Producing a batter equally accomplished across all three formats of the game is no longer achievable in cricket. Such a player represents a batting pinnacle that asks too much, and performances have suggested this for long now, yet coaches continue to believe otherwise.
The modern batter moves from franchise cricket into international T20s, then to 50-over cricket and, almost overnight, is then expected to produce a Test game in entirely different conditions. One week he is encouraged to attack from ball one and the next he must leave patiently outside off stump, play with limitations against movement, or survive pace and bounce abroad.
Cricket has gone there. Player development has not.
India’s tour of the UK is a recent example. They arrived fresh from the IPL with no meaningful preparation resembling the conditions ahead. After two defeats to Ireland on dibbly-dobbly wickets, England exposed India‘s difficulties against pace and bounce in an embarrassing manner at Trent Bridge. So much so, the T20 world champions were reduced to merely gifted players being asked to produce a game for which they had not prepared. More concerningly, all appeared uncertain about what that game actually looks like.
I have sat through enough team meetings to know it would have been discussed. But none of that is the point. What matters is what the player has prepared for, what their game has been built upon, and what their body knows when they walk into the middle.
Under pressure, the body does not reproduce the meeting. It reproduces the training. A modern military and self-help precept says that we do not rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training. And that is what we have been seeing in cricket for too long.
Batters travel with reputations and speak the modern language of “intent”, but when difficult conditions strip these away, we get to see what’s underneath. For a generation of batters, what’s left is a hybrid technique, shaped by a multi-format game, a chaotic schedule, and coaching methods centred on building batting dominance. This technique blends power-hitting with abbreviated traditional fundamentals, and it is expected to travel effortlessly between formats and countries.
When conditions suit it, the results are spectacular. But when they don’t, the failure is equally so.
Let’s take a step back.
The old methods were shaped by a more demanding and different environment. Uncovered wickets, and the lack of modern machinery and maintenance methods, produced movement all day long, forcing batters to build techniques capable of survival first.
It was a sideways game, played with the toe of the bat on the ground, only raised once the ball had left the bowler’s hand. The backlift was limited, hands were soft, welcoming the ball in close to the body, and contact was always under the eyes. Footwork was right forward and right back, using the crease, buying time.
Adaptation was always the defining skill in scoring runs consistently. That’s why Test cricket rewards intelligent limitation and honest risk assessment
It was not a game of power but of gentle persuasion. It could not be otherwise under the conditions.
Today’s batter has been raised in a different environment. Endless bowling machine feeds, and quick and true indoor surfaces are what they prepare their game on. Ideal match surfaces are thought of as those producing maximum playing time. Flat is the result.
When there is movement, batters go even harder, by moving around the crease in an attempt to scare the bowler off a good line and length, or to limit movement through the air or off the pitch. Takes out the lbw, they say, and coaches agree. The DRS, though, is still giving them out. Against late swing or seam, batting in this way is like reaching for a moving object before knowing where it will finish: the earlier and harder you commit, the less chance you have of adjusting.
The inconvenient truth is that the hybrid game provides breadth but no depth, and under severe examination has been shown to be a failure.
Cricket coaches today have mistaken a blended technique for a complete one, but they are simply not the same. It’s not difficult to understand why this misconception exists, because coaching today is increasingly led by coaches developed in the power-hitting and T20 era. Their experience shapes the dominant batting narrative, leaving fewer of them able to teach what technical discipline looks like and why it must come before stroke-making.
Coaching language is aligned to match. Questionable technique becomes “individuality”. Failure, moving from format to format, is attributed to “mindset”. These are broad and easy explanations, because technique demands specifics and many can’t go there. They simply do not understand how cricketing technique was shaped and why. I don’t hear one coach in the game, even at international level, who has pieced it together.
Bazball told the story in Test cricket. It did not liberate batting, but rather gave a generation of players permission to ignore its toughest demands and call it freedom. It arrived in a game whose technique and mentality were already shifting toward power-hitting. It did not need to convert anyone and it found a warm, welcoming home among batters. It was a philosophy and a skill set meeting at exactly the right moment.
But Bazball should have prompted caution. A Test cricket philosophy that asks nothing technically new of the modern batter was never going to develop the parts of his game that were missing. But early success made the idea difficult to challenge and few people were prepared to question it while the results were coming.
But trouble was always coming because trouble is built into cricket itself. Few sports contain such constant variation. The contest between bowler and batter is shaped by a living surface, exposed to weather and wear, changing from one country to another, one ground to another, and sometimes from morning to afternoon. Cricket keeps changing the question. No philosophy based on imposing the same rigid answer can consistently produce excellence against that. Certainly not in a game like cricket.
Thus, adaptation has always been technical as well as mental. No amount of positive thinking can help a batter play a seaming ball late if the technique to do so has never been built. A player whose game is founded largely on “see ball, hit ball” and who practises that, cannot suddenly produce prolonged restraint when the situation demands an entire session of patience, or ugly batting as we used to call it.
Simply put, adaptation was always the defining skill in scoring runs consistently. That’s why Test cricket rewards intelligent limitation and honest risk assessment. A player could build a respectable career around one attacking shot, a nudge for one, and a solid forward defence. That is how I was introduced to Test cricket.
But if I look around the game today, I struggle to find anyone still following that idea, coach or player. If a young batter attempted to build such a method now, there would be no place for them in the modern game. Their patience would be viewed as weakness, and a limited range of shots as a lack of skill. A limited backlift, starting with the toe of the bat on the ground, would be regarded as incapable of producing power and timing; restraint as a lack of intent.
Hitting is my business and business is good: players have increasingly become T20 specialists; it’s time we took that approach to its logical conclusion•BCCI
That should tell us everything we need to know about what the system now values and why it fails when under pressure.
But in all of this, opportunity beckons. That is the real purpose of this article. But it’s not for the faint-hearted.
I do not see cricket’s volume decreasing, nor do I see meaningful preparation windows suddenly appearing in a calendar built by commercial forces that have no intention of dismantling it and drawing it up from scratch.
If the fixture list lacks rhythm and preparation time has disappeared, there is only one honest route toward better, more meaningful cricket: format specialisation carried to its logical conclusion.
The game has flirted with the idea before. We have seen split coaching roles and format-specific selections. But flirtation is not commitment and half-measures have produced half-results.
What the moment now requires is a clean break: specialist coaching tailored to the unique demands of each format, specialist player development pathways, and exclusive squads built around the technical, mental and environmental demands of each format, home and away.
We can’t continue to see so many series where teams and players are slow out of the blocks and when they do finally get going, the result is pretty much a formality. The game and its followers deserve better!
The exceptional multi-format batter will still occasionally emerge and their rarity will make them even more valuable. But exceptions cannot be the basis of a national strategy.
The commercial fear is understandable. A country’s best players are marketed as a package, and separating that talent may appear to weaken the product. But look at Test cricket now: how many series are already played without a nation’s strongest side because of congested schedules, workload management, and players prioritising franchise opportunities?
In many cases, the administrators are protecting an ideal that no longer exists. So what exactly does cricket have to lose?
What sells in the end is not simply star power, but quality, context and credibility. Protect the integrity of each format, select players who are fully committed and properly prepared for its unique demands, and cricket will create a stronger commercial product, not a weaker one.
The teams with the courage to act first will move decisively ahead of those still hedging. The rest will spend the next decade wondering why they didn’t.
Daryll Cullinan played 70 Tests for South Africa between 1993 and 2001