Backward steps costing Ballance

In England last summer I had the opportunity to visit Lord's and meet one of my favourite cricketers, Jason Gillespie, the coach of Yorkshire, who, on that day, were taking on hosts Middlesex in a county game. I watched Yorkshire's No. 5 (and England's currently out of favour No. 3), Gary Ballance, play that day.

He confidently shouldered the responsibility of taking his team to a commanding position. He square-cut everything that was short and outside off, pulled with authority if the bowler targeted his head, played a dab shot between the slips and gully if it wasn't too short or wide, and played the slog sweep with control. Not once did he look to be in trouble for the duration of my two-and-a-half hour stay. He had played one Test at the time, and soon went on to play more, scoring heaps of runs.

Ballance's rise in English cricket was meteoric. Even after though he scored just one fifty in his last 10 Test innings before being dropped for Edgbaston, his Test average is 47.76.

And he has got here the hard way. The promotion to No. 3 slot was always going to make things tougher for him: if you aren't used to batting against the new ball in first-class cricket, it is really tough to make the required adjustments at the highest level straightaway, and Ballance wasn't playing at that number for his county.

Batting at three in Test cricket, especially when you play most of your cricket in England, is a demanding job. Invariably you walk in while the ball is new and the bowlers fresh, and every aspect of your technique is tested.

While Ballance impressed everyone with his run-scoring abilities, sound temperament, and instinct to grind the opposition down, questions were always raised about his unique technique. He goes deep inside the crease before the bowler releases the ball. While most English batsmen have a pronounced back-and-across trigger movement, Ballance's movement cannot qualify as just a trigger movement, for he gets into a second stance. A trigger movement is a small movement to get your body in motion, and it finishes just a fraction before the ball is bowled, but in Ballance's case, he finishes his movement well before the ball is delivered, and gets himself into a brand new stance, with both feet inside the crease.

With this new stance, he creates new lengths. The good-length balls that most batsmen are forced to play off the front foot become reasonably short for Ballance, to be negotiated comfortably off the back foot, especially on slow English pitches. And anything shorter than that becomes an opportunity for him to score runs, off the back foot. His style of going deep into the crease is so pronounced and so visible that a bowler's strategy against him is pretty straightforward: pitch it really full. But how full is really full is a difficult to question to address while bowling to him.

Bowlers are not aligned to bowling half-volleys, and invariably their attempts to go full fall a little shorter than where they should ideally pitch against Ballance. Also, simply going full doesn't work, for he is quite capable of putting bat to ball and to score off balls that are pitched full if they are within the line of his body. You need to bowl full and keep the line a few inches outside off. That is where you find him susceptible.

Another point in Ballance's favour is that, like most left-handers, he is able to play the angles well, and that is why right-arm fast bowlers struggle to find the right length against him. They either go too straight or too short, and when they go full and wide, the angle betrays their motive when the ball is only halfway down the pitch.

While Ballance cracked the code against right-arm fast bowlers, he seems to have an obvious problem against left-arm fast bowlers bowling over the stumps. What right-arm seamers struggle with comes naturally to the left-armers, for they can easily go full and outside off without making it too obvious because of the angle - or the lack of it. The numbers suggest that Ballance has had a problem against left-arm fast bowlers in his short international career so far, and this summer is not proving to be a happy one in that regard, because Australia have, like New Zealand did, some quality left-arm pacemen.

The other thing that seems to be bothering him is the bouncer that targets his body. Since in his "second stance" both feet are already next to the stumps, there's no room for him to go further back to negotiate extra bounce. He is happy to duck under or sway away to bouncers that come on predictably with pace, but the ones that keep rising and demand that he ride the bounce find him in a tangle.

So far England have been three down for not many in all four Ashes innings (3 for 43, 3 for 73, 3 for 29 and 3 for 42), which means they have lost 12 top-order wickets for just 187 runs. This might not be the only reason for their meek surrender in the second Test, but it is definitely one of the key reasons. Like Ballance, Ian Bell too has only one half-century in his last 10 Test innings, and both bat in the top four of this England line-up. One has already made way for Jonny Bairstow; the pressure must be building on the other.