For the chase against Sri Lanka at Gahunje, head coach Jonathan Trott had set Afghanistan targets in 10-over blocks on a whiteboard inside the dressing-room.
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Led by Fazalhaq Farooqi (4-34) in his comeback match, the Afghan bowlers claimed the last eight Sri Lankan wickets for 107 to bowl them out for 241.
They still had to score the runs, and for that, coach Jonathan Trott had laid out the targets they needed to achieve every ten overs on a whiteboard inside the dressing-room.
It was basic arithmetic, for he expected them to score at roughly five runs an over, which would have got them to 50 after 10 overs, 100 after 20, 150 after 30, and 200 after 40; he backed them to chase the target in 48 overs – at a rate of 5.04.
Trott also marked the targets ‘achieved’ at these points – 50, 87, 139, and 201. Afghanistan had kept up with the ‘Trott rate’ in the powerplay overs before falling behind, presumably due to Rahmanullah Gurbaz’s departure for a duck.
The late charge from No.5 Azmatullah Omarzai (73 not out in 63 balls), however, took care of any deficit. Afghanistan won with 28 balls to spare, a fair way ahead of schedule.
“There’s a bit more focus with regards to breaking it down into smaller targets,” Trott explained after the game. “But sometimes, certainly like the Pakistan game, chasing 280 and starting on 0, it’s a long way away. But if you break it down, it seems a lot more manageable.
“So those sorts of things, little things, motivating the players and keeping them in touch with where we want to be. And it’s also a feel-good factor. If you know you’re on the right track, it’s also a nice feeling as well.”
Less than a decade ago, the England team management had been criticised for adopting a similar approach. Graeme Swann, in particular, had not been impressed: “The whole game was built upon having this many runs after this many overs, this many partnerships, doing this in the middle, working at 4.5 an over. I used to shake my head thinking: ‘This is crazy’.”
Peter Moores came in for flak for his words, most famously from Michael Vaughan, for his words “we thought 275 was chaseable, we’ll have to look at the data” after England lost to Bangladesh at the 2015 World Cup quarter-final, even though Moores corrected himself instantly to say “we’ll have to look at it later”. The incident attracted enough attention for the SAS Institute to run a research.
Trott’s method was not complicated, but it was effective, and Afghanistan have had numeracy issues recently. After all, this was the same team management that was unaware of the permutations that would have earned them a Super Fours berth at the Asia Cup.
It almost certainly involved nothing more than dividing the target by overs, rounding off to the next integer, and multiplying them with multiples of ten. Whatever it was, it worked, and that is all that matters.
