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The Dodgers are looking to repeat as World Series champs in 2025, and if successful, Shohei Ohtani will have a chance to join a select group of players in MLB history.

Throughout MLB history, only five players have ever won their league's respective MVP award and gone on to win the World Series MVP in the same year. Ohtani is the runaway favorite to win the National League MVP this season for the second year in a row. If he can perform at his usual prolific level, he could very well be named World Series MVP.

Last year, Ohtani missed out on the award after a lackluster showing in the Fall Classic against the Yankees. Plagued by a shoulder injury, he had just two hits in the five-game series and didn't record a home run or RBI. Freddie Freeman was named World Series MVP in '24 after he launched four home runs and had 12 RBIs.

Should Ohtani claim the award as his own in '25, he'd be just the sixth player ever to win both the regular-season MVP and World Series MVP in the same year. Even more impressive, he would become just the second player to win all three of regular-season MVP, LCS MVP and World Series MVP.

Let's take a look at the esteemed company he'd be joining:

Player

Team

Season

Awards Won

Sandy Koufax

Dodgers

1963

NL MVP, World Series MVP

Frank Robinson

Orioles

1966

AL MVP, World Series MVP

Reggie Jackson

A’s

1973

AL MVP, World Series MVP

Willie Stargell

Pirates

1979

NL MVP, NLCS MVP, World Series MVP

Mike Schmidt

Phillies

1980

NL MVP, World Series MVP

Sandy Koufax won the Cy Young, NL MVP and World Series MVP in 1963, when he had a 1.88 ERA with 306 strikeouts during the regular season. He then pitched two complete games in the World Series, which lasted just four games in total.

In 1966, Frank Robinson was named MVP of the American League after launching 49 home runs and 122 RBIs. He was prolific in the Orioles' World Series win, too, logging a 1.232 OPS in a sweep of the Dodgers.

Reggie Jackson won the lone MVP award of his career in 1973, when he led MLB with 32 home runs and 117 RBIs. He won the first of his two World Series MVPs that same year, when he had nine hits and 6 RBIs in a seven-game series against the Mets.

The only player in MLB history to win the trifecta of the regular-season MVP, League Championship Series MVP and World Series MVP is Willie Stargell, who did so for the Pirates in 1979. That season, at the age of 39, Stargell hit 32 home runs in the regular season and had three home runs and 7 RBIs in a seven-game series against the Orioles. Pittsburgh, carried by Stargell's outstanding play, was able to erase a 3–1 deficit in the series.

Mike Schmidt was named NL MVP and World Series MVP for the Phillies in 1980. That year, he had 48 home runs and 121 RBIs with an OPS of 1.004 in the regular season, and followed it up with eight hits including two home runs in a six-game series against the Royals.

Ohtani won the NLCS MVP after the Dodgers swept the Brewers in four games. He capped off the series with a sensational Game 4 performance in which he hit three home runs and pitched six innings with 10 strikeouts. The historic performance saw him earn the series MVP award and now he'll be looking to complete the Triple Crown of MVPs.

Sachin Tendulkar talks about how ODIs are skewed in favour of batsmen, and looks back to his landmark Sharjah innings against Australia 22 years ago

Sharda Ugra24-Apr-2020It’s not the time to be fussing over birthdays and celebrations, and Sachin Tendulkar doesn’t have his 47th on his mind. The days he has kept track of instead are the number he has spent indoors in his home in Mumbai, without meeting a single outsider. Count them from March 15 onwards. And let’s not forget that, regardless of whether social-distancing norms are in place or not, it’s not like he can step outside for a change of scene and shop for groceries. What Tendulkar misses is the happy whirl of meeting old friends, playing golf or badminton, and otherwise being busy.This is, though, a chance to think about the future, to reflect on what could be, and think about what the new normal might be when cricket does return. Though players have generally tried to adapt to this “forced off-season” by trying to stay fit at home, it may take a while for them to return to their previous levels of on-field sharpness, no matter how much fitness work they have done during the lockdowns. But Tendulkar says, “I personally don’t feel the game is going to change as such.” What he cannot get his head around is the idea of closed-door contests.”That would be odd. Because you get so much energy from the spectators also. If India is to win a crucial game, you want people to be around you to celebrate – to amplify that. But no one inside the stadium? It’s not going to make anyone feel special. It is going to be a weird feeling, and I don’t know how players will react.”ALSO READ: Kartikeya Date: The three phases of Tendulkar’s ODI batting (2018)International games, at least, Tendulkar says, need their living, breathing audiences.”Can you imagine Roger Federer and [Rafael] Nadal playing on the centre court of Wimbledon with nobody there? It’s going to be such a strange thing to watch. Not just cricket, any sport needs to have that energy.”In contrast to the still vast global appetite for him, Tendulkar himself post-retirement is not an obsessive watcher of live cricket. It has been seven years since his emotional Wankhede farewell, and in that time cricket appears to have been enormously transformed, with the advent and explosion of T20 leagues and fundamental changes in elements of the sport itself.Since these are days of nostalgia and whimsical imaginings, what kind of batsman would a millennial or Gen Z Tendulkar have been? Not much different, he thinks: “I would have continued to be myself in today’s cricket, I don’t think I would have changed anything.” What, no 360-degree shot-making or Dilscoops or switch hits?He has seen his younger self on a few YouTube videos and imagines he would not have needed to use those tools. “I don’t see there would have been any need to do something out-of-the-box different. Because if I had continued doing [what I did] the same way, the boundary line is only 70 yards [away],” he laughs. “So if you are going to back yourself to clear [it], then you work on consistency more than anything else, depending on the surfaces. There are surfaces that compel you to play differently, I would have been flexible in my mind, my thought process. I think that flexibility has to be there.”0:28

Happy Birthday, Sachin

What both longevity in the game and the new rules of modern cricket demand is the willingness to keep innovating. “Like how bowlers have developed the slower-ball bouncer, the knuckleball and the wide yorker – they have developed various things. So have the batters. In time to come, maybe eight-ten years down the line, we will be looking at a totally different game – the batswing could be different, the stance could be different. Or the loading up. A lot of elements which we are not thinking of today because it’s not demanded by the game today. But in time to come, it may change.”He remembers watching Andy Flower reverse-sweeping his way to the top of the Test aggregates on the 1999-2000 India tour and saying that Flower was about “eight-ten years ahead of the rest of the lot”. Twenty years on, Tendulkar is right and Flower has come to be seen as having been an innovator back then. When he is asked about the most visible changes in the game since his retirement, Tendulkar points to two issues. One is the absence of a mechanism to correct umpiring bloopers using the DRS. “Those types of things, when the bowlers didn’t get the wicket even though the batsman was out, or the batsmen were given out when they were not, it costs us games. Those type of things win or lose matches and series. Today that doesn’t happen – a bad decision can be completely negated and you still have a chance.”The other he has touched upon before – the ODI rule changes in the early 2010s, where a total of four fielders were allowed outside the ring in the non-powerplay overs, and the use of two new balls in ODIs.”If you have to look at one-day cricket then [with] the two new balls, if the pitches are not helpful, it makes bowlers’ life really difficult. Two new balls have virtually diminished reverse swing, I have not seen lot of reverse swing. [There is] occasional reverse swing here and there.” The use of a single ball, he says, “guaranteed little bit of reverse swing with the discoloured ball and the softer ball”. With two new balls, the ball stays hard, “travels faster, and so I think bowlers have been challenged more”.ALSO READ: Have the new rules made ODIs an unequal contest? (2013)The five fielders in the ring has been an additional challenge. Tendulkar illustrates, offering a standard field for an offspinner: “You would normally have a long-off, long-on, deep midwicket and deep square-leg, and you have to have a deep point inside the ring. Because of T20, batters are prepared to back themselves, because they’ve worked on those shots, reverse sweeps and all sorts of things.” Earlier, if you pierced the infield ring, he goes on to say, “you got a single for that, with the extra fielder back on the boundary line and you lost strike. If the strike was not rotated, then you [as a non-striker] lost possibly three balls an over. And when you were batting well, the bowler would want to bowl at the non-striker and not you.”It must be remembered that Tendulkar was the first batsman to make an ODI 200, ten years ago, before the new rules came into play, when he was two months short of 37. In the decade since, only five other batsmen have gone past 200, Rohit Sharma thrice.Talking about the new rules, which he sees as palpably unfair to bowlers, gets Tendulkar’s cricket self buzzing again. The on-strike, in-form batsman today is supplied with a bounty. The ball past the infield ring is a four. “If I was batting well,” Tendulkar says, “I would hit a boundary and I would face the ball again. You are getting three runs extra, plus you are retaining strike and I would love to do that.”It is this reminder of his appetite for run-scoring that brings the twin hundreds in Sharjah in 1998 to mind. Those innings were played around this time 22 years ago, and are part of the collective memory of a generation of Indian cricket fans: the Desert Storm innings (143) that took India into the tournament final and the match-winning 134 in the final two days later on Tendulkar’s 25th birthday. His partner in the 143 was VVS Laxman, who scored 23 in a 104-run partnership and remembers talking to Tendulkar in between overs. “But I know he wasn’t listening to me,” Laxman said.On batting under the current field restrictions: “If I was batting well, I would hit a boundary and face the ball again. You are getting three runs extra plus you are retaining strike and I would love to do that”•AFP/Getty ImagesTendulkar has himself recalled being “obsessed” that night about keeping strike. “When you are batting well, you want to face every ball. I wanted to win that game, I didn’t want to just achieve our run rate, I wanted to beat Australia and get into the final, so I was playing for the victory.”What was it like being in the zone that night? “Sometimes, I don’t know… you look at the bowler and whatever you’re thinking, the bowler exactly bowls that,” he says. “It was a little bit of that. I knew more or less what they were bowling and I was ready to play that shot. Sometimes that happens, I wouldn’t say every ball, but whenever one is planning to play a big shot, you say okay, if the ball lands in this area I am going to hit. And exactly that is where the next ball has landed and I have gone for that shot. You have those days where whatever you are thinking, that is what exactly happens.”Over the course of a conversation, especially one of this kind, during a time when cricket itself stands suspended, it is easy to lapse into the past and search for new paths around familiar stories. But the game will go on, cricket will resume, and new stars will be born. Is there anyone in the new crop of gung-ho swashbucklers around the world in whom Tendulkar sees a glimpse of his younger self?ALSO READ: Tendulkar: ‘I wanted to beat Australia twice (2018)It is, of course, a headline-seeking question but Tendulkar, always a batsman of turbo-charged intensity and skill, has remained a man of controlled verbal expression. “Since we are talking about promising youngers, there are a number and the names would be Prithvi [Shaw], Shubman [Gill] and [Sanju] Samson. They all are different players. Just like how when we were playing, Rahul [Dravid] was different to me, I was different to Sourav [Ganguly], and Laxman was different from all of us. Similarly these guys are different but have a promising future. They have their own styles.”Because we are where we are, with cricket stalled, the board chiefs all meeting to talk about the future, and Tendulkar turning 47, maybe this is the best time to talk about what the game could include looking ahead. Something larger than tinkering with powerplays, surely. Tendulkar would personally like the debate about Test cricket to be focused not on quantity (four days not five) but on improving the quality of the contest and keeping spectators engaged.Get home boards to move away from the extremes of dead or unplayable wickets and commit one way or the other – seam or spin. Right in the playing conditions, if need be. It may sound radical and impossible to achieve, but Sachin Tendulkar, cricketer, cricket fan, has a parting observation: “We have two formats in which the bowlers are constantly challenged, have restrictions in their field settings, so there has to be a format where the bowlers are able to challenge batters.”

It’s 200 matches and counting for MS Dhoni in the IPL. Here’s a quick quiz to test your knowledge of his illustrious career in the league

ESPNcricinfo staff19-Oct-2020

Three first-day wickets at Galle set agenda for England and scotch some preconceptions

Andrew Miller14-Jan-2021Perhaps it’s the headband, perhaps it’s the wrist position. Perhaps it’s the “bravery” that the man himself says comes with experience. But Stuart Broad has started this Sri Lanka series – this Asian winter – with the exact same ebullience and optimism with which he finished England’s lockdown summer. In doing so, he’s let it be known once again that, at the age of 34 and with a remit to perfect the game-craft that he’s spent the past 13 years honing, he is living his best life right here, right now.The first day of England’s first excursion of 2021 was, as Broad put it at the close, “a nine out of ten day” – as a harassed Sri Lankan line-up, still not recovered from their bruising defeat in South Africa, found a range of ways to gift their opponents the upper hand – from fluky deflections off ankles and fingertips to abject reverse sweeps and miscued half-trackers.But nothing that transpired – certainly not Dom Bess’s curate’s egg of a five-for (the ball to dismiss Dilruwan Perera was the good part…) – could match Broad’s path-finding injection of know-how in his two brief but pointed spells.”It’s an absolute dream world day for us,” Broad said, “and three wickets in Sri Lanka as a seamer feels like a decent day personally.”That’s putting it modestly. Within eight overs, Broad had matched his tally from three previous Tests in Sri Lanka. That haul (for want of a better word) had been spread over three visits in 2007, 2012 and 2018, beginning with a Test debut in Colombo of such alarming inhospitality that the then-beanpole 21-year-old was quietly eased back out of the firing line and held back for more hospitable conditions in New Zealand three months later.It’s worth pointing out that Broad didn’t actually do a whole lot wrong in those three campaigns, other than bowl with the tenacity (aka predictability) of an English seamer, trained to plug away outside off stump, then bang in the short ball for effect when all else fails.But twice he had been on the receiving end of Mahela Jayawardene masterclasses (a fate that few visitors of the 2000s escaped, to be fair, given his eye-watering haul of 23 Test hundreds on home soil) while on his most recent trip in 2018, Broad’s 14 overs in two innings might as well have been designated shine-removers, as England’s trio of spinners – Jack Leach, Moeen Ali and Adil Rashid – continued their dominant theme for the series by sharing 14 wickets to wrap up a 3-0 clean sweep.This time, however, Broad was a man with a new plan – including one made more or less on the hoof, given how cursory England’s preparations for this series have been. While bowling to Joe Root in England’s solitary warm-up at Hambantota, the pair noted the awkwardness of Broad’s lift from just back of a length, and figured a leg gully might be an opportune gamble to the left-handers. Sure enough, Lahiru Thirimanne jabbed low to Jonny Bairstow, to set in motion a day of barely relenting progress for England.Broad confirmed at the close that the ball itself had not been a deliberate ploy, rather a contingency plan in case of natural variation. “At Hambantota, we had a lot of balls from middle stump sliding through the air to leg gully, leg slip,” he said. “Rooty was batting at the time and said it might feel uncomfortable on certain pitches to have a fielder there with my style of bowling. I don’t try and swing it away, but I do try and nip it back, so it was a deliberate ploy to have a fielder there and make the batsman play as often as possible. But you need a bit of luck for it to go there.”Stuart Broad claimed the big wicket of Angelo Mathews•SLCBut you need a bit of skill too to create the conditions for such happy accidents to take effect, and that is the aspect of Broad’s recent performances that is becoming ever more apparent in the late summer (Indian summer, he might be hoping…) of his career. Where once he was a mood bowler, famed for wrecking intermittent Test matches in the space of a single session but slipping back into James Anderson’s gargantuan shadow in between whiles, now he is becoming a mood in himself.Related

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It was in the process of taking his 500th Test wicket, at Old Trafford in August, that Broad’s career average dipped below 28 for the first time in his career. But his returns in the past two years, essentially from the moment he took advantage of a rare period of down-time after the 2017-18 Ashes tour and embarked on an extensive technical MOT, he’s racked up 118 at 21.44, including 38 at 14.76 in 2020 – a year that culminated in a prestigious nomination for BBC Sports Personality of the Year.The majority of those wickets, all captured in South Africa and England, might as well have been screen-grabbed from some of his most famous Test rampages – the 8 for 15 at Trent Bridge, or the 6 for 17 at Johannesburg: full and threatening, you-miss-I-hit lengths every ball, attacking the pads and the edge with equal insistence, kicking off a high seam and occasionally skidding through, and all delivered with those ubiquitous “pumping knees” that signal an attack dog at the top of his game.But it was a subtle manipulation of those methods that earned Broad his rewards today, and in conditions where even he had previously been a bit hang-dog. There was energy and optimism in abundance, of course, but his average speed, hovering around the 80mph mark, ended up being lower even than that of the left-arm swinger Sam Curran – by no-one’s estimation a bona fide quick bowler. That was, as Broad himself explained, a result of some canny changes of pace and seam position rather than any sense that he’s about to lose his nip.”We talked before the Test match about building pressure for long periods of time, and using your individual skill in those little periods,” Broad said. “So I concentrated on making the batsman play as much as possible, and also varying my pace in little ways. Maybe not 6-7mph at times but actually going up two miles an hour, coming down three or four miles an hour, and that was the plan I stuck to.”As befits a man who once captained England’s T20 side – a format in which he has not now featured for almost exactly half his international career – Broad contrived to treat every delivery of his precious new-ball spell as an event. It’s a trait that served him equally well in England’s lockdown summer, when his new-found relish for a fuller, stump-threatening length asked questions of every batsman in his sights.”The pitch offered us something with the ball, which you expect when you bowl a side out for 130, but it wasn’t necessarily sideways movement,” he added. “There was a little bit of extra bounce, a little bit of two-pace that brought the fielders in.”Broad was also responsible for two of the outstanding moments in what was otherwise an abject Sri Lankan batting display – the perfectly pitched cutter outside off that lured the hard-handed Kusal Mendis into a tentative stab to the keeper (and a fourth Test duck in a row), and the injection of venom just back of a length that rushed Angelo Mathews into a misjudged slash to slip, where Root grabbed an impressively sharp catch. On the face of it the moment was yet another batsman error, but Broad’s variety and accuracy made it happen.”I was pleased with [the legcutter],” he said. “It’s one of my best balls. A few years ago I wouldn’t have tried that second-ball to a new batsman but, with experience and confidence in my game, I wanted to bowl a quicker one first ball and then a legcutter to get the batsman playing on the second one.”It just did that perfect half-a-bat-width movement and I think, just with experience and playing more cricket in these conditions, you get braver. With a new ball. I’d never dream of doing that in England, but in these conditions, you’ve got to try something different.”Broad is now two wickets away from matching Courtney Walsh – the first man to breach the 500-wicket barrier way back in 2001, and whose eventual tally of 519 scalps once seemed an insurmountable peak. And who knows, on this showing, maybe even Anderson’s humungous tally of 600 and counting will not be out of his reach.For he may lack the natural skill that has marked his team-mate out as the greatest English bowler of his generation, but Michael Vaughan wasn’t wrong when he stated, way back in 2008, that Broad was one of the most intelligent operators he’d ever encountered. He was finding new ways to skin Test batsmen even back then – short and nasty on that occasion to complement Anderson’s full and tricksy – and as his evisceration of David Warner showed in the 2019 Ashes, the evolution of his methods has been gathering pace for some months already.For if Broad’s fabled reaction to his omission from England’s last first Test of a season, against West Indies at the Ageas Bowl in August, is anything to go by, he’s got the form, the skill and the bloodymindedness to keep confounding expectations for as long as his remarkably injury-free body holds up. And who knows, maybe he, like Anderson before him, can go some way to confounding those preconceptions about his record in less seam-friendly climes.

And Sri Lanka Cricket doesn’t even try to make our correspondent work for his jokes

Andrew Fidel Fernando01-Mar-2021Pitches. What makes a bad one? How should a good one behave? Is there a charter for pitch decorum handed down to us from centuries past? Do people put pitches in stadiums, or do they build stadiums around pitches that have existed since the dawn of the universe?And why on earth do they crumble? Is it because when non-Asian teams visit, South Asian pitches tend to find themselves at the centre of raging controversies, with abusive words like “poor”, “unfit” and “misbehaving” thrown around, and in the face of this global media pressure, the pitches fall to pieces? (Wouldn’t you?)These are all excellent questions. This column will not answer any of them.Decades-long doctoring
Clearly if the ball turns from the first day in a Test in India, the home side is winning underhandedly. Having lost the first Test, the pitch for the second Test in Chennai was described by some pundits as “a sandpit”, with England collapsing for 134 and 164, and India going on to score more than 600 runs across two innings. If that wasn’t outrageous enough, apparently, this isn’t even the first time India have dominated an opposition on a spinning surface. Can you believe this? This means that not only do India produce pitches unfit for Test batting, they have gone as far as producing generations of batsmen who can score loads of runs on these pitches, the cheats.Premature pitch slander
Spare a thought for the media pundits who used their staunchest anti-pitch rhetoric up in the second Test, where 914 runs were scored, and then found that in Ahmedabad, where the match aggregate was 387, no one really trusted them anymore. Like hunters using all their ammo up on a rat while a bear sneaks up behind them.Mandatory Sri Lanka Cricket round-up (please kill me now)
Do we have to do this again? Do we really have to mock the ever-living crap out of SLC yet again? At some point it becomes boring. I mean, every month. Every single month, it’s the same thing with these people. It’s like they think that after one decent Lanka Premier League, everyone has suddenly forgotten how resplendently incompetent they have been for years.Which of their screw-ups should we drag them for this time? How about SLC describing in a press release Chaminda Vaas’ decision to pull out of the fast-bowling coach position as “holding the administration, the cricketers, and indeed the game at ransom” because he asked for more pay? We could talk about how SLC has consistently spurned local coaching talent in favour of foreign coaches, whom it pays way more, generally (this is the opposite strategy from, say, its extremely successful neighbours to the north). We could talk about the ridiculous turnover for coaching staff within the Sri Lanka national team, which points to a profoundly dysfunctional system (Vaas had only been hired because David Saker had quit earlier in the month).What about all those trophies Vaas got during his career? Can’t he melt those precious metals and sell them for millions?•AFPBut ultimately, we don’t have to do any of that, because SLC’s own press statements make more ruthless fun of it than any of us could. After claiming that Vaas had made his request based on “personal monetary gain”, the statement goes on to suggest he’d instead been “rewarded over the years both in status and in kind”. Hopefully future SLC coaches will figure out how to pay bills using status. The kind of status that sees them flung under the bus in public releases.Best of luck to the Royal Challengers Bangalore…
…who after the IPL auction, put up videos on social media in which cricket director Mike Hesson is shown to be outsmarting other franchises by bidding for players RCB don’t necessarily want (thus driving up the amounts other teams will have to pay for those players) in order to secure the likes of Kyle Jamieson and Glenn Maxwell in later rounds of the auction. I don’t know about you, but for a team that’s notorious for making too little of the talents at their disposal, it seems a little early in the process to gloat. Either they are right to be this confident or they have made their eventual shaming even more hilarious. In which case, see you back here in three months.No-show champions
Australia are not going to tour South Africa in March, as had been planned, Why? Officially, Cricket Australia is citing an “unacceptable health and safety risk” to its players, due to the prevalence of Covid-19 in South Africa. Here are some facts, though:- The teams were to be in a biosecure bubble, so the Covid-19 status of the country is irrelevant if the bubble is secure enough.- Cricket South Africa had devised an especially tight biosecure bubble for the Australia series.- The cutting short of the England tour in December has been tacitly accepted by the ECB as having been no the fault of CSA’s bubbling procedures.- Covid-19 case numbers were on the decline in South Africa at the time of cancellation and have largely been that way since.It’s difficult, though, not to think that these are not the facts most relevant to the postponement of this tour. Try these:- Australia had just been beaten at home by an under-strength India team.- The last time they went to South Africa for a Test series, they suffered an epoch-changing pantsing.Next month on The Briefing:
– Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, dozens of pundits continue to claim to be cricket experts.- SLC decides to burn down all its stadiums to cut down operational costs.

They were once the all-conquering side in the shortest format, but are now struggling to keep pace with its evolution on multiple fronts

Hassan Cheema04-Jun-2021There’s a line in the finale of the American version of that feels relevant not only to the world in general – especially the last year – but also to cricket fans. “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days, before you’ve actually left them,” the character Andy Bernard says.It was true of Pakistan’s mid-’90s ODI side, true of Misbah-ul-Haq’s Test side, and most obviously true of Sarfaraz Ahmed’s T20 side.ESPNcricinfo LtdIn the three years following the 2016 World T20, Pakistan played 36 T20Is, winning 30, and yet were not taken seriously. Their rise, and fall, coincided with the longest period in the game without a T20 World Cup since the event began. Their achievements were usually appended with caveats: their wins came in the UAE (even though only 11 of Pakistan’s 40 T20Is during Sarfaraz’s captaincy were played in that country); they cared too much about bilateral series, and T20s were all about domestic leagues; they were playing second-string sides (though ten members of the England team they beat in 2016 had played the World T20 final just four months prior, and ten of the 13 Australians in the side that was clean-swept by Pakistan had played in the IPL, and the New Zealand team Pakistan beat away had ten players with 20-plus T20Is).Related

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And this wasn’t just ex-players or fans sniping away – that would be par for the course. The PCB itself didn’t take these achievements seriously, sacking Sarfaraz after one bad series, despite three years of continuous success. And even that lost series was defined by an overhaul that wasn’t needed. Predictably, when that overhaul failed, Misbah, the new head coach, further undermined the achievements of his predecessors – to him, three losses in their last 13 T20Is somehow represented a losing streak.Eighteen months on, Pakistan’s T20 fortunes elicit a nostalgia stronger than Andy Bernard’s.Where did it go wrong?Conservatism up top
In the summer months of last year, as the world moved from one lockdown to another, a conversation brewed on cricket analytics Twitter: was it time to do away with anchors?Theoretically it makes sense. T20 is still played in a conservative fashion; it is seen by too many as an offshoot of 50-overs cricket, not as a separate format. The argument was encapsulated in this article by Karthik Krishnaswamy, the headline of which was the equivalent of a red rag to a bull.It is an argument most progressive T20 thinkers would side with, albeit in hushed tones. Seeing drastic changes in other sports makes one question accepted notions within your own: basketball had its three-point revolution; baseball has had its barrage of three-true-outcomes hitters, who take fielders out of the game by aiming only for home runs, walks or strikeouts; all football codes have had their own analytics revolutions. The key difference is that those sports provide, a degree of homogeneity that helps in terms of analysis in a way cricket, reliant so much on its pitches, lacks.On pitches where a score of 180-plus is par, an anchor could be a liability. Once the par score goes below that, the anchor becomes a necessity. We’ve seen the value of the anchor in T20 leagues over the last year played on a limited number of pitches, from the CPL to the IPL.It’s not always the pitch, however. As with the Pakistan side, the case for an anchor is also made by the lack of faith a team has in its batting depth. (From here on, the period from post-2016 World T20 to January 2019 is referred to as phase one and from January 2019 to March 2021, phase two.)You can gauge the state of a country’s domestic cricket system – or at least its blind spots – by the foreign players selected in its franchise tournament. The eight Big Bash franchises this year employed seven different Asian spinners. Twelve of the 24 foreign players selected for The Hundred are predominantly bowlers, an indication that England’s white-ball bowling depth doesn’t quite match up to their white-ball batting depth.ESPNcricinfo LtdIn the PSL draft every year, foreign top-order hitters are a prime commodity. Even in their successful first phase, Pakistan were backbenchers in the powerplay. It could be argued they often played on slow surfaces, but considering both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka feature in the top three above, it seems a flimsy excuse.This has continued through phase two.ESPNcricinfo LtdIn both periods Pakistan were one of the two bottom teams on scoring rate in the powerplay. It worked because in phase one Pakistan decided to conserve wickets up top and succeeded: their powerplay average in that phase was the third best (behind Afghanistan and England). Since then they have been much poorer at protecting wickets.ESPNcricinfo LtdTop-order conservatism in T20s is a high-risk strategy. At its best, it reduces the game for your batting unit from a 20-over match to a 14-over one, ensuring that even if you don’t win many games in the batting powerplay, you don’t lose many either. But if the top order fails, the entire deck comes crashing down. Considering Pakistan’s middle-order frailties, it’s a strategy that makes sense for them.But even as Pakistan’s top order has risen in the last few months, there has been a call for a more progressive style of play, crystallised in the Babar Azam-Mohammad Rizwan vs Fakhar Zaman-Sharjeel Khan debate. Considering the top three usually play over 50% of all deliveries in a T20 game, that is where Pakistan’s batting needs to catch up. So the debate goes that one of Rizwan or Azam should be paired alongside a “hitter” like Sharjeel or Zaman, or that both Fakhar and Sharjeel ought to open.Except, the numbers show there isn’t much to this debate.ESPNcricinfo LtdThe concept of a top-order hitter alongside Azam or Rizwan is appealing, but the reality is that neither Zaman nor Sharjeel is that – both are essentially glorified anchors. Each of the four strikes in the mid-120s in the powerplay. Sharjeel has the highest ceiling, with a post-powerplay run rate of almost 9.50 but a powerplay average of 17 indicates that the probability of him getting to that scoring rate is way lower.The quickest of the four in the powerplay is Rizwan, who goes at 126, a run rate of 7.56 per over. For contrast, eight of the 12 Full Member sides have scored at over eight an over in the powerplay in phase two.Pakistan could look at the table above and conclude that there’s no need to change the Azam-Rizwan combo and that they could do with Zaman and Sharjeel lower down. Of course, there’s a difference between batting in the eighth over when you’ve been there from the start, and arriving at the fall of a wicket with the bowling team’s tail up. Each of these four players has a much higher post-powerplay strike rate when batting in the top order than when batting in the middle order. Yet it isn’t such an outlandish idea to have them in the middle, such is the state of Pakistan’s middle-order batting.Middle-order malaise
In raw numbers Pakistan’s middle-overs phases have been far better than their powerplays. They have been an average or above-average team for most of this era.ESPNcricinfo LtdHowever, these phases have been dependent on that top order batting long and scoring quicker the longer they bat, and in 2020, on Mohammad Hafeez. The latest iteration of Hafeez is the prime reason Pakistan have actually kept up with the world in those middle overs.Pakistan began this five-year period with the likes of Sarfaraz and Shoaib Malik in their middle order. Unsatisfied with accumulators, they looked for a power-hitter and have since experimented with Asif Ali, Khushdil Shah, Haider Ali, and even tried to force Iftikhar Ahmed into that role. None have stepped up. Since Iftikhar made a couple of scores in Australia in 2019, Pakistan have played 21 T20Is, tried over a dozen players at five and six, and only once has a player made more than 25. Forget averages or strike rates, that’s a level of failure that is hard to comprehend. For context, even the allrounder, Faheem Ashraf, has scored three 30s in this period, batting at seven and eight.This has led ubiquitous former Pakistan players still playing domestic cricket to peddle a false argument that selectors are unfairly obsessed with picking “PSL hitters” over “domestic performers”. In doing so they ignore that Shah averages 45 at a run a ball in his six-season-long List A career, and that Asif Ali has averaged 52 at a strike rate of over 110 in 50-overs cricket in the last four domestic seasons, and that Haider Ali averages over 45 in both first-class and 50-overs domestic cricket in his two seasons. And that Iftikhar, a man who has never really set the PSL alight, is one of three players with at least 50 innings (along with AB de Villiers and Virat Kohli) to average over 50 with a strike rate of over 90 in his List A career.It isn’t unknown for cricket teams to follow a selection formula like deep states secretly running countries employ: they put in place a new regime and at the first sign of trouble start wondering whether the old one was really that bad. Sure, the old guys aren’t what they dreamed of, but right now there’s not much else that can be done. And so:ESPNcricinfo LtdThis is simply comparing Malik and Hafeez to the overall mean – forget about comparing their numbers to those of the like of Glenn Maxwell, Keiron Pollard, Rishabh Pant or David Miller. Pakistan went back to Hafeez very soon after discarding him, and it has paid off. What are the odds they’ll go back to Malik too?In a spin
Much of Pakistan’s success over the past five years has been built around their multi-pronged spin attack. They have been aided by helpful conditions, but both Imad Wasim and Shadab Khan stepped up in Pakistan’s rise. And the subsequent decline of both has been one of the causes for the team’s overall fall.ESPNcricinfo LtdFor all their legacy of fast bowling, the past decade has been defined for Pakistan by their being at the forefront of the powerplay spin revolution: no team in history has opened with a spinner more often than Pakistan; no spinner has shared the new ball across formats more than Hafeez; and in T20Is no one has opened more often than Imad Wasim.Wasim reached the top of the T20 rankings almost entirely on the back of his new-ball expertise, but the Wasim of phase one and two are different bowlers.ESPNcricinfo LtdThis change in numbers, however impressive the economy rate still is, isn’t to be regarded in isolation. After a decade during which spinners’ fortunes were high in the powerplay, there has been a movement back towards pace bowling in the last couple of years. Teams, both national and franchise, are learning that the value of top-order wickets is higher than they assumed and so a run-saving spinner isn’t always the positive he once was.Since the white Kookaburra tends to swing for only the first two or three overs, giving spinners those early overs ends up being counterproductive. So the powerplay spinner has become a shock tactic, perhaps best exemplified by the fact that even in the 2021 half-season of the IPL, with spin-friendly wickets, less than 14% of the new-ball overs were bowled by spinners (compared to, say, the 2018 IPL, when that number was 26%). Instead, as the Chennai Super Kings showed with Sam Curran and Deepak Chahar opening the bowling, new-ball swing bowlers are back in vogue.In that light, Pakistan dropping Wasim for Mohammad Nawaz made sense. Nawaz may never be the powerplay option that Wasim is, but he is a better bowler in the other phases. And with the rise of Shaheen Shah Afridi and the return to form of Hasan Ali, Pakistan have pace resources for the powerplay.Mohammad Wasim, Pakistan’s chief selector, specifically noted how Wasim needs to improve his middle-overs bowling – a clear indication that he was thinking of a move to pace. And yet, his words have not been backed by the actions of the team management. In the absence of Imad Wasim, Nawaz has played eight T20Is and shared the new ball in six.A similar trend has emerged with legspin, and for Pakistan it has been exacerbated by Shadab’s lack of form and fitness since the start of 2019. His overall decline mirrors that of many of his contemporaries.ESPNcricinfo LtdSince the 2016 World T20, eight of the top 20 wicket-takers in T20Is are wristspinners, only one of whom has had a better phase two than phase one. Only Yuzvendra Chahal and Kuldeep Yadav have had as sharp a decline as Shadab; one is now out of the Indian team and the other has question marks around him for the first time in years. Shadab can’t be far behind.But in the absence of many real middle-overs enforcers, and the fact that the World T20 is going to be in Asia, Pakistan are still going to play a wristspinner. The only question is whom.If you consider only the tournaments that each of them have all played, it’s clear that Shadab remains among the best options for Pakistan. Based on the data below, Zahid Mahmood is the likeliest to replace him: from being the best T20 bowler to being the first legspinner in a decade to take more than 50 first-class wickets in a season, he has been the outstanding leggie in the Pakistan domestic game over the last two seasons.Of course, these aren’t exactly like-for-like comparisons – the biggest advantages Wasim and Shadab have is that they can be significant contributors with the bat.ESPNcricinfo LtdAnd there is the wild card. Pakistan spinners have always depended heavily on their captains, from Abdul Qadir being so beholden to Imran Khan that he ended up naming his eldest son after him, to Misbah making Yasir Shah’s career after having captained him domestically for half a decade. It is with this in mind that Usman Qadir’s case is to be assessed. He goes back a long way with Azam and his quality as a wicket-taker under Azam in T20s is clear from his numbers too.ESPNcricinfo LtdAny one of Shadab, Mahmood or Qadir should be fine, as long as Pakistan realise that T20 legspin isn’t what it was even four years ago – teams have employed more lefties as hitters in the middle overs to counter it (which is also why Pakistan should consider Zaman and/or Sharjeel in the middle order more seriously than they actually will).

****

So this is where Pakistan now stand. Over 18 months they have gone from wondering whether their all-conquering side could translate their success at a T20 World Cup, to wondering what it will take to get back to that level. It’s clear that a misuse of their own resources, a drop in form of several star performers, and perhaps most significantly, an inability to keep pace with an ever-evolving format have all contributed to the decline.Even their pace bowling, the one safety net Pakistan have had in T20Is, has question marks over it. Despite the emergence of Afridi and the return of Hasan Ali, Pakistan’s pace attack has gone from being one that took wickets more often than the global average (while going at over a run per over better than that in phase one), to one which is pretty much average by most metrics.Some of that is down to a change in personnel, but there’s also the simple fact that in the Sarfaraz era, every bowler had been assigned just the right role: it rarely felt as if Pakistan were bowling a fast bowler in the wrong phase. Now, take the case of Haris Rauf. He is one of the few fast bowlers to go at a lower economy at the death than in the powerplay (but is twice as likely to take a wicket at the death), while being an above average middle-overs bowler. Yet 30% of the deliveries he has bowled in T20Is have been in the powerplay.That sums it up, really. A change in personnel, a lack of resources, yes, but more than anything, a failure to understand those resources and maximise them. And until Pakistan return to being the team that was bigger than the sum of its parts, you can see their T20 fortunes going the way their 50-over fortunes have gone in the past two decades.

Australia have a good attack, established stars with the bat, and a new captain who is the best man for the job

Ian Chappell05-Dec-2021This is the hardest Ashes series to decipher.First, there are the controversies to be assessed on both sides; the Tim Paine crisis and the Azeem Rafiq Yorkshire debacle. Then, neither team has played much serious cricket in the build-up and therefore it’s hard to equate the successors in each side.However, it’s still the Ashes and one team will gain an advantage over the other. It seems that England has to quickly establish their credentials at the Gabba or they will be overrun by an Australian team in the ascendant.England have that opportunity in the first Test. There is an unknown quantity about the pitch, Ben Stokes is making his comeback as a full allrounder, and Pat Cummins is yet to establish his captaincy credentials.Related

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The last point is the most crucial for Australia. Cummins is the right choice as captain. He is by far the most inspirational cricketer in Australia. If a team-mate is not inspired by Cummins’ heartfelt leadership, he’s playing the wrong grade. However, Steven Smith as vice-captain is a controversial choice. How come Smith’s leadership punishment carries a different weight to that of David Warner?Cheating is cheating and both players indulged in the crime at Newlands in 2018. That being the case, their punishments should be identical but they are not. I can only assume Smith received the lesser punishment, in terms of not being disbarred from the captaincy, because someone at Cricket Australia (CA) didn’t like Warner. Like and dislike cannot be part of any selection dilemma and CA should have made a complete break from the past with a brand new leadership duo.England need to establish authority quickly at the Gabba because the wicket may help them early on. If Stokes can then put himself in the mind of the Australians, this will undermine their confidence and may create some unwanted doubts in Cummins as a leader. Even if England don’t win the first Test, they need to finish the game on top to head into the Adelaide day-night affair with a full head of steam. If, on the other hand, Australia win or at least establish authority in Brisbane, a shaky English outfit will struggle to regain a winning psychological advantage.Joe Root’s leadership qualities are tenuous at best. As a captain he lacks imagination, which can be a necessary quality in Australia. England’s best hope is that Stokes can establish himself as a player of authority and that his advice will be well received in the Test side. Stokes’ assertive nature, if Root accepts his input, would make a big difference to England’s on-field leadership.Australia have three established stars with the bat: Warner, Smith and Marnus Labuschagne. They have three others who are a gamble, with Cameron Green the most likely to succeed. Marcus Harris and either Usman Khawaja or Travis Head are the players who are most likely to be found wanting.Australia’s best attribute is a strong bowling attack which will fare well if Alex Carey provides the expected input as keeper. England, on the other hand, have an attack well suited to home conditions but one that has plenty of question marks over it when it comes to a series in Australia. If Stokes establishes his credentials as an aggressive bowler in Australia, this will improve England’s chances immensely.On the batting side only Root and Stokes are confirmed English players of Ashes quality. The rest of the side need to make their mark. The most changes in the series are likely to occur in the England batting, and if this happens Australia will have triumphed.Australia don’t have much wiggle room in their batting, and this is one reason why a hard-fought game in Brisbane is critical.I expect Root’s leadership to wane over the series and Cummins to establish his authority by the end of the five matches. If this happens, Australia will comfortably finish the series winner.

Numbers since 2019 show that he has found the job of opening a lot trickier in the IPL than that for his country

Gaurav Sundararaman and Shiva Jayaraman12-Apr-2022Among 15 batters to have batted at least 30 times in the top three since the 2019 IPL, only two average less than 30. And among those 15 batters, five strike at less than 130 runs per 100 balls. But only one falls in both categories: Rohit Sharma.Rohit has been way below par in the last few seasons in the IPL. The last time he averaged 30-plus in an IPL season was in 2016. Since then, Rohit has averaged below 30 – in the high twenties – every year. His strike rates in these five seasons have been ordinary too: he has struck at 130-plus only in one of them – in 2018. From the 2019 season, when he began opening for Mumbai Indians regularly, Rohit has averaged 27.9 and struck at 127.7. However, these numbers are not indicative of what he is capable of.In T20Is since April 2019, Rohit has made 982 runs at an average of 32.73 and strike rate of 144. And he has scored these runs mostly as an opener for India, the same position where he bats for Mumbai in the IPL. In fact, Rohit is currently the second-most prolific opener in T20Is after Martin Guptill. His 25 fifty-plus scores are the highest in the format for any opener; four of those have been hundreds, and no batter has score more hundreds in T20Is. So clearly, opening is something Rohit is used to.Related

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Even so, Rohit has found the same job a lot trickier in the IPL. It could be because he feels the need to take on the role of an anchor with Mumbai. After all, he is the captain and a seasoned player of the franchise. Rohit could well have been talking about himself when he said “we want batters to bat deep” after the loss to Royal Challengers Bangalore.India’s batting line-up doesn’t demand that role from him. There has been Virat Kohli to play the anchor. There has been KL Rahul too at times. Rohit is free to play his natural game with India. But perhaps he is not so with Mumbai. Or is he?Unlike Punjab Kings or Sunrisers Hyderabad, Mumbai have had the luxury of having a strong middle order in the previous seasons. While the likes of Rahul, David Warner and Kane Williamson had to take on the responsibility of playing deep into the innings, Rohit has actually had the opportunity to play freely.Consider these numbers. Since the 2019 IPL, with Rohit in the middle, his partners have averaged 50.3 runs per dismissal across innings. Now, that is a privilege no other top-order batter has enjoyed in this period: among the 25 batters with at least 20 innings in the top three, none has had their partners average higher than Rohit’s.Rahul, who is often criticised for playing too slowly and costing his team in the end, has seen his partners getting dismissed every 31.4 runs on an average. Williamson has seen a dismissal every 28.8 runs from his partners. Thus, there is clearly a reason for these batters to drop anchor.