What’s more? Tom Banton ups the volume

5 minute read

There’s a fundamental tension these days between specialising in one particular format and striving to become a more rounded cricketer. It’s pretty much impossible to walk both paths, but right now Tom Banton appears to have put a good few footprints on each.

In the parallel worlds of strength and endurance training, coaches often talk about the relationship between volume, intensity and frequency. Volume is how much you do; intensity is how hard it is; frequency is how often. Whether you’re powerlifting or riding a bike, you can’t really neglect any of those three areas if you want to progress.

We’ve thought about how this applies to cricket quite often since T20 franchisery made it possible for players to concentrate almost entirely on the shortest format. A few years back, we wrote about Jason Roy’s “foundations” and whether he might have needed a bit more time in the middle.

Roy was playing high intensity cricket and he was playing it often. What he wasn’t doing was facing a great many deliveries.

Broadening the mind, then crushing it

Tom Banton had a big T20 Blast in 2019. The only batter to make more runs than him was his then Somerset team-mate Babar Azam – and he didn’t make them anywhere near as quickly. Banton made 549 runs at 42.23, scoring at 161.47 runs per hundred balls.

At this point he was 20 and only a few months later he was handed an England cap in New Zealand. Not too long after this, he was playing for everyone. To refer to him as a Somerset player is something of a misrepresentation.

Now 26, Banton’s turned out for Brisbane Heat, Colombo Stars, Delhi Bulls, Dubai Capitals, Fortune Barishal, Gulf Giants, Kolkata Knight Riders, MI Cape Town, MI Emirates, Northern Superchargers, Peshawar Zalmi, Qalandars, Quetta Gladiators, Team Abu Dhabi, Trent Rockets and Welsh Fire.

Rather than being an integral part of a band, Banton had become more of an itinerant session musician. He reckons he had his first taste of burnout as early as the winter of 2019/20 and a few months later he was already talking about the importance of finding a balance in his various commitments.

“I need to make sure I plan my winters well from now on and not play too much cricket,” he told Wisden.com in 2020.

In that same interview, he said he just tried to enjoy his cricket as much as possible. “The way I see it at the moment is that playing for your country is so much fun, so just enjoy the experience.”

How’d that go then?

“I hated cricket,” he recently said of the period after he was dropped by England for a second time in 2022. “I didn’t really enjoy playing it. I just had to do it because it was a job.”

This can happen even if you only play for one team, but a transient existence probably magnifies such feelings.

Given that Banton has clearly recovered a bit of form (and enthusiasm) since then, the obvious conclusion would be to assume that the freelance work dried up and he came back to Somerset, found a bit of stability, played some red ball cricket and got into a bit of rhythm. Except he actually reckons things turned around last winter when he was playing for MI Cape Town in the SA20. He then parlayed that into a run of scores in the ILT20 with Dubai Capitals.

As backdrops for heartwarming comebacks go, it’s one of the more soulless

But, you know, back is back. Banton played 12 County Championship games for Somerset last year and averaged 49.50. This year he’s put himself in a position where he can now peel off half a dozen ducks in a row and he’ll still be averaging more than 50 because he racked up 371 in his first innings of the season.

Kudos to Worcestershire for batting out 200 overs to secure the draw in that match, but they have to take second billing here. When a lad comes in at 39-3 after the opposition were dismissed for 154 and knocks out a triple, that’s a pretty big deal. The innings of the season might already have been and gone.

That Jason Roy article talks about the importance of building and maintaining a base. On a bike that just means doing low octane, steady miles, day after day. It’s an aspect of fitness that takes a while to build, but unlike the type of fitness required for more intense efforts, it lasts longer too. It takes time though. While various trends and fads sometimes suggest otherwise, it’s widely accepted there isn’t really any substitute for putting the hours in.

If you’re a high quality England batter, this is the hardest thing to find. There’s always a T20 league underway somewhere, so intensity is a given – and frequency too. But volume? How often do you really get a chance to just bat and bat and bat?

We don’t mean in the nets. We’re talking about in the middle, with fielders, against bowlers who are trying to get you out. Batting with less urgency. Zone 2 batting, if you will. It’s not easy to find this. Even if you don’t want to specialise in one format or another, chances are the game will steer you in that direction anyway.

So there’s a bit of luck here. The forces that align the stars are beyond a cricketer’s control. Banton had a good county season and a good T20 winter – but crucially not such a good one that he attracted any bids in the IPL auction. That left him free to play in Taunton, where he upped his volume considerably in the span of just one innings.

Maintaining significant volume might be more of a challenge, longer-term. That is unless he gets himself a regular gig with the Test team.

Speaking of frequency

We’ve been posting a bit erratically the last couple of weeks. Ideally, we’d move to posting shorter pieces a little more often, but honestly, for one reason or another, it just isn’t panning out that way at the minute. As ever, the best way to stay up to date with the site is to sign up for the email.