Shreyas Iyer’s batting tweaks: Ravi Shastri and Ricky Ponting rave | Ipl News

Shreyas Iyer’s front leg has been a twinkling balletic limb of substance this IPL. The open stance, the rapid jerks of the bat-swing while still awaiting the ball-release, the angle of that bat and the timing of its pick-up, and the retreat of the back-leg deep into the stance have all been rightly focussed on the television cameras. The front leg too is worth a look.
It’s lightfooted, ready to spring to action, and sort of hangs loose even as he moves about. In the recent past, when he started to tinker with his batting to sort out his short-ball woes, he occasionally would get the whole weight on the backfoot, and find himself in a tangle while trying to shift the balance forward. No longer. The elastic loose front foot now can press forward in a blink or press down to let the unimpeded bat flow through.
It helped in the way he walloped Sam Curran and Pathirana in the game against Chennai Super Kings. When Curran slipped in a slower short ball around off stump, Shreyas quickly pressed down the front foot, waited, and tapped the ball nonchalantly up and over the short third. When Pathirana aimed for the yorkers, Shreyas had retreated well inside the crease, used the front foot to hold balance and in the weight-transfer to wr couple of boundaries on the on side, and once, a peach of a late-steer down to the third man boundary.
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It’s all been done the man himself, says Ricky Ponting about Shreyas’s batting tweaks.
“I’ve had nothing to do with that,” Ponting said at the end of the game against Chennai Super Kings. “You guys will see how his stance has evolved. He’s opened his stance up a little bit. He’s getting his right eye around more to the release point of the ball. And with his shoulders being open, he’s being able to create some more access to the ball when the ball is back in towards his body. So that’s stuff that he’s all worked out himself.
“We’re still working on it pretty much every day. There’re little things that he needs to do because it is such a drastic move that he’s done. He’s got to make sure that everything is in the right position and all his movements are syncing up really well. But, I mean, some of the innings he’s played this tournament so far have been as good as anyone else’s. I mean, there’ve been a lot of hundreds made, but Shreyas’ first game when he made 97, that’s as good an innings as I’ve seen in the tournament.”
Former India coach Ravi Shastri too has been raving about Shreyas’ batting changes.
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“He was very side on, was back and back, very much leg side. The fact that he’s prepared to go back and across now and with a very upright stance and the pick up,” Shastri said on the ICC Review. “While he’s moving back, the bat’s being picked up as well when he’s going back and across. That allows him to play both sides of the wicket. If they [fast bowlers] bang it in short, he can pull and hook. And if there’s any room outside the off stump, he can cut as well. So that opens up the game for him rather than being too leg side where the rib cage was being targeted and then there was no escape.”