In the PSL7 two years back, Alex Hales returned to Islamabad United via a trade from the Karachi Kings for Colin Ingram, who ironically also returned to his first PSL franchise just like Hales.
United played against the Multan Sultans in their season opener. In typical Hales fashion, he attacked the pacers to ensure United were off to an aggressive start right from the get-go as per the founding principles of the United’s brand of cricket.
But when Shahid Afridi came on the first over after the powerplay, it became a living hell for Hales on the crease.
On the final ball of the 7th over, Afridi bowled a 97.4 KPH googly that skid through and crashed into his middle stump.
Hales was completely clueless in reading it, getting on the back foot against a full-length delivery in what looked like an attempt to defend the ball.
From that moment onwards, I knew his spin gears were far inferior to that of his pace gears.
They are so inferior that in a Vipers Voices episode hosted by the International League T20 (ILT20) franchise Desert Vipers, in response to host Brian Murgatroyd’s comment of Hales telling him his Emirati opening partner Rohan Mustafa helps take the pressure off him, Mustafa said that “whenever the spinners come on, he comes to me and said that if there’s a left-arm spinner or a legspinner, you can attack more than me.”
If you watch T20 cricket close enough and often, odds are you know already that Hales is quite vulnerable to spin.
However, the thought of a recent T20 World Cup winner and T20 great hailing from a country producing a truckload of T20 talent currently indirectly asking an Associate player to shield him against spin wouldn’t ever be pondered, let alone cross the imagination of most.
But the thought was pondered alright, by the man himself at that too.
One can argue that franchise cricket has enabled such power dynamics to be possible, and though to a certain extent, they’re certainly right.
If you look at the numbers, it paints a crystal clear picture as though it were the work of the Renaissance Artists.
Six openers have faced at least 1000 balls in the powerplay since 2020 in T20s including Hales: James Vince, Faf du Plessis, Will Jacks, Jason Roy, and Phil Salt.
Though Hales has a very respectable record of 40 | 161.5 against spin in this phase, he’s also been dismissed by spin the most out of the six openers, and that too by a considerable margin: 22 times.
The second in the list is Salt with 15 dismissals.
It is also important to highlight that the numbers aren’t inflated by a particular spin type as seen below.
However, it's in the middle overs (7-16) where his struggles against spin are exposed to the world when the fielding restrictions are on.
Comparing the six openers in the middle overs, Hales and Vince are both tied for the most spin dismissals at 30. But Hales has faced 141 fewer balls of spin than Vince has, complemented by a much poorer record of 22.6 | 124.6 in contrast to Vince’s 32.9 | 144.
This also means that Hales’ balls per dismissal (BPD) rate against spin is worse than Vince’s; 18.16 compared to 22.86.
N >/= 30 is the standard number of observations taken in many fields for data to have predictive power. And Hales’ 30 dismissals to go along with his average and strike rate help us establish our predictive power against Hales that even analysts working for teams most likely use when planning for and against him: he badly struggles against spin.
The question now becomes “how and why he struggles against spin?”
To try and answer this, we’ll analyze three exhibits of one type of away-spin and in-spin: legspin and offspin respectively, along with his neutral position.
As mentioned in the preface of this article, Hales went on the backfoot against the full-length Afridi googly seen in the leftmost exhibit.
This is similar to his fellow English counterpart Salt, who is also coincidentally a pace hitter. It was particularly prevalent in the recently concluded IPL for the Delhi Capitals.
Along with representing the inability to read the variation, it also shows an error in length anticipation, even when the speed is on the slower side.
This is seen in the rightmost exhibit against Matt Parkinson, currently the slowest T20 spinner, who deceives Hales with a loopy 76 KPH legspinner.
Though he did get on the front foot in this instance, he was completely clueless on how to get any bat on this peach of a delivery, for it is evident he was expecting a googly.
The middle exhibit shows that Hales has the tendency to slice the ball, as seen below.
Specifically by slicing, it means that he is turning the bat inward rather than striking the ball with the full face of the bat.
Along with power transfer, this affects three important variables for boundary hitting: launch angle, apex height, and airtime.
The then Mumbai Indians’ head coach Mahela Jayawardene explained in a net session scene with Kieron Pollard of the Netflix documentary Cricket Fever that slicing imparts 50% less power onto the ball.
More importantly, slicing can also make the ball go finer than intended and significantly increase the chances of dismissal.
All of the errors in length anticipation, inability to read the variation, and slicing are present in the exhibits.
The inability to read the variation is highlighted in the first 2 exhibits, where Hales plays the cut against Sunil Narine’s arm ball and Mujeeb-ur-Rehman’s carrom ball very late, turning in and away from his body respectively.
This is similar to the particular struggle of Sai Sudarshan in this season’s IPL against the googly, where he was primarily playing the cut, notably against chinaman Kuldeep Yadav.
But there is also another major flaw in Hales’ game against spin seen in the middle exhibit: an error in line anticipation.
Notice how Hales tries to play the cut away from his body after realizing the line of the ball was wider than expected. To make up for the error in line anticipation, he slowly straightens the bat plane, particularly prevalent in frames 1-3.
But it’s much more difficult to make up for error in line anticipation than it is for length anticipation as Harigovind Sankar points out.
As a result, the highest recorded upswing is very low, far from ideal for a cut shot, especially in Australia where conditions are typically bouncier. The bat is also not in line with his eyes.
When the downswing is initiated, rather than exploding through the ball, he explodes against the ball, inducing the outside edge that went straight to short third man.
Now let us analyze his neutral position.
Leading to his neutral position, Hales has a trigger movement that consists of a forward press and crouch. Both are good qualities against away-spin since the press helps take his front foot forward against the direction the ball is spinning.
However, Hales' has an upper body-lower body combination of closed entirely, meaning there is an imbalance at the crease since there is very little gap between his feet to quickly get on the front and back foot as needed.
Hales’ numbers against in-spin (offbreak and left-arm wristspin) in the middle overs read as 18.9 | 111.9 as a result of this.
An open shoulder may help improve these numbers, for it is considered a valuable trait against in-spin since it enables the batter to briskly steer against an unanticipated high degree turn of in-spin by maneuvering the ball to the legside.
A prominent example of an elite T20 batter who has found vast success with an open shoulder against spin is Rishabh Pant, which saw his IPL2022 numbers against in-spin (right-arm wristspin and slow left-arm for left-handed batters) read as 71.5 | 181.
The season before, it was absent, leading to his in-spin numbers reading as 24.8 | 104.2.
But what do we take away from this, that Hales is not as good as he is said to be?
Far from it.
Like most English batters, Hales can play the sweep against spin and is also a decent enough strike rotator (with a spin NBSR of 65.39), but compared to most T20 batters of his ilk, he is far from proficient against spin.
This doesn’t change the fact that Hales is a monstrous elite T20 batter, but he’s certainly not an elite outlier monster like AB de Villiers and Suryakumar Yadav in more recent times.
Hales is more on the human side, meaning for him to excel, he needs to take advantage of having complementary players at the other end who can shield him against spin so both he and his team can best maximize his skillset and output.
The necessity for complementary players can also be derived from the definition of Economics: “the study of allocating limited resources to satisfy unlimited wants.”
At the end of the day, there are not even a handful of players who offer the skillset de Villiers and Suryakumar do, so to best increase your chances of performing consistently as a T20 team, its mandatory to recognize the importance of complementary players and invest in them.
Of course, it can’t be ruled out that Hales can work on his game against spin and be on par with the aforementioned. Last November, Hales said that playing T10 has helped improve his spin game, so perhaps he may end up being a late bloomer against spin, but we don’t know for sure.
So for A Matchup Made in Hell, complementary players are certainly the way to go, even if outsourced from nations least expected, for otherwise as AC/DC says, you’re “on the highway to hell.”