He believes he can fool batsmen into thinking he’s going to do something different, when he’s actually planning to bowl the same ball
Melinda Farrell14-Feb-2019Daniel ‘Frankie’ Worrall stood at the top of his mark. That in itself looked odd, of course. Worrall doesn’t start his acutely angled run-up where most right-armers do. So, even though he was about to bowl around the wicket, anyone who hadn’t seen him bowl before could be forgiven for thinking he was about to bowl over the wicket; such was his alignment.Glenn Maxwell had bowled the first, very tidy, over; just three runs from it. But this was the powerful opening partnership of Matthew Wade and D’Arcy Short; the pair had piled on 810 runs together in 14 innings during the regular series, had finished first and second on the run-scorer ladder and Short had broken the scoring record he himself had set the previous season. They were playing at home in front of a parochial crowd rugged up to ward off the cold summer breeze blasting off the Derwent River.Worrall ran in. Tapping his bat, then waiting, Wade must have lost sight of him for just a fraction of a second as he crossed from right to left behind the umpire. Worrall emerged and released, moving the ball in slightly to the left-handed Wade and landing it full, just wide of the off stump. It nipped away just enough to catch the edge and with one delivery, Worrall had broken the wonder partnership and dismissed the Hurricanes’ captain for two runs.Caleb Jewell came to the crease. Another left-hander. Two days earlier, Jewell had spoken about the sense of calm and confidence the Wade-Short duo gave him. Only Jewell didn’t look quite so calm facing Worrall so soon in the innings. He defended the second ball of the over to cover and then played and missed as he attempted to drive the third. A wider delivery, and he was off the mark with a single and was back on strike for the last ball of the over.ALSO READ: The curse of finishing top in the Big BashWorrall stood at the top of his mark. Only now he’d changed his position; switching to bowl over the wicket. He has a theory in T20 cricket, you see. Sometimes he believes he can fool batsmen into thinking he’s going to do something different, when he’s actually planning to bowl the same ball. Just be chaotic, in the hope of creating chaos.He decided to try and get Jewell playing off the hip, maybe limit him to a single. It didn’t go to plan; it was a good-length delivery that pitched on middle and leg. Jewell played inside the line as the ball crashed into middle stump. At the end of Worrall’s first over the team that had dominated the group stage had lost two wickets with just five runs on the board; only once, in 2015, had they had a poorer start to an innings. If it wasn’t quite chaos yet it was, at the very least, unsettling.*****Daniel Worrall struck twice in the second over•Getty ImagesGeorge Bailey and Ben McDermott ran. They ran a lot. Forrest Gump couldn’t have run much further. Brought together in the middle after Short was caught at long-on, trying to attack the legspin of Adam Zampa, Bailey and McDermott were resetting the Hurricane’s innings with singles and twos. It was low-risk batting but it was also hard work, thanks largely to the Stars’ two-pronged legspin medley, with added wrong’uns and googlies, provided by Zampa and Sandeep Lamichhane.If the boundaries weren’t coming thick and fast, neither were the dot balls. The partnership started with two non-scoring shots, but of the first 69 balls Bailey and McDermott faced they scored off 59. Nudges and dabs and nurdles and strokes, and all those other descriptors that immediately let you know the ball hasn’t crossed a boundary rope.The running between the wickets, especially from Bailey, was superb – the speed and commitment outstanding. This was part of their strength, knowing they could keep the run-rate going at around seven an over and keep the explosives for the last five or six overs. Just keep running. Run, Forrest, run.The last boundary had come in the sixth over, when Short had launched Zampa over deep square leg for six, just before he was out. The next came exactly eight overs later: Bailey shifting gear to smite Zampa for two consecutive sixes. A brief respite in all that running.*****Worrall came back into the attack in the 16th over. This time he concentrated on bowling wide of off stump. On the 70th ball of the partnership, ‘Frankie’ bowled a slower ball, wide again. Bailey, now in attack mode, struck the ball with the toe-end of his bat and watched it fall into the hands of Maxwell, fielding at long-on. With no more running to do, Bailey walked off.There was one more over left for Worrall to bowl, the penultimate one. Dwayne Bravo had dismissed McDermott with a ball similar to the one that had Bailey done for: slow and wide, dragged to deep midwicket. But now it was hard to work out what Worrall was bowling. His first ball to Faulkner seemed to grip and turn in; the next, to Simon Milenko, followed the batsmen as he backed away to give himself room. This was chaos-inducing bowling and the best was to come: a slower ball that seemed to swing and then turn as if it had been delivered by one of his legspinning team-mates to rap Milenko on the pads.Worrall’s four overs had given him his best T20 figures, not to mention the best figures for a bowler against the Hurricanes, who were the best team throughout the season and who would not be playing in the final.Four overs with just enough chaos.
