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Jos Buttler hits a great many sixes and a proportion of them are delivered via a mad wrist snap. The mad wrist snap is what we’re writing about today.
For some in cricket – most of whom are commentators and several of whom are perhaps mildly racist – ‘wristiness’ is a quality that is unique to Asian batsmen.
This is odd because when we think about wristy shots, quite a few of the examples that immediately come to our mind were played by England batsmen. Think of Kevin Pietersen’s manipulated work-to-leg to get off strike or Eoin Morgan’s what-the-hell-was-that-supposed-to-be.
Think also of about half the shots played by Jos Buttler. Where Chris Gayle swings from the torso, a Buttler wallop ripples down through every joint, culminating in an almost Murali-level snap of the wrists. It’s a movement from another sport – maybe badminton, or squash. (Probably golf if we’re honest, but let’s not start writing about golf. A man’s got to have some standards and that’s one of ours. (We have eight standards in total.))
We’d actually go so far as to say that Buttler is the wristiest batsman we’ve seen. Maybe he should change his name to Josananda Buttlerweera so that all the generalisers can more easily come to terms with his style of play.
It’s not easy to get a sense of what he does from a photo, but look at his bat in this shot and then look at where the ball is.
The ball was dispatched through midwicket. Just think about what his wrists had to do for that to happen. Madness.
This is the essence of the Buttler wrist snap. It starts with a ludicrous wrists-cocked backlift and ends with a ludicrous wrists-cocked follow-through. In the nanosecond between those two positions, bat strikes ball – usually quite hard.
It’s pure golf… you’re right. Brilliant spot. Wrist hinge in a golf swing, and how late you hold that hinge, so how fast you have to snap your wrists actually to hit the ball, is the key to whacking it miles.
Much like you’ve described in your last image with Buttler – and he whacks it miles.
“We have eight standards in total” – that was a beauty.
What are the other ones?
I particularly liked the use of nested parentheses. Naughty but nice.
(Had KC listed his seven other standards at the appropriate point in the text, he might even have managed triple parentheses. (Using multiple parentheses tends to send the grammar and style police into apoplexy. (There are many other such punctuation peccadillos, too numerous to list here.)))
Never say “haitch”, never come to know makes and models of cars, always drink on a Friday etc.
All good stuff, KC, but abstaining from golf-writing (and presumably also golf-playing) is surely your pre-eminent standard.
If I had to guess, I’d say ‘No dancing. Ever.’
Oh, and Tamim Iqbal’s back. You get the idea. Back to being badly let down by his team mates.
No dancing, deffo. Those damned rhythmic ceremonial rituals.
http://www.espncricinfo.com/series/18805/report/1153847/day/3/new-zealand-vs-bangladesh-1st-test-bangladesh-in-nz-2018-19
What the heck’s this? I hadn’t even realised there was a series going on.
1123 runs have been scored, 715 in NZ’s innings (for the loss of six wickets) and there’s likely only six more wickets left in the match…
Are people playing cricket in fast-forward these days? Bangladesh have been going along at 4 an over and it doesn’t seem to be helping them any.