When is a pull no longer a pull? If you're the kind of person who spends an unhealthy amount of time dwelling on the precise meanings of cricketing terms, you might find yourself pondering this when you watch Heinrich Klaasen play the pull.
Defined most simply, the pull is a horizontal-bat shot hit across the line of a short-pitched ball. Klaasen's pull, particularly against spin bowling, routinely fails to check all three of those boxes.
Consider the one he hit off Adil Rashid en route to his 67-ball 109 against England at the Wankhede Stadium. It could hardly be described as a horizontal-bat shot, since his bat was at something like a 45-degree angle to the ground. He didn't hit across the line of the ball as much as through it, his bat swing tending towards that of a back-foot drive on the up.
And the ball from Rashid was really not short at all. It was a more-or-less good-length ball, a wrong 'un probably destined to miss leg stump at slightly below stump height. Klaasen shifted his weight on to the back foot and swung his hip open so his front leg was well outside leg stump, brusquely reclaiming the room that the bowler had tried so assiduously to deny him. From this position he swung his bat through an arc both smooth and ferocious, his arms at full extension, and launched the ball well beyond the wide long-on boundary.
This was a shot that occupied the outer limits of what a pull is and does - not really a pull at all, but nonetheless the most devastating of pulls. The Klaasen pull may, in fact, be even more than that; it may well be the most devastating weapon against spin in all white-ball cricket.
It's a tall claim, but consider this. Since the start of 2022, no batter (minimum 200 runs) has scored quicker against spin in ODIs than Klaasen, whose strike rate of 147.74 (8.86 runs per over) is more than a run an over superior to Jos Buttler's in second place (129.24/7.75). And the pull is central to how quickly Klaasen scores against spin.
Among batters who've played the shot at least 20 times against spin since the start of 2022, Klaasen has the third-best strike rate (271.87), behind David Warner and Scott Edwards. But of the top 10 pullers in terms of strike rate, Klaasen has scored the highest percentage of his runs (22.14%) with that shot. Against spin, the pull has brought Klaasen 87 of his 393 runs in this period, and exactly a third of his 24 sixes.
Where other batters can claim to play the pull as effectively as Klaasen, few play it as often, and this is because he's able to play the shot against a wider range of lengths than most. Ball-tracking data from ODIs since the start of 2018 suggests that the average length off which batters pull spinners is 6.51m from the stumps; the average length Klaasen pulls is 5.87m, which is more than half a metre fuller than the average pulling length.
Bowlers don't need to bowl egregious drag-downs to get pulled by Klaasen. Even the smallest fraction short of a good length is enough. Their margin for error is wafer-thin, particularly since Klaasen is just as punishing when he's launching full balls down the ground or slog-sweeping over midwicket. If you're a spinner, you have the narrowest possible band of the pitch you can land on and expect any kind of respect from Klaasen.
The result of this is already evident at this World Cup. Klaasen (138.18/8.29) has been the quickest-scoring batter against spin (minimum 50 runs) so far, and has scored more than a run per over quicker than Rohit Sharma (117.89/7.07) in second place. He, like the rest of South Africa's awe-inspiring top seven, has been fortunate to play three of his five games in Delhi and Mumbai, which have offered up two of the truest surfaces of this tournament, but if he slows down at all on grippier pitches, other batters will probably slow down even more.
Klaasen's next stop is Chennai, and a Pakistan spin attack that's struggled with its lengths all through the tournament. They'll know they can't afford to be anything other than pinpoint against Klaasen. Not unless they have a masochistic urge to witness that most devastating pull that really isn't a pull at all.