Regarded as one of the pioneers of the aerial shot, Brendon Kuruppu is sitting in the Sri Lankan dressing room as manager, appropriately attired in team colours, watching the players hit innovative shots in the Twenty20 format.

“I would’ve loved to play this format. It would’ve given me so many runs with the shots I used to play,” he tells The Indian Express. “There are so many variations now. You can pay the ball in the air with the pull, cut, sweep. These guys look better than me.”

Kuruppu can’t pinpoint the match in which he first went over the top. “I think it must’ve been sometime in 1983. Kris Srikkanth followed suit almost immediately,” he says. “I wasn’t a natural hitter, so I had to develop that shot with practice. I had tried it a lot in the club games first before taking it to ODIs. There were so many fielders packed on one side of the field and I had to think of a new way to score runs. I thought of hitting over the fielders instead of getting frustrated while trying to pierce the cordon.”

The 47-year old says the trick to go over the in-field is to pick the length of the ball early and go through with the shot along with the pace of the ball. “It’s a calculated shot, and not a pre-determined effort as it might look from the sidelines,” he says. “With batting powerplays and fielding restrictions, the onus is on the batsmen to play the aerial shots regularly these days. Cricket is a spectacle, one needs to woo the audience with lots of runs, and so it’s important to keep adding rules to benefit batsmen.”

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