Slog of the Day: Paul Stirling v England

2 minute read

A paean to pace, the pivot-pan and the perils of the pair of them today.

If you’re unaware of the shot known as the pivot-pan, it’s probably because we only just labelled it. As you’ve no doubt guessed, the nomenclature in large part arose because we wanted to slot a couple more Ps into our opening paragraph.

The pivot-pan is when a batter adopts a narrow stance and swings cross-batted sufficiently powerfully that they perform a kind of pirouette in their follow-through.

Ireland’s Paul Stirling played just such a shot to Mark Wood today. The ball was wide of off stump, back of a length, and Stirling deployed a full mow, setting his sights on The Dean Jones Bar, which was just in front of square on the leg-side.

The very great thing about the exact moment captured above is that the ball is almost exactly behind Stirling.

This is the thing about pace: it can be quite hard to slog.

However, the other thing about pace is that you don’t always need to middle it.

Down at third man, Sam Curran made a highly valiant attempt to first take the catch and then, when that ceased to be an option, prevent a six.

It was a forlorn effort though as his foot made contact with the boundary. It’s interesting to think that while this worked out as half a dozen on a toblerone ground, it would probably only have been a single (or maybe two) if they’d been using a rope. It’s harder to advertise on rope though.

Two balls later, Stirling stepped away and tried to carve one over the in-fielders to the cover boundary. Unfortunately, he again edged the ball aerially to third man and this time not quite far enough as Curran took an easy catch.

The six was pretty useful though being as Ireland won by five runs according to the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method.

Top slogging, Paul Stirling.

Well played, Ireland.

T20 is a bit too complicated for us these days, so we’re instead celebrating one of cricket’s oldest and simplest pleasures via our Slog of the Day feature.