AB De Villiers' Century: Why ODI Cricket Has Swung Too Far in Favour of Batsmen

Awesome, incredible, superhuman, preposterous—just some of the adjectives used to describe AB de Villiers' sublime century against the West Indies in Johannesburg on Sunday, and every one of them richly deserved.

Just typing 149 runs from 44 balls seems faintly ridiculous.

Helped by some woeful West Indian bowling, De Villiers took full advantage to deliver a pitch-perfect masterpiece of power hitting.

Are flat pitches and short boundaries tilting the game too heavily in the batsman's favour, though?

Consider that in the 50-over game, 21 of the highest 22 team totals have been scored since the start of this century. Similarly, the five highest individual innings in ODI cricket have all been recorded since 2009. Scoring has become faster, too, with 22 of the 26 fastest centuries compiled since 2000.

As influential as Twenty20 cricket has been in broadening batting horizons, the deluge of runs can't all be down to improvements in batsmanship.

It's often been said—granted, mostly by bowlers—that cricket has always been a batsman's game.

Laws and regulations are often changed in favour of the batsman, rarely to the advantage of the toiling bowlers. Covered pitches, the introduction of protective clothing, limitations on short-pitched bowling, giant bats—whenever the bowler seems to be gaining the ascendancy, the batsman finds a way to regain the advantage.

The poor bowlers battling to stem the runs at this year's World Cup will have to contend with five men inside the fielding circle. Meanwhile, the use of two new white balls in the one-day game sounds like it should favour the bowlers, but it will instead make reverse-swing much more difficult to come by. The harder ball should come off the bat much more sweetly, too.

Throw in flat pitches and often shorter boundaries, and the bowlers' lot is often becoming an unhappy one.

It's not just the ODI game where bowlers are feeling the strain. The succession of flat pitches in the recent Australia versus India series prompted Ryan Harris to tell SEN's Morning Glory (h/t Cricket Australia) that at times he felt like little more than “a bowling machine.”

This from one of the best bowlers in the world.

Administrators would no doubt argue that they are just giving the cricketing public what they want. Crowds have come to expect fast scoring and plenty of boundaries. Twenty20 cricket has certainly changed how spectators watch the game. No run chase is off limits now, regardless of how unlikely it may seem. Batting often has the look of a baseball home run derby.

The best matches, certainly in Tests and ODIs, are ones where the contest between bat and ball is relatively even. Low-scoring games with a nervy run chase often provide the most memorable and entertaining finishes.

Nobody is calling for a succession of slow, seaming pitches. Is there anything worse than hearing a commentator describe a pitch as being one that will be enjoyed by bowlers who take pace off the ball?

A shift of the pendulum slightly in favour of the bowling side wouldn't go amiss from time to time, though.

As Ryan Harris told SEN’s The Run Home (h/t SEN.com.au): “That was the disappointing thing about the wickets that we played on this summer, they were just so flat. We didn’t want a bowler-friendly green top but a wicket that you could at least bowl a good bouncer.”

Surely administrators around the world can deliver that?