
The madness of milestones
Rishabh Pant was a few inches short - not chasing a desperate run, but making his partner’s lunch easier to digest.
You can buy my new book 'The Art of Batting' here:
It could have brushed anything - willow, plastic, leather. So many chances to be spared. But it didn’t. It found the stumps. The batter walks. And with them, what mattered most. All lost for something that didn’t.
It all started with a minimal curve of the ball into the stumps. Anything but deadly, from the hand of Shoaib Bashir. It’s almost gentle, then on pitching, it straightens slightly. Not with big spin, or something ripping, just a yawning fade. The ball could not find the middle of the Rishabh Pant bat in a more mathematically precise spot. It squirts out in front of point.
But the moment it does, there is an instant call, and suddenly the casual occurrence of cricket becomes high octane. This is not a single that needs to be taken; it will not make India more likely to win the match. It’s also not one that is in any way safe. KL Rahul has backed up, but it’s more of a crawl rather than him expecting the run. But he wants to get down the striker's end so he can try to bring up his hundred before lunch. So when he decides to honour the call, his athleticism and speed explode as he’s now racing Ben Stokes, who has plenty of both as well.
It’s touch and go whether Rahul will outrun Stokes. When the ball is in the captain’s hand, he’s running directly at the striker’s stumps and KL has not yet passed Rishabh Pant.
The run out is on.
But Stokes turns it on its head. Instead of flicking at the stumps near him, he stops on his right leg, twists his body in mid-air, and turns to throw back behind himself. He has seen something few could have - Pant’s millisecond of hesitation. Rahul might have been out had Stokes flicked, but if he hits the bowler’s end, Pant will be.
Then, in a moment of bad luck for India, Stokes not only gets the throw away straight, but the ball appears to go past the pads and between the bat and boot of Pant as he is running. While he wasn’t trying to get in the way, he was doing a pretty good job. But Stokes picked up the ball perfectly, turned like an ice skater performing an axel, and then threw accurately enough to hit the stumps and miss every other obstacle in his way.
Rishabh Pant was a few inches short - not chasing a desperate run, but making his partner’s lunch easier to digest. A single for the stomach. It ended up upsetting more than that.
KL Rahul pushes the ball into the offside and takes a risky run. He is a couple of feet past the crease, and he then celebrates his hundred.
This is seen as a normal run, but it isn’t. At no other stage in a Test would this be needed, outside of a player struggling against a particular bowler. But we accept a little bit of risk when taking a single here, because of his hundred. An arbitrary landmark where your score goes from double digits to triple.
There is no reason - just after lunch - for you to be stealing a run on a pitch where wickets are really hard to take. It doesn’t make any real sense. Just continue to bat the exact way you were before, and score as many as you can.
But as cricketers, we are trained to do this - to react a certain way to each milestone.
I know more than most that these things affect your brain. When I played junior cricket, you had to retire when you made 50. I would bring up that mark, raise my bat, and walk off. Then, as I got to the higher levels and didn’t have to retire, I would bring up my 50, raise my bat, and be out within a few balls.
I was a cricket Pavlovian dog.
Ivan Pavlov had a dog, and the scientist rang a bell every time he fed it. Before long, the dog started drooling just at the sound of the bell - no food in sight. My junior cricket days had conditioned me to think that my job was done once my 50 was celebrated.
Every single hundred I made was also followed by my worst shot of the innings. Anyone cheering for me when batting was the worst thing that could happen.
So I know this is a real condition that batters face. Despite knowing it’s completely nuts that we’re worshipping these random whole numbers. Because of the number of digits we have, we’ve decided to use base ten, or the decimal system. So 50, or 100, matters a lot. But obviously, this is nonsense. 99 is worth one less run than 100. I tried to tell Martin Crowe once: 299 is a cooler number than most over 300. So he should count himself lucky to have that as his top score. He disagreed.
Mark Waugh told us for The Art of Batting, “Test match cricket - I probably should have averaged three or four more points higher if I was really hungry when I was on top. And that’s something I probably should have been better at, but I was more concerned about getting the team into a good position and winning the games most of the time.”
Mark Waugh passed 100 twenty times. He passed 120 with only seven. A lot of those lower hundred scores were from him thinking the job was done. Some were clearly from his failure to, as Barry Richards puts it, “club baby seals.”
Perhaps the best case of this ever is not Waugh, but the player he inspired, Michael Clarke. For the first part of his career, he regularly went out not long after making a hundred. And then later in his career, he was dismissed just after making 150.
This is not accidental. He told Steve Smith that in his mind, the total he wanted to get was 150, not 100. And for the latter half of his career, he made big scores.
These are two quality players who were both affected by the milestone issue. Most people think you’re more likely to get out in the nervous 90s. But weirdly, batters are brilliant under that pressure - they watch the ball more, and ensure they get to their milestone. The safest time for any Test batter in the first 125 runs of the innings is the 15 from 85 to 100.
The most dangerous time after scoring 70 runs is when you have just scored your hundred.
And you can see that when you’re making 200, the exact same thing happens. Even the greatest batters of all time are like Pavlov’s dogs - give them praise, and it is the easiest time to take their wicket.
In fact, the pattern is weirdly similar. Batters in the five runs before their major milestones are really good; in the five after, they drop off massively. We don’t see this for 50s or 150s. It is just for your big boys.
Batters love praise, and then straight after, lose their bubble.
Today, KL Rahul got the single, raised the bat, and then Pavlov’s dog drowned him. He somehow managed to get an outside edge to a Shoaib Bashir ball that looked as life-threatening as sugar-free vanilla ice cream - without adding another run. He made exactly 100.
Before Pant tried to get Rahul on strike, India looked likely for a very healthy lead. By the time Rahul was out, it was back to the bare-knuckle fistfight we’d been seeing all Test.
Rishabh Pant was a few inches short, KL Rahul was stopped dead on his aim. Because of one milestone, India upset themselves.