In the winter of 2019, a small group of kids stood at the back of an outdoor practice pitch in Perth and ran to collect balls just struck by Tim David, as he tried to blast sixes from the offerings of his coach Jim Allenby.
Unwittingly, they were the humble first audience for a pioneering approach to Twenty20 batting that has vaulted 26-year-old David onto a home World Cup stage, in a story that has shades of professional golf’s long-range bomber Bryson DeChambeau.
Tim David’s swing is more golf than baseball.Credit:Getty Images
In each case, David and DeChambeau have concentrated on one thing – hitting the ball further than anyone else – and committed comparatively less time to some of the other, more traditional skills of their respective arts.
But where DeChambeau made the change, ultimately leading to victory in the 2020 US Open at Winged Foot, after a career that had already been successful, David and Allenby were compelled to try something different after the conventional approach had not worked: in early 2019, the tall, powerful batter and sometime bowler had lost his state contract.
Having to take the unconventional path to a professional cricket career was something that David had, as a junior player at Claremont-Nedlands in Perth, once watched Allenby do. On the fringes in Western Australia, Allenby spent over a decade of county cricket in England as a local player, assembling a fine all-round record for Leicestershire, Glamorgan and Somerset.
“There were a lot of ups and downs in Tim’s younger days, when the most frustrating thing from my point of view was I saw a lot of what I did wrong when he was doing it wrong,” Allenby says. “So it was like looking in the mirror at times, especially our petulance, not getting our own way as younger men – I had a bit of empathy for where he was at.
“As a teenager, that was being a very high-performing player in club cricket and finding it hardest to be the first picked. Finding ways to challenge him to keep getting better when the obvious rewards weren’t happening when perhaps they should have been, that was the bit where we got the understanding that sometimes you’ve got to find your own way and go really hard at a certain goal and hope it comes off.”
Those conversations came to a head after the 2018-19 season, when David was cut by WA after spending much of the summer recovering from an injured ankle. Initial frustration with the vagaries of that list-management decision gave way to more constructive talk about what David and Allenby could see as the gap in the market – the high risk, high reward of power hitting.
Tim David clubs a six against the West Indies recently.Credit:Cricket Australia / Twitter
“I had the experience of playing in the Big Bash over a couple of seasons, so I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to come up against,” David says.
“When I got released from WA, my only opportunities so far and what looked like being in future had been to bat in the middle order in T20, so we had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do. It happened pretty naturally and we went at it. Training was fun, we just tried to hit sixes for as long as we could.
Bryson DeChambeau loads up his swing in 2020, the year he won the US Open.Credit:Getty
“At its most basic it was try to get as strong as you can, and do the specific exercise you can do for that, replicate the swing, and try to hit as many sixes and hit the ball as far as you can. That was how it was, and we just tried to push it as far as we could go really. I think there’s still a lot more that I can do, a lot more improving to do, but so far it’s been going well.”
As it had in golf virtually since Tiger Woods won the 1997 Masters tournament, increasing emphasis has been placed on power hitting in Twenty20 cricket, especially towards the end of an innings. Lance Klusener had shown the way in the 50-over game, but few had followed. Almost none had done so in Australia.
“We naturally got to a point where there wasn’t much point practising forward defences or leaving the ball,” Allenby says.
“It was, ‘Let’s try to go down this path, there’s a role no one’s doing at No.6 in T20, might as well get as good as possible at that, and you can always come back to four-day cricket or 50-over cricket later.’ Clearly it was a good decision, but I think it fell into place because it had to.”
For the most part, focused work on hitting the ball as far as possible was something state and international players did among other things. As NSW state coach, Phil Jaques denoted “T20 Tuesday” as the day when batters could think purely in terms of attack. That’s more time than most.
David and Allenby, by contrast, committed to two-hour sessions at least three times a week. All built upon helping David hit short balls, full balls, wide balls and straight balls – primarily delivered by pace bowlers – over the boundary.
“In that winter of 2019 I think Tim added 10-20 metres onto his hitting,” Allenby says. “It’s fine to hit a six 75 metres when you middle it, but the goal from my point of view was to try to help him be able to toe the ball for six or splice it for six.
“He didn’t necessarily have to middle it to hit it for six, the mechanics of the swing allowed imperfect contact to still go for six, and that gives the player confidence that they can clear any boundary and the fielders don’t really matter then.
Jim Allenby (back row, fourth from left) and Tim David (front row, second from right) after winning a one-day pennant in WA.
“Indoors training is fine, but actually seeing the visual, psychological thing of seeing how far the ball is going is just as important. So outdoor sessions are very important for someone looking to go down this path.”
One conclusion reached by Allenby and David through their training is that better comparisons are made between the golf swing and the batter’s hitting arc than between those of baseball and cricket.
“Certainly, I look at golf in terms of the mechanics of the swing and more the swing plane than anything,” Allenby says. “Because it pretty much goes the same way as hitting a ball over long on to cow corner for 120 metres, which is the ultimate goal of this process.
“Baseball is not quite what people think it is, it’s more of a golf swing because it’s a bit more consistent, and that’s where the ball generally is, not hitting it on the full. And from a training point of view if you want to swing hard like Bryson, he trains to hit the ball hard.
“But I think the worst thing you can do is get too complicated with this stuff and try to reinvent the wheel. There’s some cross-learning from other sports, but it’s mainly about trying to get the bat in a straight line through the ball as quickly as possible and as often as possible.”
That was the theory. But the hardest obstacle for David to overcome was less physical than mental: to gamble that by giving short shrift to other elements of his game, he would be able to steal an advance on bowlers in the 10-20 balls he expected to face at the back end of a Twenty20 innings.
“It kept building the whole time, it would get better and better, and then we were like, ‘This is going pretty well’,” David says. “Then waiting for an opportunity to play a game and that came in the BBL for the Hurricanes. That was the first time where really, a couple of games in, we checked back and thought we’ve prepared pretty well here and onto something good.
“There’s a lot said about levers and that sort of thing, but to me, it’s about an ability to hit the ball hard, commit to try to hit the ball hard. One thing that does help me is my reach, being able to hit wide balls and still hold your shape and hit those over the off side, that’s something that helps me a lot.
Tim David made 50 against India during his third match for Australia last month.Credit:Getty
“But it’s really the training you do. I try to bat instinctively in games, I don’t have a lot of balls to face, so it comes back to training. If you prepare well and tick all those boxes, then you can try to go after it in a match.”
For Allenby, the focused training would not have worked if David had not committed to it as fully as he did. It is a resolve that, as most players still juggle formats, he is yet to see replicated.
“I’ve not seen anyone come close to that desire to be as good and to gamble as well, to understand the consequences and say ‘I might as well be the best at something or do something else’,” Allenby says. “I think a lot of other people take a safer approach to cover more bases and be pretty good at some things, whereas no one else yet has let go and said, ‘I’m going to go full tilt at this.’
“To do it in your early 20s, it’s certainly motivated me and inspired me to try to get better to help him, to see someone who is that willing to fail, in order to succeed.”
And there’s another one: Tim David belts out against the West Indies.Credit:Cricket Australia / Twitter
In finding the mental strength to go a different way, David also built the self-reliance to suggest to the national selectors this year that it would be better to play in the Pakistan Super League, thereby winning an Indian Premier League contract, than to be a reserve batter for a home T20 series against Sri Lanka. Nine months later, and he is not only in the World Cup squad, but a key part of Australia’s plan to defend the title.
A little of that perspective came from something else David and Allenby share: a conviction to not let cricket mutate into something more than a game to be enjoyed.
“Coming out of the game when I did, I was noticing that people were just taking themselves a bit too seriously and sessions weren’t as fun,” Allenby says. “It’s supposed to be fun, you’re playing with your mates. You’re trying to win the game, sure, but no one’s living and dying by your performance.
“I like that balance in Tim’s perspective, and that helps his role – you’ll have many more bad days than good days when you’re batting six and you’ve got between five and 10 balls to make an impact. He has that emotional intelligence to understand what you’re doing is entertainment, and that’s why I think we’ve worked pretty well together, because we certainly have a similar opinion on how the game should be played.“
Maintaining that view under the floodlight of a World Cup, as everything about his game is dissected, is a challenge that David has already clocked.
“It’s taken a fair while to get there, it doesn’t just happen,” David says. “It might be different for people and Jim and I might be really isolated in that opinion, or in that way of looking at it. Coming into a World Cup, there are a lot of eyes on that, so to be able to keep that freedom is something I’m trying to do. Less overthinking for me is probably the key.”
As for what David’s story means to Twenty20 and the professional cricket system, it is a lesson in focus and thinking that echoes some of what DeChambeau has achieved for golf. In the words of the author Shane Ryan: “To compete in the Bryson Era, it’s not enough to have talent and to work hard. You better think hard, too. You better be so committed that you treat golf like an experiment to be solved, and you better stumble upon your own innovations. DeChambeau’s long-lasting effect on this game won’t be physical. It will be mental.”
Undoubtedly, Tim David has got a lot of players thinking differently.
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