Shreyas Iyer (AP Photo)
MUMBAI: Since he scored an 80 not out against England in July, India’s T20I captain Shreyas Iyer had been experiencing a rare slump in white-ball cricket, where he’s usually highly consistent, having failed to cross 30 in his last 10 T20I innings. Since resuming his role as T20I captain this year, Iyer has scored 511 runs in 17 innings at an average of 39.30 and a strike rate above 149, including one century and two fifties.
It’s such an understanding, that it doesn’t take that much time,” the former India and Mumbai allrounder said. It helped that over the years, Nayar has followed Iyer’s batting closely. “I compared his old videos and tried to set him up to get to what is normally very comfortable with him. I did a little bit and set him up. It’s such an old relationship.
Basically, I made a slight alteration to his grip, the initial movement and his backlift,” Nayar told TOI. “I had a brief interaction with Abhishek Nayar in that period (during his time in Japan) where we were talking about cricket. The productive two-hour chat session took place at Iyer’s Worli home, during which Nayar ironed out a few technical things in Iyer’s game. “I went to meet him and he was feeling that he wasn’t getting the power to hit sixes. He wasn’t feeling that he could hit a sixer. So, we spoke about some technical things and made some changes in batting. We spent two hours on his grip and backlift. I can’t tell you what exactly, but I changed his grip and backlift a little bit.
After his blazing knock, Iyer said in a video released by the BCCI on Tuesday that a conversation with Nayar had aided his performance. I think that conversation with him helped me a lot in today’s performance. The key note which I observed in my batting today was setting myself before the delivery of the ball, and that worked perfectly.