Rigid batting orders should be abolished in ODIs

One day international cricket can learn, and in fact has learnt, a lot from its considerably younger and rebellious sibling, Twenty20.

Opening the bowling with spinners, line-ups heaped with all-rounders and batsmen attacking from the first ball are all some of the nuances of Twenty20 cricket that are creeping into the one-day format.

Although, if there’s one tactic I feel we could see used widely in ODI cricket, it’s the removal of the stringent and rigid nature of batting orders.

You’d never expect a captain to have allocated overs one to 50 among each of the bowlers before going out to field. Fifty-over cricket is a format that thrives upon changes in momentum. When fielding, it demands captains be switched on, analysing the current situation and subsequently thinking ahead to plot their next move. Captains must adapt to the current situation and in turn pre-game plans will often need to be completely scrapped.

It’s clear the fluvial nature of ODI cricket requires adaptive planning from captains and coaches. So why then do we create a batting order pre-match and generally stick to this order regardless of what happens during the course of the innings? Just as a captain would do with his field selections and choice of bowlers, shouldn’t we adapt to the needs of the situation when batting?

My stance on this issue stems from that fact ODI sides are now stacked with all-rounders. Look at Australia on Sunday night for example – Mitchell Marsh, Glen Maxwell, James Faulkner and even Mitchell Starc and Ben Cutting. These players are all aggressive, attacking batsman but don’t have as sound techniques as the likes of George Bailey, Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin, or even Steve Smith, who was omitted.

There will be games when Australia are well and truly on top, so with wickets in hand why not promote one of these all-rounders way up the order to accelerate the scoring.

On the other hand though, there are situations like Monday night where Australia is in trouble or collapsing. The situation called for a calm head, a tight technique in the extremely foreign conditions and an ability to play spin. In this situation I would have sent in Brad Haddin after the wicket of George Bailey.

I would have felt a lot more at ease with a genuine batsman in Haddin at the crease than an all-rounder, Mitchell Marsh. Maybe Haddin and Clarke could have formed a partnership that got through the tricky part of the innings, and set a platform for an onslaught from the all-rounders at the death of the innings.

Who knows if that would have happened, but from a tactical point of view it seems a lot more likely that in that very situation a Haddin-Clarke combination would have better suited than a Marsh-Clarke combination.

Or to a lesser extent, what about looking at the genuine batsman’s role in this very argument. Take Steve Smith and George Bailey, for example. They’re batsmen who will patiently noodle the ball around the field early in their innings, constantly rotating the strike to get into the groove.

As their innings goes on, they see the ball better and can both deal in boundaries. At the same time though, from a technical point of view it’s clear that their footwork and lack of tight technique isn’t quite up to the swinging new ball. In an ideal world you’d try to protect them from the new ball and have them enter once the shine of the ball begins to diminish, after the 10th over. At the same time though, if they hadn’t entered before the 40th over with wickets in hand, you’d send in much more aggressive players who can attack from the outset.

I can hear the pessimists shouting already, ‘So who do you send in to hide Smith or Bailey in the first 10 overs?’. Well, you may not be able to, that’s just the nature of cricket. Just the same way you try to protect spinners from a certain damaging batsman, but sometimes you have no option but to bring them on and get their overs done with.

There are plenty of occasions when a change of bowling, or field setting might not go as it may have been hoped, and that may be the same with the promotion and demotion of batsman in the order.

A sub-plot to this argument is picking or not picking players because they do or don’t fit the supposed job description of a certain number in the batting order. For example, to use Steve Smith again, he’s a much more capable batsman than some of the all-rounders in the side. It was clear on Sunday night that the pitch resembled that of an Indian third-day Test pitch, and as such would require skilled batsman to deal with its nature.

But we don’t pick him, because he doesn’t fit the number six description as an attacking all-rounder. Why not pick the best batsman and slot them into the innings when required?

Each individual cricketer has a variety of skills that makes them a completely different player to the next, and more suited to the needs of the situation that the match is currently poised in. This beautiful game throws up so many variables, and it’s the way in which captains utilise the different skills of each player in the face of an assortment of variables that will play a large role in affecting its outcome.