Dawid Malan looks imposing with a bat in hand. It’s an assessment that every bowler who has run into him this year will concur with. He’s six feet tall and lines up almost fully straight and upright before the ball is bowled – with shades of Marcus Trescothick to his stance. Early on Tuesday morning in Dharamsala, full of sunshine and opportunities on a flat wicket, he put on display minimal footwork for an outrageous shot that would’ve made Trescothick proud.
Bangladesh fast bowling pair of Mustafizur Rahman and Taskin Ahmed started promisingly, getting the ball to subtly move or straighten and beat both the opening batters in the first four overs. Malan had had enough of that, and planted his front foot just a touch out of the way and whacked a delivery angled into him from the left-armer behind square leg for the first six of the innings. It was premeditated, all the way back from the nets sessions on Monday.
Less than 24 hours before he pulled off the audacious hit, he was doing it in the nets against throwdowns. For a good 20 minutes, Malan hit shots on both sides of the net with his feet firmly planted in place. Drives against fuller throwdowns came easily but for short and length deliveries, he reached out to cut, pull, and flick, the way he did against Mustafizur in the game, without moving his feet. It seemed like a peculiar drill to do on the eve of a game, but clearly came with potential for application in a game situation.
This replication, straight from the training ground, threw Bangladesh off their game, and kickstarted what was an extremely busy first half of the game for Shakib Al Hasan. This was the first of numerous occasions where Malan forced Shakib to make a reactionary field change. Fine leg and square leg fielders constantly went in and out, based on which area Malan expertly targetted. At the end of the first 10 overs, he’d outpaced and outscored his opening partner, Jonny Bairstow, who playing his 100th ODI for England.
Malan comfortably used his feet against Mehidy Hasan, a spinner who had previously kept him on a leash in the format, and blunted him. He stepped up to be proactive right after Bairstow fell, fought past a period of lull between overs 20 to 30, before spearheading England’s violent up-shift in gears, incidentally against Mehidy again. An exasperated Shakib gestured wildly and changed his field every ball but to little avail as the over fetched 22 runs, with Malan hitting two fours and two sixes.
Against the skidding new ball in the early stages, Malan’s risk of taking the pacers on came off. Against the trio of Shakib, Mehidy and Mahedi Hasan, he got 84 off 64 balls – an ever-improving spin game which ironically, is down to the years he’s spent playing in the Bangladesh Premier League.
Malan’s 107-ball 140 was his fourth ODI century of 2023 – only Shubman Gill has more this year. No England batter has ever hit five in a calendar year. It’s also his sixth since the 2019 World Cup, again a record that none of the current batch of England batters even come close to matching. Malan is also England’s leading run-getter in this period (1176 runs) with the best average for any batters who has played more than three games (65.33) between then and now. Among batters with 500 runs since then, only Gill has a better average (70.40). It’s the kind of consistency he’s had to keep at, to push himself to be worthy of a place in one of the finest white-ball squads ever assembled.
The incredible batting standards in England meant it took him a full ODI series of absolute high quality to convince the selectors to retain him in the final squad for the tournament. England, who’ve mass-produced batting swashbucklers and rated them very highly, couldn’t keep Harry Brook out of the final squad despite his recent lean run. Brook’s entry was expected to come at the cost of Malan, until the latter turned that narrative on its head in the New Zealand series last month. In the space of one week in early September, Malan scored 54 in Cardiff, went home for the birth of his son, returned right away to score 95 at the Oval in London and then proceeded to get his name up on the Lord’s honours board to finish with 277 runs in the series.
“You either have to be an absolute freak or you have to be so consistent you keep your name in the hat,” Malan had said after that knock, just two days before officially being retained in the World Cup squad in place of one of England’s earliest white-ball ‘freaks’ Jason Roy. Tuesday’s effort in what was only his second World Cup outing was the perfect kind of vindication for folks with perhaps one of the toughest selection jobs in world cricket currently.
