George Bailey's new side-on batting stance
One man – George Bailey – seems to be attempting to change the basic rules of batting. No issues with that. The world is quite open to innovations these days more than ever. MS Dhoni, Steven Smith, Chris Gayle and AB de Villiers head the unorthodox batting club. But Bailey, with his new batting stance, is trying to gatecrash and that league abruptly. So far, his efforts haven’t been limited; the right-hander has been trying to do that persistently over a period of time and has been quite successful as well.
The above-mentioned paragraph just wants to roughly describe the strange, awkward yet unique batting stance which Bailey is implementing at the international arena. He perhaps might be having a very out of box theory behind it but to a spectator, it looks outrageous. It’s creating a bit of discussion among cricket fans and a few in the social media circles are demanding for an ‘ABW’ which translates to ‘Ass before wicket.’
Bailey bats exactly opposite to how West Indies legend Shivnarine Chanderpaul batted. The left-handed batsman, in his entire career, played with a big open-chested stance. Chanderpaul’s batting stance did make the purists of game unhappy initially but later found acceptance after achieving a good amount of success.
Bailey, who started batting with this stance towards the end of last year’s IPL, however, has made the experts go crazy with his approach. The fact which adds to the disagreement over the eligibility of such batting stance is that experts feel it would be of no use in long term.
Bailey’s stance is too closed. He is standing fully side-on, His front leg is not in line with the back leg as it points more towards the off side. With the front foot too across to the stumps, Bailey would perhaps sacrifice his drives in exchange of few hard-hitting slogs.
It seems very difficult to drive the ball with proper timing with this stance and may also induce nicks to the gully region. One can clearly sense how Bailey is just managing to defend the ball outside the off stump, making defending the ball look just like a formality. He was at ease because the ball was bowled in mid 120s. But with someone like Adam Milne or Stuart Broad at the other end, his story in the middle would end very prematurely almost every other time.
Bailey is probably trying to overthink the technical aspects of the batting. Experimenting is not wrong in any way but maybe he should not think twice before dropping the idea after a couple of repeated failures starting from his dismissal today where he nicked one behind on the leg side to wicketkeeper BJ Watling.
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