Wednesday, June 4, 2008

The Yo-Yos New Jobs

Mohammad Yousuf was a late signee for Lancashire this season as he was brought on board when Brad Hodge left for 5 weeks to join the Kolkata Knight Riders.

Yousuf was supposed to be there for only 5 weeks but got his contract extended as Hodge got called up for Australian duty in the Caribbean.

Yesterday Yousuf flew out of England to join the Pakistani squad to tour Bangladesh for the ODI series.

Though, not before scoring an unbeaten double century.

Mohammad Yousuf hit an unbeaten 205 in Lancashire's championship match against Yorkshire.

Lancashire had sent a request to the PCB for Yousuf's services for longer, however the PCB disallowed the request as they wanted to take a "full strength" squad to Bangladesh.

Yousuf should be back at Lancashire after the Tri Series / Asia Cup in a months time.

The PCB had faced some embarassment recently when Nasim Ashraf had announced that Younis Khan would be joining Western Australia for this season's Pura Cup, only for a WA official to come out and say that they had made no offer to Younis.

Later on it turned out that it was South Australia who had made the offer and Younis had accepted.

What I find funny though is that Cricinfo's headline reporting this news says "Younis Khan agrees to help out South Australia."

Now my friend over at Cricket with Balls tells me that South Australia has the weakest batting line up in Australian State Cricket.

Thats fine, but do they really expect Younis Khan to help them out?

Mark Sorell, the SA coach sure does.

But how?

Don't get me wrong, I think Younis is a great test batsman. He has played numerous match winning and match saving test innings. He averages almost 50 in tests and along with Inzamam and Yousuf had / has been the main stay of Pakistan's middle order for almost a decade now.

But Younis is an unorthodox batsman. He doesn't have a sound technique. He plays his shots away from his body. He drives of the back foot, he pulls with his feet off the ground, he plays cuts of the front foot, he plays reverse sweeps in test matches.

So how is this man going to help the South Australians?

One half of the Yo-Yos excelled in his new job, how will the other one do?

Make your pitch on this post...



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12 Pitched:

  1. John said...
     

    Which Indian batsman has two triple hundreds?

    I am no expert, but from the last decade we have seen that unorthodox or not, batting can be distilled into a few fundamentals which all the best batsmen know very very well - eye, head, balance, awareness of scoring opprtunities, responding to circumstances etc. Textbook technique is the optimum expression of those fundamentals, that is all. If the fundamentals are sound, some can get away without sticking to the optimum.

  2. Jrod said...
     

    South Australia's best batsman last year batted at 7,8 & 9. And tow of them are gone. So they probably just got Younis to bat with their number 7 Manou a bit.

    The funny thing is that Younis is there for the first half of the year then they said he may come back for the finals, I'm assuming as a spectator cause they aint making the finals.

  3. Q said...
     

    John - I see what ur saying about Sehwag and technique but what i was saying was more on the lines of how exactly Younis will help out the South Australians...

    Maybe he will score runs for them and help them win more than they usually do, but he cant help improve them as batsman, i don't think.

  4. Q said...
     

    Maybe they expect Younis to take them to the finals Uncle J..

  5. Som said...
     

    Q, I think end justifies means and for good or bad, cricket matches are still won by numbers and not aesthetics. We've long stopped worrying about how good the batsman looks, his balance, head position, follow through. Haven't you seen Dhoni playing airborne shots with deadly effect?

  6. Q said...
     

    Som I totally agree with that and yes I have seen Dhoni :-)

    But my point was that Younis may score lots of runs, also win matches for SA but how will he help the SA batsmen?

  7. Anonymous said...
     

    the Paki batsmen have always been unorthodox other than a few....if you ask me even the greats like javed miandad werent exactly from the coaching manual...

    I have given up trying to talk about technique in the modern game...as it seems people like Dhoni, Yuvraj, make more money than the ones who spent sweat and time learning the art of batting...

    So...dont be surprised if Younis does as well...he has a great HOOK SHOT...

  8. Q said...
     

    Welcome to Well Pitched UTP :-)

    My point is being missed here again.

    I have no doubt that theres little correlation today between being technically correct and scoring lots of runs.

    I think Younis is a great test batsman and he will probably do well for SA, but the news report that I talk about mentioned Younis as the one who would help out South Asutralian batsman... I ask how would he do that?

    He can't coach them.. can technically incorrect batsmen be good batting coaches?

  9. Jrod said...
     

    The only way Younis could take them to the finals is if he buys them tickets to the game between Nswales and Victoria or WA.

  10. Q said...
     

    That depends on how highly the tickets are priced...

  11. Jrod said...
     

    Domestic games are free in melbourne if you take a bus/train/tram ticket with you. So lets say he buys the public transport tickets at 2 bucks a pop, squad of 15 players, 30 bucks, i think he can handle that.

  12. Q said...
     

    Yeah i guess he can Uncle J. South Australia would probably pay him well..

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