Why The Hundred may encourage teams to turn batting order upside down – with little risk

When the Oval Invincibles announced their side for their opening game of The Hundred, it looked comfortably reassuring for Surrey fans unsure what to make of this whole new gambit. The Invincibles’ XI contained six Surrey players, including all of the side’s first-choice top three from the Twenty20 Blast: Jason Roy, Will Jacks and Laurie Evans.

But when Roy walked out to face the first ever ball in the men’s Hundred, a curious thing happened. He was accompanied by neither Jacks nor Evans, but instead another Surrey player: Sam Curran, who had never opened for the county before.

To understand why Curran was opening, the tale of Sunil Narine, one of his Invincibles teammates, is illuminating. At the start of 2017, Narine was a bowler who only occasionally batted: he had scored fewer than two runs per match in his T20 career. But when his Big Bash side, the Melbourne Renegades, suffered an injury they promoted Narine to open, largely on the basis of his prowess against spin. An ad-hoc experiment turned Narine from a bowler into a player of great batting value too: an opener who, while his average is meagre by conventional metrics, became one of the quickest-scoring batters in the Indian Premier League.

The simple insight that informed the elevation of Narine was that as teams are very seldom bowled out in T20, it makes sense to elevate unreliable fast-scorers. When they fail they aren’t a drag on their side, as they don’t start their innings slowly. When they succeed - even if only occasionally - they can transform a match. With 20 balls fewer, these dynamics are heightened in the Hundred.

It was with this hope that Curran was sent out alongside Roy at The Oval. While Curran has considerably more pedigree than Narine as a batter, the principles are the same. Curran’s primary worth is as a bowler, so his wicket is relatively expendable. Just like Narine, he is a left-hander best against spin bowling that turns into his bat, and away from the right-hander: handily, this is exactly Roy’s weakness.

And so, when Roy flicked the second ball of the match for one, Curran was primed to attack Tom Hartley’s left-arm darts. After he pushed a yorker back to Hartley, Curran gallivanted down the pitch second ball, and launched him over long on for six. This was what Curran was here for: he perished cutting the next ball, for six runs from three balls.

When Curran was dismissed, Oval doubled down on their plan. Rather than Jacks or Evans, they used Narine at three, to continue Curran’s attack against spin while maintaining a left-right split at the crease. It did not work: Narine found no fluency and was wrongly given out lbw - he failed to review - fifth ball for two.

Yet while Curran and Narine only contributed eight runs between them, they had only absorbed eight balls. Both their roles were best seen as low-risk, high upside bets: for both, the consequences of only lasting a few balls were trivial, but batting for even 10 balls could have been match-shaping.

The use of the pair was a window into the Invincibles’ approach. Recognising the scant danger of being bowled out, the Invincibles prioritised maximising run-scoring opportunities afforded by the Powerplay over minimising wickets lost. With Sam Billings and Colin Ingram - along with Roy, their two most experienced batters on the T20 circuit - at five and six, and Evans a firewall at seven, the Invincibles had insurance when they lost three wickets in the Powerplay and then four within the first 34 balls. Attacking in this way may lead to occasional ignominy, but over a season it should also maximise a team’s run-scoring.

Manchester Originals embodied a more traditional approach to building a batting line-up in short-format cricket. A top-four of Phil Salt, Jos Buttler, Joe Clarke and Colin Munro brims with power and class. But the lack of depth in the batting order - number seven Calvin Harrison has only scored 50 runs his T20 career - encouraged the top four to try and complete the job themselves, which meant beginning slower. Manchester scored six runs fewer than the Invincibles during the Powerplay - two-thirds their final margin of defeat.

The shorter the format of cricket, the greater the relative value of scoring quickly, and the lower the importance of protecting wickets. It was a truth that, even amid a scrappy, flawed display, ran through the Invincibles’ batting approach. And so it was entirely apt that, even as they beat them, the Invincibles lost more wickets than Manchester: vindication for embracing the risk-taking that the format demands.