How Heinrich Klaasen bosses spin with a destructive quasi-pull

When is a pull no longer a pull? If you're the kind of person who spends an unhealthy amount of time dwelling on the precise meanings of cricketing terms, you might find yourself pondering this when you watch Heinrich Klaasen play the pull.

Defined most simply, the pull is a horizontal-bat shot hit across the line of a short-pitched ball. Klaasen's pull, particularly against spin bowling, routinely fails to check all three of those boxes.

Consider the one he hit off Adil Rashid en route to his 67-ball 109 against England at the Wankhede Stadium. It could hardly be described as a horizontal-bat shot, since his bat was at something like a 45-degree angle to the ground. He didn't hit across the line of the ball as much as through it, his bat swing tending towards that of a back-foot drive on the up.

And the ball from Rashid was really not short at all. It was a more-or-less good-length ball, a wrong 'un probably destined to miss leg stump at slightly below stump height. Klaasen shifted his weight on to the back foot and swung his hip open so his front leg was well outside leg stump, brusquely reclaiming the room that the bowler had tried so assiduously to deny him. From this position he swung his bat through an arc both smooth and ferocious, his arms at full extension, and launched the ball well beyond the wide long-on boundary.

This was a shot that occupied the outer limits of what a pull is and does - not really a pull at all, but nonetheless the most devastating of pulls. The Klaasen pull may, in fact, be even more than that; it may well be the most devastating weapon against spin in all white-ball cricket.