Of ‘half bats’ and Arabic tattoos

How does this half bat look like? The bat’s length is just like normal bats but it’s the width that’s reduced to half the normal size. Reason? Encourage the batsmen on using their feet to reach to the pitch of the deliveries. ‘Graham (Thorpe) thought about training with half bats which are actually quite skinny to help us train on the spinning wickets of West Indies. It encourages the batsmen to use their feet more positively and move up and down the wicket. The idea is you need to be very quick on your feet. It is about precision and attention to detail about where you want to really hit the ball and that should really help us out. Footwork is an area we need to work on and using the half bat is good practice,’ opener Alex Hales revealed during an interaction.

* Once you enter Dhaka, you will find Shakib Al Hasan staring at you from every nook and corner of the city. It can be a UNICEF advertisement where he is appealing to end malnutrition or it’s a mobile phone company whose catch line is ‘Two Tigers’ with Shakib sharing space with a Royal Bengal Tiger. Then he endorses motorbikes, biscuits, soaps. The only one who can compete with him is Tamim Iqbal, who does a Bengal TV commercial of a men’s beauty product which Virat Kohli endorses in India.

* England’s Alex Hales has a lovely tattoo on his right wrist. On being queried about the script of the tattoo, Hales said it’s Arabic word which means ‘Courage’ in English. Among Indian players, Shikhar Dhawan would simply be a runaway winner with his extensively tattooed biceps.