Uppercut
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I just mean that seam movement hardly ever happened during the first ~half of Clarke's career. The ball swung for 20 overs if you were lucky, then it went through arrow-straight for the rest of the innings. I think the bounce was usually more consistent too, though that's less easy to spot on TV.Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Particularly when there is a narrow view of what constitutes evidence (i.e. raw numbers).
What do you mean about seam movement? I don't understand the sentence.
I kind of assumed that there wouldn't be any data on this, but I checked and Cricviz collect data on average degree of seam movement for England that shows it happening here: https://www.cricviz.com/swing-kings/. There might be equivalent data for other countries.
That absence of evidence is not evidence of absence was kind of my point. Batting may or may not have gotten worse, it's basically impossible to tell, but it has definitely gotten harder.
That said, the story about short format cricket ruining techniques isn't one that I buy personally, at least not over that time period. In the 2000s and early 2010s we had lots of openers who didn't move their feet but nevertheless had good-to-excellent careers. Trescothick, Hayden, Gayle, Smith, Jayasuriya. Old timers kept telling us they were going to get found out by lateral movement, and sometimes they did, but lateral movement was rare enough that it wasn't usually a major problem. Nowadays we don't see many players succeeding with that type of technique. I expected Jason Roy to go OK in tests, because I was used to players with his strengths and weaknesses scoring enough in good conditions to get by. The fact that he bombed so hard really drove home how much the game has changed.