball with full control or on the backfoot to nudge it for a single. She only hit the deliveries that were either on her pads or bowled wide.
You’ll find it hard to find a better marriage between control and steady play against spin in Mandhana’s career. That’s why, despite the low strike rate while playing spin, her control percentage against the tweakers was still around 97%.
This discerningly suave game against spin on the day helped Mandhana survive the trickiest period when half of the team was in the dugout. India needed her until the very end if they had to have a competitive score on the board for South Africa to chase.
That’s why when the pacers came on, Mandhana made up by taking full toll from them whenever they pitched it to her around the good length or full areas. That one pull shot she played in the tenth over in front of the square on a delivery extremely close to her body showed how well she was playing pace on her Women’s Premier League (WPL) home ground. Her pulls earned her 29 runs in just 17 deliveries.
When the consolidation phase was done, and only the last 10 overs left, she changed her gears rapidly, scoring 30 runs in her last 16 deliveries and completing her hundred in the process.
On a pitch where batters perished in clusters chopping on against spinners or trying release shots, Mandhana was the epitome of discipline as hardly anything was played away from her body or against the turn. And it was that discipline that underlined the grace in her batting today.
That same grace saved India today by getting it to 265, which was more than enough for a fragile South African batting order.
Read - Opponents beware, the Smriti Mandhana redemption arc might have begun
One can say that the WPL captaincy added another level of cricketing and non-cricketing wisdom to Smriti Mandhana’s life. One can also say that the intensive skill and fitness camps being organised under Amol Muzumdar’s regime bring out the best in her.
However, one undeniable truth is that Mandhana's inherent grace in her batting and her proclivity to adhere to it allowed her to stay disciplined in Bengaluru. At the same time, her highly esteemed teammates perished in the lack of it.
Beauty, after all, isn’t just in the eyes of the beholder. As Mandhana showed, beauty also resides in the one holding the bat and hoisting it above her head after saving her team gracefully.
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