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The rise of tactical batting retirements: intriguing innovation or just not cricket? | Jonathan Liew
The new T20 trend for replacing batters at crucial moments will upset traditionalists, but that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong
For a game rooted in centuries of tradition, cricket has often found itself curiously susceptible to fashion. Did you spot the moment, about five or six years ago, when it quietly became mandatory for any good fielder to be described as a “gun”? Bowling attacks were “the bowling unit” for most of the 2000s before imperceptibly morphing into “the bowling group”. Left-arm wrist-spin is having its long-awaited moment in the sun, itself a reaction to the 2010s trend for spinners who didn’t really spin the ball at all, but just did funny flicky things with their fingers while going “oooh” and stroking their chins a lot.
And so, just as one wicket often brings two, another fashion is sweeping through short-form cricket. On Sunday at Edgbaston, while playing for Birmingham against Nottinghamshire in a rain-affected eight-over game, Carlos Brathwaite became the first batter in the history of the T20 Blast to be retired out for tactical reasons. Seeing Calvin Harrison, a leg-spinner, about to bowl the final over for Nottinghamshire, Brathwaite decided to leave the field and let Sam Hain – a better player of spin – replace him.
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