From the moment a bowler releases his ball, a batsman only has a split second to make his judgement calls. He will have to watch what grip the bowler using (for example, a pacer will hold his ball cross seam for a cutter or slower ball, and up seam for a regular delivery); whether his wrist position indicates any attempt to generate seam/swing movement; at what height he is releasing the ball from and at what length he may pitch it. You have to judge if you expect to see any lateral movement (swing, seam, cutter, spin) after the ball pitches; at what height, line, and speed you expect the ball to come at you after pitching; whether you're going to play it on front foot or back foot, with a cross bat or straight bat; how much mechanical force will you extract or just deflect it to the angle you want. While doing all those, you will have to maintain a mental picture of positions of ten fielders and place your shot in a gap (unless you're going for a six).
A batsman spends hours in nets to develop/maintain his techniques and reflexes so he can do all those things right in each delivery he faces in a match. For an inform batsman, you will see him making those calls right most of the times though he can make a mistake every now and then due to probability or a lapse of concentration (as used to happen frequently to Ashraful). For an out of form batsman, you will see him struggling to make those calls through out his innings, even though he may stick around and score even more than an inform batsman because of his persistence (a la Naeem Islam).
From what I hear, in the practice match, Soumya labored to score 18 runs. Eventually he mistimed a pull to a short delivery from Abul to the short thirdman. The selectors then made the call to send him back to domestics.
On the other hand, Anam only scored 24 in that match but he looked at ease while he was batting. Thus he was brought back to the ODI squad.
*Not saying the selectors made the calls based on that practice match alone. But this has been the trend for those two at recent times, the practice match affirmed it, and helped the selectors to make their calls.
|