R Ashwin and the retired out gambit

A strategic retired out. Oh what fun.

I remember being in a bar late at night with one T20 coach, and he said his dream was to retire someone out. So many times, he had played or coached players he knew weren't about to hit a bunch of boundaries, but his old school cricket knowledge wouldn't allow it.

If it went wrong when he was a captain, he would have to explain it to a coach. If it went bad as a coach, he'd have to explain to a GM, CEO or owner.

This is not a new concept. Almost from the time people started having tactical discussions about T20 cricket it has been mentioned. The first time I saw it discussed was 2008/09.

But doing it is something else. Because so few teams have ever done it.

Cricinfo put this graphic up the other day. And it shows the three previous times this has happened. But this isn't the full list. They are popping up everywhere on my timeline.

So let's have a look at a few of them. The first seems to have been in a women's ODI game.

Albeit a rain-affected match. And the Sri Lankan women got very stuck in their first innings. I don't know how long was left in the innings when it happened, but keeper Dilani Manodara was eight from 39 balls. And they obviously decided that wasn't quick enough. In the end West Indies won with two wickets in hand and three balls remaining.

Also, as Hypocaust points out, the kick in this tail was pretty handy to keep them on the bench as Manodara struggled.

Aisya Eleesa did it for Malaysia after her 13 from 28 balls wasn't helping Malaysia chase Singapore's 127. Sadly, her tactical retirement didn't help much either, and they lost by 29 runs.

In the men's T20 there was a match between Belize and Panama where Howell Gillett opened up and made 8 from 23 before walking off after ten overs with his team only having 33 runs on the board. Belize made 71 runs in the next ten overs, and would go on to win the game. Howell Gillett is not just a great name, but a hero.

If you go back to the Cricinfo list, you'll find that not all of those are real tactical retired outs.

In T20, the first one is a tour match before a World Cup. Shahid Afridi was smashing Northants everywhere in a warm-up game, and as often happens in tour games, he left the field to give someone else a bat. That is not a tactical retired out. His strike rate at the time was 300. That is an old fashioned, let the others have a go retired out.

The one in the BPL is fascinating as all hell. Because it is a tactical retired out, but again nothing like we saw with Ashwin. I couldn't find this reported on anywhere, so I asked Bangladesh cricket writing GOAT Mohammad Isam what he knew. Being the legend he is, he asked Sunzamal Islam, the hero in question about what happened. This is a robot saying his quote.

"According to the batting line-up, I was supposed to go to bat at the fall of the next wicket. When Malan was run out, naturally I got up from the dugout. We needed three off the last ball. I started walking. Crossed the rope and took about four steps when the coach Shohel Islam told me to get back. He said that Mujeeb should go ahead of me. I think he thought Mujeeb could get us the boundary off the last ball. I turned around when the fourth umpire stopped me. Where are you going? I said I won't bat, Mujeeb is going. He said wait, let me talk to the umpires. They declared that I was out. Mujeeb walked in and hit the winning runs."

Now, Sunzamal can bat. He averages 23 in first class cricket. But his career T20 strike rate is less than a run a ball. But it started over 100 because in his first knock he made 31 from 24. That is still his highest score after 76 matches. And twice since he managed to make his strike rate pop back over a run a ball.

So Mujeeb Ur Rahman was the better option.

Who did hit a boundary and therefore won the game. Sunzamul Islam is a true hero in retiring before he faced a ball in a fairly comical situation. But that makes it all funnier because on ball 19.5, technically, two wickets fell. That usually only happens when someone is timed out.

And that usually only happens when a road floods or someone is stuck on a plane. Those weren't random by the way; both of these actually happened. What a fantastic sport we have.

So that brings us to our last retired out in a T20 match, which was an international between the Maldives and Bhutan. Where Bhutan batted first, lost both of their openers to ducks off consecutive balls in the first over, one was a diamond duck. They recovered to 40/3 when Sonam Tobgay entreated the crease.

Tobgay has played only two T20is, and his career strike rate is 64. But he has played a lot more cricket than that. This is his first game on cricket archive, and it was an under 17 game against Kuwait where he scored five from ten balls. Oh, this was from 2005 by the way. He's been around.

I went through most of Tobgay's senior and U19 games. There is a gutsy 61 that almost upset UAE under 19. S He struck at 53. And so I went through all of his knocks from scorecards, scorecard after scorecard.

There was one Under 19 game against China, and this senior game against Malaysia where our hero Sonam Tobgay scored at better than a run a ball. Twice in 57 recorded matches by cricket archive. And this one was 14 runs from 13 balls. If Togbay knows anything about his game, it's that he is incapable of scoring quickly. Which wasn't a problem when he entered the crease at 40/3.

It became more of a problem as he made 24 from 35, and at the end of the 19th over, his team only had 113 runs. So Tobgay left the field and let a lower order batter swing away to get Bhutan up to a better score.

In that final over, Bhutan scored four runs. The Maldives chased this down in 15.1 overs with eight wickets in hand. Sonar Tobgay's fight, and sacrifice, would be in vain.

So that brings us to R Ashwin. Who has said it was a potential plan beforehand and that he gave himself a chance to hit a couple of boundaries, it didn't work, and he left the field.

It all makes sense. Riyan Parag comes on, hits a boundary, Rajasthan wins by three runs, and it feels really perfect.

Some won't like it because they don't like anything new. But it is worth looking at one interesting point from Cameron Ponsonby's article. In retiring out, you are robbing the bowling side of a chance of a dot ball.

As the great man Mark Butcher has pointed out, the other option is you can always walk past one on purpose and go out. But there are problems here. Before we had declarations, we had batters getting out on purpose to finish innings. And people hated it because it looked shit and messy. In this world of match-fixing, it seems pretty silly to go back to players standing out of their ground on purpose so they can be run out or stumped.

Retired out is a more elegant solution to this. It might be that the MCC looks at when you retire out if a ball is taken from the batters team chase. But In truth, I don't think this will happen that often.

The main reason is this, it's tough to strike fast when you just come to the crease. The only person who mastered in cricket was Luke Ronchi who had a strike rate of 160 from his first five balls. No one else was close. And he did it in the powerplay.

But that is not an issue here, as we are talking about later in the innings and players who are set replacing batters who are not. So it was Amol Desai who gave me that info on players and their starting strike rates.

So I went back to him and asked, What are the strike rates of players in their first five balls, 5-10 balls, 10-20 balls, and 20 balls plus in the last six overs an innings.

You can see that set batters just score quicker. We all know that, but now we have a graph. But that is important because it's why the situation doesn't actually come up that often. Strike rates don't usually get slower in innings. There is no magic ball mark where batters get tired and start scoring slower. So if someone has been in for a while, the only time to yank them is if they are scoring very slow.

There are situations where a batter gets stuck so bad, that you just have to take them off. One might have happened in the last World Cup when Lendl Simmons, a World Cup winner and Mumbai Indians opener, got so trapped that he sunk his team. Simmons made 16 from 35 balls. And being that the West Indies had Andre Russell, Kerion Pollard, and Shimron Hetmyer to come, that was a perfect situation for them to retire him out.

But there is a simple reason why teams don't do this. It's because on the one brings two laws. Which is an old cricket phrase that clearly has a basis in reality.

The reason is fairly simple, a wicket brings a new batter, and that is when they are at their most vulnerable, from Test cricket to T20 that holds up. And when I talked to captains or coaches, that is the bit that worried them. It isn't the actual retired out. It's what if a wicket falls after. For now, our two retired hurts have come in the 18.2 and 18.6 marks. When wickets are far less important.

But I think we should look at Ashwin precisely because of all the players to do this too. He is the most likely. Because R Ashwin can bat, just not really in T20.

He has five Test hundreds, and if not a front line all-round talent, he is at the very least an overqualified number eight. But he's not a power hitter. His strike rate is barely over a run a ball in either T20I or the IPL. We all know what he is, a skilful player who doesn't really have masses of power.

It means he's of limited use, and even though he gives you a slight kick at the death, that's still relatively slow for that period of the game.

So if he isn't an ideal number eight for hitting, what he might be is an ideal pinch blocker. Or at least a floating anchor.

There are very few times you want Ashwin to bat, but there may be times you need him too. A bunch of wickets have fallen, especially to spin, because he's good at handling that. So him heading up the order to keep knocking the ball around when things are falling apart might be handy. If not, he can at least rotate the strike for better hitters at the end.

Coming in at 67/4,  you wouldn't usually need someone like Ashwin, but Rajasthan have such a thin batting line that Trent Boult is the number eight. So if they lose their first few wickets, they need to stretch out their lineup; Ashwin is perfect.

But he faced 23 balls and only made 28 runs. Which is ok in the middle, but starts to become a bit of an issue at the end. And what he did was substitute himself for another hitter. Someone who was less likely to hit 28 from 23, but more likely to hit eight from four.

Cricket has always been about innovation. The game moves around and changes, and people complain about it. Sometimes those complaints mean the game stops changing. Sometimes they are so loud they keep the game as it was. While some will complain about the retired out, I really can't see too much of a problem here. If a team is in a position where a wicket doesn't matter, they will give it up.

That doesn't matter much as Ashwin has pointed out, the sport is moving forward. T20 is a new game, and it shouldn't be played the old way. We have two canaries that have retired out down the coal mine in Sonam Tobgay and R Ashwin.