Former India captain Rahul Dravid believes that having the liberty to 'practice and experiment' risky shots in addition to the leniency shown by team managements with regards to failures are helping batsmen to improve and flourish in the T20 format.
"We are more accepting of failure, I think, in T20 cricket than we are in any other form of the game," Dravid was quoted as saying by ESPNcricinfo. "When a batsman takes risks and plays a paddle sweep or a reverse sweep or all the kinds of shots that they play, you're more likely to view it with a certain degree of acceptance than you would, say, in a Test match or in one-day cricket. This has given batsmen freedom to try and experiment with these things more and they're getting better and better at it."
Citing the example of AB de Villiers, the 43-year-old observed that the South African swashbuckling batsman has also been able to refine his batting skills because of this freedom to experiment.
"Apart from the IPL, he gets other opportunities to practice and experiment with that, and if you keep trying something and you keep failing and learning from it, you are going to get better at it, and that's what happened with batting techniques. People have been allowed to take a few more risks. They keep doing that over and over again and they get better and better at it," Dravid said.
