For a game rooted in centuries of tradition, cricket has often found itself curiously susceptible to fashion. Did you spot the moment, about five or six years ago, when it quietly became mandatory for any good fielder to be described as a “gun”? Bowling attacks were “the bowling unit” for most of the 2000s before imperceptibly morphing into “the bowling group”. Left-arm wrist-spin is having its long-awaited moment in the sun, itself a reaction to the 2010s trend for spinners who didn’t really spin the ball at all, but just did funny flicky things with their fingers while going “oooh” and stroking their chins a lot.
And so, just as one wicket often brings two, another fashion is sweeping through short-form cricket. On Sunday at Edgbaston, while playing for Birmingham against Nottinghamshire in a rain-affected eight-over game, Carlos Brathwaite became the first batter in the history of the T20 Blast to be retired out for tactical reasons. Seeing Calvin Harrison, a leg-spinner, about to bowl the final over for Nottinghamshire, Brathwaite decided to leave the field and let Sam Hain – a better player of spin – replace him.
Less than an hour later, Nottinghamshire’s Samit Patel became the second. With one ball remaining of the innings, three runs required and Patel at the non-striker’s end, Nottinghamshire withdrew Patel so that Harrison – a quicker runner – could replace him. Did either change work? Not really. Hain didn’t face a ball, while Harrison was only able to scamper through for a single that gave Birmingham a one-run victory. Nonetheless, this unprecedented double substitution – entirely within the laws of the game – offered a taste of where this most restless and unruly format may be heading.
The first thing to say is that there is nothing particularly new about deliberately engineering a dismissal. Most recreational cricketers will have reached a point where they have intentionally lobbed one to extra cover because they have a train to catch. More intriguing is the tactical assassination. “Go and run the bugger out,” Bob Willis urged a young Ian Botham in Christchurch in 1978, with England in pursuit of a quick declaration and Geoff Boycott chiselling away at his usual glacial pace. “What have you done?” a horrified Boycott cried as Botham left him stranded halfway down the pitch. “I’ve run you out, you cunt,” Botham retorted, barely able to contain the giggles.
But the tactical retirement: this is a reasonably new phenomenon, and one largely driven by the growth of T20 and its fixation on marginal gains. Earlier this year Sydney Sixers courted controversy by sending the injured batter Jordan Silk to face the final over of a Big Bash game against Adelaide Strikers, only to retire him once he had reached the non-striker’s end. If that was something of a grey area, then Ravichandran Ashwin’s self-sacrifice for Rajasthan Royals in the Indian Premier League in April was the moment the tactical retirement went global.
With Ashwin on a sedate 28 off 23 balls going into the final over, Rajasthan decided to replace him with the big-hitting Riyan Pirag, who duly smacked eight runs from four balls. In a way, it felt entirely fitting that it was Ashwin – a man whose career has been defined by innovation, experimentation, the search for that extra edge – who fell on his sword here. “We haven’t cracked T20 cricket fully yet,” Ashwin said by way of explanation. “These things happen constantly in football.”
Not everyone was wild about the move. For Chennai Super Kings coach Stephen Fleming, deliberate retirements ruin “the beauty of the battle”, allowing misfiring batters to simply depart rather than working through their issues in the middle. Some argue that retiring a batter in T20 denies the fielding team one of the main benefits of a wicket: a dot ball. There is also something thematically unsatisfying about seeing a perfectly healthy batter walking off, not after being deceived or conquered on the field, but by choice. It is, literally, not cricket.
And so the rise of the deliberate retirement has two major implications, one tactical and one cultural. Tactically, it sharpens the emphasis on match-ups and options, creates another little game within the game. Keeping wickets in hand and deploying tactical retirements in the last few overs may end up being a viable strategy for some teams. Meanwhile, how long until fielding teams start deliberately dropping catches or refusing appeals to keep a struggling batter at the crease? The potential for farce is ripe.
But the really interesting aspect of the tactical retirement is the way it signals a further shift away from the individual and towards the team. At its highest level T20 is gradually pivoting away from a game of individual expression and problem-solving into one of systems and strategies, away from the captain and players on the field and towards the general manager, the boardroom, the analyst. Once it becomes culturally acceptable to withdraw batters in the middle of their innings you are essentially taking another step towards the idea of cricketer as pure resource, a disposable market good in a branded jersey.
Still, just because an innovation is awkward or weird doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. In many ways the apostasy of the tactical retirement – the lateral thinking, the upending of age-old consensus – is the very point of the exercise, indeed the hallmark of T20 as a game. “Is nothing sacred?” the traditionalists squeal. “Not really,” the modernists reply, with a wry smile and a wicked glint in the eye.
