Yorkers going the way of the dodo?

Alongside ‘never run on a misfield’ and ‘don’t sledge anyone who bowls faster than you’, one of cricket’s enduring truisms has told us the most accurate predictor of a team’s 50-over total is to observe the score after 30 overs and double it.

The more nuanced would suggest in addition to that arithmetic, it’s instructive to multiply the number of wickets to have fallen at the 30-over mark by 10 and deduct that product from the initial calculation – so that a score of, say, 5-150 would extrapolate to 250 after 50 overs.

Provided there’s not an outbreak of misfields.

But the engineering of the ‘super bat’, the doubling of the number of balls used in one-day internationals, the constriction of boundary dimensions and the 20 per cent reduction in the number of fielders permitted to tend those foreshortened perimeters has substantially altered this equation.

The brutal attacks now launched on unprotected sections of the fence and the crowd behind it during the final quintile of a batting innings have become so decisive that soon the Old-Timers’ Handbook will need to be revised to proclaim simply ‘take the score after 40 overs and add 150’.

Or perhaps just ‘at the coin toss pick a number between 350 and 500’.

It’s the unsubtle changes to laws and equipment that largely explain the concerns raised by influential cricket folk in recent days as to why the use of the yorker-length delivery in the final ‘death’ overs suddenly seems headed the same way as the dodo and celebrities with humility.

So far in the 2015 World Cup, five of the six teams to have batted first have posted 50-over totals of 300 or above and the average number of runs they’ve scored from those last 60 deliveries is a shade under 110.

Final 10 overs of teams batting first - first five matches

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A lazy 11 runs an over. With only the West Indies failing to convert their start into a victory.

So if today’s batsmen, armed with tools of trade that in another era would have aroused suspicion as ballistic missile launchers, are thrashing cricket balls still 25 overs hard rather than 50 overs soft at and over boundaries rendered schoolyard-size and vacant, why aren’t bowlers employing the one counter-measure that has historically proved unerringly six-proof?

According to Mitchell Johnson, the ICC’s reigning Player of the Year and arguably the most feared fast bowler on the planet, it’s essentially because firing in yorker after yorker at the end of an innings becomes too predictable.

And it’s the foreseeable that poses more of a problem for fielding teams than the four-hittable.

“I think you still need to bowl the yorker, that’s still part of the game,” said Johnson who, with fellow quicks Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood remains Australia’s preferred bowling option in the crucial ‘death overs’.

“It’s just trying to make it not predictable.

“It’s a huge challenge but it’s just part of the game and you have to learn to adapt.

“That’s what the game is about, it’s about who can adapt the best.

“I think you’ll find that run rates for bowlers have gone up in this (50-over) game, so if you learn to accept that then it’s OK.

“But I still think you’ve got to find a way (to curtail big hitting at the end) and we’re doing it pretty well at the moment.

“It will be interesting to see when we’re under pressure how we handle it.”

Johnson identified the recent changes to the fielding restrictions that limit the number of fielders allowed beyond the inner restrictive circle to a maximum of four rather than five previously as one of the game-changers to the way bowlers attack the final overs.

But he also agreed that the increased use of ‘ramp’ shots, whereby batsmen are now able to flick yorker-length deliveries into vacant areas behind the wicketkeeper, has meant bowlers need to have a wider variety of weapons available to them at the ‘death’.

One of the problems with the yorker, as the Zimbabwe and Ireland bowlers found to their cost against South Africa and the West Indies respectively this week, is it carries a small margin for error as over or under-pitching by a few vital inches translates to a shin-high full toss or a tasty half-volley.

It was England’s reluctance to revert to the tried-and-proven yorker strategy in the final frenzied overs of Australia’s innings at the MCG last Saturday that triggered the debate as to why highly paid, ultra-professional bowlers of now were not taking a leaf from those who did it so well back in the day.

Rather than try to deprive Australia’s last recognised batting pair Glenn Maxwell and Brad Haddin of opportunities to swing their arms and pick their scoring zones, England’s bowlers persisted with a strategy of back-of-a-length deliveries mixed with shoulder-high bouncers of varying speeds.

Which allowed the Australians to flail away with the impunity of fly fishers casting into a vast, vacant lake, a freedom that netted a partnership of 50 runs from about half as many balls.

When England’s coach Peter Moores was asked about the paucity of yorkers in the wake of his team’s 111-run loss, his explanation proved far trickier to get a handle on than most of what his bowlers dished up at the back end of Australia’s run glut.

“The yorker is a really good ball, but you've got to bowl the right ball to the right field,' Moores explained.

“If you look at the stats for the best in world cricket, they don't just bowl yorkers – but they do bowl yorkers.

“They bowl simple plans.

“(Mitchell) Starc is a yorker bowler, but some (others) are not and they bowl a heavy length (mixed) with slower balls.

“You have to go to your strengths.

'So we have certain bowlers who lend themselves to going full with yorkers (but) others won't use it quite as much.”

True to his pedigree as the most successful bowler in the quadrennial World Cup’s 40-year history, former Australia seamer Glenn McGrath was far more parsimonious and targeted with his interpretation which included a touch of his trademark confected hubris.

Quick Single: McGrath bewildered by missing yorkers

"The final 10 overs – if you can bowl good yorkers at will and pretty much hit them, you're going to be successful,” McGrath said following Saturday’s match.

"It seems that because people have brought the ramp in, bowling yorkers at the death is a dying art, which just bewilders me.

"New shots have come in and things like that, but I feel like I could have combatted that."

The man regarded as perhaps the game’s most effective ‘death overs’ batsman, India’s World Cup-winning captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni, believes the shift away from yorker bowling is as much a risk management exercise as it is an effective run-saving ploy.

Dhoni, whose junior days as a gifted hockey player enabled him to develop a unique capacity to generate enormous power via his bottom hand which somehow enables him to clout yorkers into the crowd, recognises the danger of getting those block-hole lengths wrong can be just too dire.

As a consequence, bowlers would rather deploy their available outfielders to a designated hitting zone and then challenge a batsman to take them on by bowling to that field in the hope that a mishit will yield a wicket rather than banking on the execution of a perfect yorker to prevent a boundary.

“Most of the teams, what they are doing is just bowling back of a length and asking the batsmen to clear the boundaries and irrespective of how good a batsman you are that’s one strategy that almost all of the teams have deployed and it is working,” Dhoni said after his team’s win over Pakistan on Sunday.

“But in some games we will see someone really middling their shots and if (the ball is continually hit) outside the boundary then they (bowlers) will have to revert back to their other plans of bowling yorkers and everything.

“As far as the tournament is concerned, so far that’s a strategy that has been working and most of the teams are falling for that.

“But what we have seen is that it can be difficult to contain because of the pace of the wicket and also with that extra fielder inside (the restrictive circle), at times you don’t know really where to bowl in order to contain the batsman.”

Which suggests the imminent replacement of ‘play each ball on its merits’ by ‘belt it wherever the fielders aren’t’ in the 2015 edition of Hackneyed Cricket Principles.