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The Black Caps’ T20 prospects

The state of Shane Jurgensen’s Dubai hotel room says plenty about the effort being made to prepare for the T20 World Cup, writes Andrew Voerman.

When Black Caps bowling coach Shane Jurgensen was interviewed from his hotel room in Dubai this week, he had to be careful not to point the camera at the walls.

He arrived in the United Arab Emirates almost three weeks ago and has been busy thinking about the task that lies ahead of the national men’s cricket team – adding the Twenty20 World Cup to the World Test Championship they won in June.

As part of his thought process, he’s been busy making notes on sheets of paper posted on the walls of his hotel room, which he understandably didn’t want to share with the world via Zoom.

‘‘They’re basically huge sticky notes, or post-it notes,’’ Jurgensen said. ‘‘You sort of start thinking about things, like you’ll be asleep and wake up and go, OK, are we going to bowl wide slower balls in the 20th over or not against [Indian captain] Virat Kohli, or whatever it might be, trying to break down each game.

‘‘In T20 cricket, we probably do more preparation behind the scenes than we do for any other format and that’s basically what all the little things are, up on my wall – trying to find all those windows of opportunity to get ahead of the opposition.’’

Underpinning that preparation is analysis of all the data produced by T20 matches around the world. In a format where there are only 120 balls for batters to face and only 24 balls for each bowler to bowl, maximising the value of each one is important.

T20 is still relatively young, as far as sports formats are concerned. It only celebrated its 18th birthday in June. New insights are being gleaned all the time.

Among the basic need-toknows are the fact that the fewest runs are scored in the first over and the seventh over, as batsmen adjust to starting altogether, then to starting again when field restrictions change after the power play; that leg-spinners, like Black Caps Ish Sodhi and Todd Astle, are valuable because they can turn the ball away from both right-handed and left-handed batsmen; and that the average number of balls faced by Nos 8–11

make bowlers’ batting abilities less valuable than they are in longer formats.

Those are all part of the fabric of T20. What keeps changing are the players and the conditions and when teams arrive at a tournament, such as this World Cup, their focus narrows to the specific opponents they’ll be playing and the specific venues they’ll be playing at.

‘‘Then we sort of sharpen the process on the opposition that we’re going to play on those grounds. My role is to really hone in on the opposition batters at different phases of the games and link that up to our players’ strengths in the bowling unit,’’ Jurgensen said.

Sharjah is the venue for the Black Caps’ first match, against Pakistan on Wednesday morning [NZ time] and the one of the three in use in the UAE that has come under the most scrutiny. It hosted matches in the most recent

edition of the IPL where the pitches were slow and difficult to bat on and that appeared to still be the case when it made its tournament debut on Friday, hosting the first round match between Ireland and Namibia.

Ireland got off to a flyer, scoring 55 runs in the six-over power play, but only another 70 in the 14 overs that followed.

Namibia went for the opposite approach, crawling to 27-1 after the power play, before coming home strong to win by eight

wickets and qualify for the Super 12 phase, where they will join India, Afghanistan, and Scotland as the other teams in the Black Caps’ group.

Jurgensen and the rest of the Black Caps staff will look to gather as much information as they can, then they’ll feed that to the players as they go.

‘‘The whole idea is to make them as comfortable as they can [be] once they hit the ground and really confident in their game plans.’’

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2021-10-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282587381181258

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