Is Brendan Taylor doing too much?

Happier times for Brendan Taylor: captain, but not keeper

Zimbabwe have just come off a convincing 5-0 series defeat to India. While that result was not particularly surprising, the lack of runs from Brendan Taylor, normally their best batsman, was a surprise.

Some of that may have been due to India having done their homework on him. Duncan Fletcher is a clever coach, and will have been aware that Taylor is capable of winning games almost single handedly with a big innings. In 128 innings against good opponents (test teams or Ireland) he has 6 ODI hundreds. To put that in context, at a similar point in his career, Jayasuriya had 5 ODI hundreds. It would have been, therefore, negligent of India to have not had specific plans for Taylor.

But as much as that may have been a factor in this series (and also potentially in the last two against West Indies and Bangladesh where Taylor was also ineffective) there was possibly something else going on. In the last few matches he has been keeping wickets and captaining the team. Some players thrive when given the gloves and the captaincy, but most players find their batting suffers when they are both captain and keeper.