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Prithvi Shaw plays himself out of national contention with terrible IPL 2023

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Last updated on 01 Jun 2023 | 01:02 PM
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Prithvi Shaw plays himself out of national contention with terrible IPL 2023

The Delhi Capitals batter did indeed turn his strength into his weakness

There was a time when everything was going well for Prithvi Shaw. After facing the axe, he worked on his game, his back lift, and that paid off as he began to score daddy hundreds in the domestic circuit. After being ignored for long, he was called up to the Indian team. It felt right.

All he needed to do to seal the deal was have a good Indian Premier League 2023.

However, things did not go according to plan. His scores of 12, 7, 0, 15, 0, 13, 54 and 5 for the Delhi Capitals (DC) this season did little good and now he could see himself further down in the pecking order, especially in white-ball cricket. More so after the smashing seasons Shubman Gill, Ruturaj Gaikwad and Yashasvi Jaiswal had.

But what exactly went wrong for Shaw this year? His childhood coach Prashant Shetty is of the opinion that the pressure got to the opening batter after the initial failures.

“He didn't start well. After he failed in the first 2-3 innings, he felt a lot of pressure. Then he slipped into bad form,” Shetty said in a chat with Cricket.com.

“He was a part of the India camp also before the tournament. So, he was in good shape. He was looking forward to the IPL. But it happens. When he didn’t do well in the first 2-3 innings, the pressure really got to him and he couldn't recover, which is disappointing.”

One of his undoing this season was his inability to score against pacers. Most of his dismissals against them came when the ball was delivered on good length or just back of a length, i.e., 6-10M length.

The fast bowlers bowled 48% of their deliveries between the length and back of length area and Shaw could only manage 46 runs off 43 balls. 

Taking on the pacers, especially in the powerplay, is what Shaw had done so successfully over the last few seasons, but he hit a new low this time around. He scored at a strike-rate of just 115 (average 13.8), a massive dip given that he had scored at close to 150 (average 27.92) against them in the three seasons preceding this one.

While Shetty does not see any technical glitch in the opening batter, he was concerned with the fact that Shaw did not look to negotiate the initial bombardment that could have seen him play longer innings.

“For me, he needs to find a way to play 15-16 deliveries in the powerplay. My issue is he used to get dismissed in 6-7 balls. If he gets settled a bit, plays some 12 balls or so, he usually scores 2-3 boundaries in this period,” Shetty observed.

“You get some time, you have some flow and get into a rhythm and you can capitalise after that. He is known to set up the match for his side by hitting boundaries in the powerplay, but he could not do it unfortunately.”

That’s a valid point indeed. Out of Shaw’s eight dismissals this season, six were within the first 10 balls of his innings. To put things into perspective, he played 11 or more deliveries only twice this season. That’s astonishingly poor for an opening batter. And moreover, he was dismissed once every 9.3 deliveries in this ball range – the lowest for any opening batter who faced at least 10 deliveries.

Ricky Ponting, the DC head coach, too made a similar point earlier in the season.

"Prithvi, absolutely, at his absolute best we know he is a match-winner. That's one of the reasons that he is a retained player here at the Delhi Capitals because we know that if he bats a certain amount of balls, we win about 95% of the games, but so far this season he hasn't been able to produce that," Ponting had noted after Shaw failed to go past 15 in his first six innings.

Where does Shaw stand among his peers? The last few months have pushed him way behind. 

In the domestic season preceding the 2023 IPL, Shaw’s numbers were highly influenced by bashing the lesser prominent teams. Barring his 379 and 113 (against Assam and North East Zone respectively), he had only one hundred in 11 innings (142 against Central Zone). In Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy 2022/23, both of Shaw’s 50-plus scores came against Assam and Mizoram. In seven innings in the Vijay Hazare trophy, Shaw’s best score of 54 was against Mizoram. 

However, Shaw went into the IPL season in good spirits, as confirmed by Shetty. Ricky Ponting, the Delhi Capitals head coach, also felt that this could be Shaw’s season, by the “look in his eyes” in the pre-season warm-ups. 

With Shaw having had plenty of IPL seasons under his belt, deducing his weakness is inevitable. His fifty against the Punjab Kings did come as a relief to the team management, who had retained him, but by then, it was too little too late for the Capitals.

It’ll perhaps take another season or two of grind in the domestic circuit for Shaw to get back into contention for a place in the Indian set-up. However, even that might not be enough (ask Sarfaraz Khan). Regardless, a good season in the IPL next year could certainly fast-track his case.

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