'Conscious choice' has David prepared for failure

Often the messages Jim Allenby sends to his superstar pupil Tim David have just one character: a rainbow emoji.

It's a common reaction when David hits one up in the air and is out cheaply, such was the case in the first T20I against England at Perth Stadium earlier this month when he picked out deep square leg off Mark Wood and was out for a third-ball duck.

Allenby has been David's batting coach for the better part of eight years, but that match was the first he'd seen live over the past two due to the global pandemic and restrictions on travel, particularly in Western Australia, the pair's home state.

Allenby, who enjoyed a stellar 12-year T20 career himself with English counties Glamorgan, Leicestershire and Somerset, jokes that maybe he should stay away from David's matches, the next of which is at Perth Stadium tonight against Sri Lanka, but then that would go against the philosophy they both hold.

Built into David's approach to his 'finisher' role that he's become so renowned for across the globe since joining the Hobart Hurricanes in November 2020 is the knowledge that he's not always going to "come off".

"If you want to see the rainbow, you've got to put up with the rain," Allenby explains to cricket.com.au.

The phrase said to be coined by the first Roman Emperor Augustus has become a fundamental aspect of how Allenby and David view his high-risk, high-reward style of T20 batting.

"Some days I'll send him that as an emoji after he has skied one first ball or something like that," says Allenby.

"It's a phrase that resonates with his role – the good days are spectacular and the bad days are also spectacular.

"We talk about his high-risk game being something that is a conscious choice.

"If you come off one-in-three, one-in-four innings, you're an absolute superstar in that finisher role, because coming off means winning the game."

Nine games into David's international career for Australia and his strike rate of "coming off" is already slightly better than one-in-three, and although not all of those innings have resulted in Aussie victories, they have given them a chance from where there previously was none.

"You can't have a guy who hits massive sixes and wins you games and then also expect him to come off every game because it's just not realistic," explains Allenby, who along with mentoring David also runs a coaching business, Players Choice.

"We talk very candidly about it really … (of) him having the awareness and emotional intelligence to know he isn't going to come off that much but when he does to make it a match-winning innings."

David's acceptance that his method might not succeed every game stems from tough experiences earlier in his career when he was trying to make it in all formats, believes Allenby, before he lost his WA state contract after just one season and without playing a senior game.

But perhaps the reason the two can speak openly about failure is their bond stretches back further than a traditional player-coach relationship.

The two have known each other since David was six or seven years old, their families are friends and they both have a lifelong association with Claremont-Nedlands – the cricket club Australia's new No.6 still calls home today when he is not touring the world on the global T20 circuit.

Allenby recalls first coming across Singaporean-born David when he was an 18-year-old running school holiday coaching clinics "trying to get enough money for a weekend night out", with the pair holding their first one-on-one batting session a couple of years later when David was nine.

They started working together more regularly when David was in his late teens and on the cusp of the WA squad for the first time.

Either side of that has been Allenby's own professional career, which like David, saw him on the fringes of state selection (he played one T20 match for WA in January 2007) before forging a successful career abroad in the UK that yielded 14,043 runs and 442 wickets from 411 games across all formats.

"Having played at the start of T20 and then through to the beginning of this phase, seeing a lot of changes … it's probably helped more to understand the emotions of it and how you're going to feel on a good and a bad day," says the 40-year-old, who finished his career with Somerset in 2017.

"Technically, it's not really shaped much of my coaching, it's more about how I communicate with the player and discuss certain situations."

Over time their sessions have evolved from learning the basics of cricket – forward defence, leaving the ball and ducking bouncers – as a teenager to now purely about the art of finishing a T20 innings where David will test how hard he can swing while still maintaining his shape and balance.

While there's still certain technique checkpoints, such as head position, foot, hands, back lift, that they tick off each session, a large focus is allocated to making sure his swing is standing up under pressure.

"The (checkpoints) make sure my swing is going well and that I can hit the ball and back that in a game," the 26-year-old tells cricket.com.au.

"I'm not going to face a lot of balls in games and I'm going to have failures, so I've got to be willing to move on from them and still be able to take risks."

The theory behind the sessions is similar to that adopted by golfers: if they miss, they want to miss the right way.

For David, that means being able to miss hit a ball and still clear the rope.

"If you're relying on middling the ball for it to go for six, your results aren't going to be that consistent," says Allenby.

"We're always constantly trying to see how hard he can swing or how fast he can swing while maintaining the technique and bat plane.

"It isn't just standing there and teeing off and whacking it, a lot of it is, but there's intricacies of the game as well.

"The sessions go into a bit more detail than they may come across when we talk about standing there and just swinging hard, there's a bit of method in it.

"The theory behind it was you don't need to middle the ball to hit it 75 or 80 metres, which are the boundary sizes, you want to be able to middle it 110 to 120 metres because naturally if you don't quite get it, it's still going to carry that 80 metres.

"What that does is it not only enables more chance of hitting a six but it also means the field positions that are set by the captain don't really come into it when you're deciding the shot you want to play, it's more about just making sure the swing and decision making is good and trusting that if the contact is relatively good, the ball is going to go far enough to clear the field even if he's on the boundary.

"Plus, it's pretty cool to see the ball go over 100 metres if you do middle it."

That's where the visual aspect comes in, with many of their sessions held outdoors with a physical boundary that acts as a great psychological tool for David to know, and feel, that he's committed to his swing and it's still going to clear the fielder.

Allenby admits it's far from revolutionary theory, but he's coached other BBL and international players and is yet to see anyone commit as fully and completely to this role and style of cricket than David.

"A lot of the other guys are also playing other formats, I think it's a little bit difficult for them to commit too strongly to just doing this," he says.

"Playing three formats is tough, you're trying to divide your time but that's something Tim did, he didn't divide his time, it was 100 per cent focused on this.

"He's the only person I've seen come close to his commitment to it.

"It was a huge risk and it came off, which is great, as it should have done.

"But most people want to have a bit of a backup plan and I don't really think he did."

Allenby is confident David would be successful at any level in any format had or if an opportunity came his way, and points to his red-ball success with the WA Second XI where he made 137 on debut in February 2017 as an example.

David himself isn't too perplexed and is prepared to just follow each opportunity where it takes him.

He evolved into a middle-order power-hitter when an opportunity presented itself, firstly as a replacement player with the Perth Scorchers in BBL|07 and BBL|09, and then with his birth country Singapore for 14 T20 internationals in 2019 after losing his WA contract.

"It's always been about trying to take the opportunities that I can get to play and have fun while I'm playing," he says.

"I want to keep my options open for everything to try to play as much as I can … at the moment all of my opportunities have been in T20 cricket, it's just evolved naturally that way.

"I've had a good 18 months so far, but I want to keep getting better, keep pushing it and see how far I can go."

Men's T20 World Cup 2022

Australia squad: Ashton Agar, Pat Cummins, Tim David, Aaron Finch (c), Cameron Green, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Marsh, Glenn Maxwell, Kane Richardson, Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc, Marcus Stoinis, Matthew Wade, David Warner, Adam Zampa

Australia's fixtures

Oct 22: New Zealand beat Australia by 89 runs

Oct 25: v Sri Lanka, Perth Stadium, 10pm AEDT

Oct 28: v England, MCG, 7pm AEDT

Oct 31: v Ireland, Gabba, 7pm AEDT

Nov 4: v Afghanistan, Adelaide Oval, 7pm AEDT

Click here for the full 2022 T20 World Cup fixture