T20 cricket has brought innovation in the batting department like perhaps nothing has ever. Batters have been forced to either evolve quickly and speed up with the trends of the game or be left behind. The same goes for the bowlers who have to counter every shot a batsman can potentially play.
Transformation in the thought processes of batsmen in white-ball cricket has seen drastic changes. Batters come as if almost set from the dugout knowing that they could be required to swing their willows from the first ball they face.
With that bowlers have also found ways to tackle, and have made progress when it comes to planning and tactic and bowling to the field. In the aim of playing the field, a few batsmen over the years developed some rarely seen shots before.
Here are 3 cricket shots that these batsmen made famous:
Switch Hit – Kevin Pietersen
Former England captain Kevin Pietersen was much ahead of his teammates when it came to batting in white-ball cricket. While his teammate stuck to their conservative batting approach, Pietersen would take the bowlers head on with his funky, aggressive, and dominating style.
Kevin Pietersen stunned everyone when in way back in 2008, he used the switch hit first – twice – against New Zealand medium pacer Scott Styris. “Unbelievable,” the commentator was left astonished.
“Everybody wants brand new ideas, new inventions and that’s a new shot. Nobody has seen it before,” Pietersen himself said, sounding proud of his stroke that then was perfected by the likes of David Warner and Glenn Maxwell in the past few years.
