MATCH STORIES
Follow UsTake out your front foot. Make sure it points towards the covers. Then align your head and bat in a single line while keeping your back straight, and when the bowler is ready to deliver the ball, just bend it a bit as your front foot gets out, and the bat comes from behind in an unhindered arc.
If you go to any batting coach worth their salt, that’s how they’ll tell you how to be ready to play a cricket ball. After all, this is exactly what the age-old batting technique manuals will tell you.
When T20 cricket arrived, it became clear that consistent six-hitting is now a mandatory skill for every batter to succeed in the format. And regardless of whether you were someone of an average build like Virat Kohli or you had big muscles like Keiron Pollard, you needed to do the power-hitting basics right.
Power-hitting became one of the main arrows in the quiver of modern T20 batters. However, as we know in cricket, modernity was and is being challenged by every batter who finds their own way to score runs.
Jake Fraser-McGurk is one such post-modern batter for whom power-hitting isn’t just the main arrow in his quiver.
It makes up his entire quiver.
After all, if hitting sixes is what wins you games, then why not make your batting mostly just about them? Why not break the hold of tradition and create your style guide for T20 batting?
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The 22-year-old Fraser-McGurk from Australia made his IPL debut against the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) on April 12, showing that the hype that preceded him and his batting was absolutely worth it.
He came in to bat at number three in the fourth over and smashed his second ball from Yash Thakur for a six with immense disdain. All the hype was visible in that one shot.
How stable he remained at the crease, how he had absolutely zero footwork, how he just shifted his front foot and aligned himself for the shot, and then the most noticeable thing amongst it all - his clean, unhindered swing of the bat that finished in an arc behind his back.
Such clean power hitting requires a stable base (which includes a firm head position, high back lift, and proper weight transfer on the front or back foot) at the point of impact with the ball, and a clean swing of the bat. That’s how maximum power gets imparted on the ball. Fraser-McGurk followed this process to the T and added an extra aesthetic element with his beautiful bat swing ending near his lower back.
There couldn’t have been a better way for T20's latest sensation to announce his arrival at the biggest cricketing league in the world.
Fraser-McGurk continued this way throughout his innings. He walloped his fourth ball for a 96-metre six wide of long on. At that point, one felt he would struggle once the spinners who turn the ball away from his majestic bat swing.
However, when slow left-arm spinner Krunal Pandya came on to bowl, he smashed three consecutive sixes in the 13th over. One was lofted towards the leg side in his typical way, but the next two were bludgeoned on the off side off deliveries that were bowled wide, but one full and the other pitched short.
In that over, he showed that his technique was good enough to allow him to hit sixes consistently throughout the innings. This exact prowess helped him attain the incredulous record of the fastest List A hundred (in 29 balls!) and made him famous around the cricketing world.
His 55 against Lucknow included five sixes and just two fours. He attacked 29 out of the 35 balls he faced. By the time he was dismissed, Delhi Capitals needed 28 off 32. The chase was effectively over, and LSG’s defences were finally breached at Ekana.
All it took was a 22-year-old Australian of average build who looked like a high school student to use his bat like a golf club.
Other youngsters in this IPL, like Riyan Parag, hit humungous sixes just like Fraser-McGurk, but their default batting technique is the one discussed at the beginning of this article. That allows them to play at different tempos in a game and in diverse conditions.
However, T20 cricket across the globe is witnessing more and more flat tracks being prepared, and your adaptability as a batter is not being tested enough.
This IPL, 180 runs total, has been breached in 16 out of the 26 games played so far. More often than not, pitches in other franchise leagues are also built for high-scoring games and entertaining knocks. Jake Fraser-McGurk's arrival on the T20 horizon couldn’t have been timed better.
He has already played the BBL 2023-24 and had the third-highest strike rate there. He also batted at a strike rate of 214 in the three innings he played in the ILT20. Such was the promise of his batting that the Australia national team gave him a debut against West Indies last summer.
Batters in world cricket like AB de Villiers have revolutionised power-hitting in terms of expanding their reach of the ball and accessing unique areas of the ground. Fraser-McGurk’s future might also see him become a pioneer one day in consistent six-hitting if he continues to bat as if he’s on a golf course and not a cricket ground.
Of course, he’ll have to ensure that he’s adept at strike rotation and chooses the right ball to hit the maximums, as he himself confessed during the post-match presentation. That will only make him stay longer at the crease and do more damage to the opposition.
Also read - Jake Fraser-McGurk: I’m aggressive, but it is hard to eliminate fear of failure
T20 cricket is changing. Teams have now realised something the West Indies men’s team did a decade ago - six hitting wins you T20s.
Yes, you need to be good enough to stay there and hit. But if you don’t smash more boundaries than the opposition, chances are high that you’ll be thrashed in the game.
Batters like Fraser-McGurk are a product of that realisation. They have broken away from modern T20 batting by making a technique suited for power-hitting their default mode of batting.
Big, powerful players like Shivam Dube and Tim David, among others, also do it with ease. But these players have a lot of natural muscular power to rely on. Not someone like Fraser-McGurk, and that’s why he’s so unique as a power-hitter and is a sensation worldwide at just 22!
He is the perfect post-modern prototype of a T20 batter, and it’s time we acknowledged that.
