Posted by When will Dawid Malan (six hundreds in 23 innings, average of 63.15, strike-rate of 98.44) finally prove himself?
“I’m desperate to do well in this format and prove a point that I deserve to be in there,” said Malan today, after his latest ton.
Two games ago, Malan hit another hundred. “It’s satisfying to be able to silence some people who’ve always got negative things to say,” he had said after that one. His previous innings had been 96.
Malan certainly has his critics, but after four hundreds this year, they are surely reducing in number. We get the impression that Malan will be the last to notice this.
He’s giving off distinctly Jonny Bairstow vibes. The Yorkshireman has repeatedly proven himself to be a person incredibly motivated by a desire to “prove the doubters wrong” and has therefore sometimes gone to quite a bit of trouble to imagine-up said doubters in the first place. One time Bairstow hurt himself playing football and when the kinds of people who complain about England cricketers playing football inevitably complained about England cricketers playing football, Bairstow for some reason interpreted this as a unanimous belief that he was awful at batting.
If you told Jonny Bairstow that you didn’t like his new jumper, he would feel like he had a point to prove on the cricket field. If you said he’d put the wrong wheelie bin out this week, he’d brand you a doubter and score a hundred to prove you wrong.
Dawid Malan seems cut from similar cloth. Rather helpfully, he has actually had quite a large stockpile of doubters to draw on over the years so hopefully he won’t run out before the end of the World Cup.
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It looks more like Jonny Bairstow is becoming the old Dawid Malan. With Roy teeing off at the other end, the occasional 50 at 88 per 100 was always going to be OK from Bairstow. But with Malan only going through 100 per 100 in his longer innings, when he gets to go through the gears, he needs to succeed an awful lot of the time (as recently). Against tougher opposition there is a fairly high probability that Bairstow and Malan will play this game of “after you Claude” and waste the first 20 overs, before getting out. This is not the Eoin Morgan game-plan.
As a south Indian, I have always pronounced Malan as maul-an
& also why is there a w in his first name? Is it pronounced differently from David ??
Dawid is pronounced differently from David, Marees.
The name David is pronounced “day vid”. The w in Dawid is absolutely “w”, like the w in Wigan (home of Campbell the bottleless git ie not the best Rugby League team in the whole world…but I digress). The first syllable of Dawid is pronounced “dah”, which I think (somewhat ironically) is more akin to the way you would pronounce the a in Dravid than the “ay” in David.
Now that Malan is an honorary Yorkshireman, it might be that people will start pronouncing his surname with a more rounded “a” – “maul an”, rather than the almost e like sound on the first syllable, like the first syllable of “mama”.
I wonder whether the move to Yorkshire has brought out Dawid’s inner Bairstow – I don’t recall signs of sensitivity to perceived criticism when he was at Middlesex
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