CLEMSON, S.C. -- Clemson coach Dabo Swinney was ready to see his second-ranked Tigers build momentum for the final regular-season push. He couldnt be happier with their performance against Syracuse.The Tigers (6-0 Atlantic Coast Conference) improved to 9-0 for a second straight season, rolling over the Orange for a 54-0 shutout Saturday. Not even seeing Heisman Trophy contending quarterback Deshaun Watson leave the game with an injury in the first half could spoil Swinneys satisfaction over this one.For us, its just trying to stay on course and build some momentum, he said.That was not easy in October as Clemson needed fourth-quarter rallies to defeat No. 7 Louisville (42-36) and No. 22 Florida State (37-34) and sweated out a missed field goal by North Carolina State to escape that one in overtime, 24-17.Watson threw for two touchdowns, including a pretty, arcing 65-yard toss that hit Deon Cain in stride, and ran for a third in the blowout victory.Both Watson and Swinney said the bruised right shoulder was fine and would not prevent him from facing Pitt next week with a chance to clinch the ACC Atlantic Division.Watson finished with 169 yards passing and 39 rushing to keep the Tigers (6-0 Atlantic Coast Conference, No. 3 AP) on track for the ACC title game.November is championship time, Watson said . Its time to set a new standard and set a new tone.Watson, who had a bag of ice on his right shoulder, said he felt fine and couldve kept playing.Syracuse (4-5, 2-3) had hoped to catch Clemson napping after the Tigers dramatic, 37-34 win at Florida State last week. However, any upset chances left once Orange quarterback Eric Dungey was knocked out in the first quarter following a hard hit by linebacker Dorian ODaniel. Dungey, the ACC leader in passing yards and completions per game coming in, returned from the locker room in shorts and a ball cap as backups Austin Wilson and Zack Mahoney finished up.Orange coach Dino Babers said his training staff ruled Dungey out and he had no additional update about the quarterbacks condition or how soon he might return.I do think anytime you lose your starting quarterback in an offense thats designed to pass, its going to be a dramatic change, Babers said.Syracuse was held to 277 yards of offense, including just 172 yards passing -- their second fewest this season.Clemsons Cain had two TD catches and 125 yards on five receptions. He said this game -- Clemson scored 31 points with Watson sidelined -- showed how deep the Tigers are this season. Best is the standard and our standard doesnt change, Cain said. Weve got the best of the best out there all the time.It was Clemsons first ACC shutout since defeating Miami 58-0 last year and the first time Syracuse was held without points since a 56-0 loss to Georgia Tech in 2013.Tigers linebacker Ben Boulware said Syracuses offense was fast-paced and complex so to go out there and get a shutout, thats a difficult thing to do.THE TAKEAWAYSyracuse: The Orange had come off two straight wins, but Babers program is not yet ready to take down teams like Clemson.Clemson: With their toughest regular-season games over, the Tigers are rolling much like they did down the stretch a year ago. Thats a dangerous prospect for their potential ACC title game opponent or for other national title contenders.POLL IMPLICATIONSClemson: Its status quo for the Tigers, barring a major Saturday night surprise . Despite the easy win, Clemson likely wont jump No. 2 Michigan in the Top 25 rankings or No. 1 Alabama in the CFP poll next week -- unless the Crimson Tide stumble. Clemsons path to the end, though, is much less worrisome than its two higher ranked competitors, leaving the Tigers in prime pouncing position if anyone ahead loses.RECORD SETTERSyracuse receiver Amba Etta-Tawo had nine catches, setting the schools single-season record with 75 receptions. He topped Alec Lemons mark of 72 in 2012. Etta-Tawo came into the game leading the ACC in several categories, including total receiving yards and yards per game. Etta-Tawos older brother Etta Etta-Tawo was a rising Clemson defensive lineman whose career ended early in 2006 because of medical issues.UP NEXTSyracuse: The Orange face North Carolina State next Saturday, the first of two straight games at the Carrier Dome.Clemson: The Tigers play their final ACC regular-season home game with Pittsburgh, a team it has not faced since the Panthers joined the league before the 2013 football season. Yeezy Boost 350 Pas Cher . R.J. Umberger scored twice to lead the Blue Jackets to a franchise-record for consecutive wins with a 5-3 victory Tuesday night over the Los Angeles Kings. Yeezy 350 V2 2020 Pas Cher . After a first half in which he thought "the lid was on the basket," the Toronto Raptors coach watched his squad mount a second half surge to defeat the Cleveland Cavaliers 98-91. http://www.pascheryeezy350v2.fr/fausse-yeezy-350-v2-hyperspace.html . Scott won the Australian PGA last week in his first event in Australia since winning the U.S. Masters in April. American Matt Kuchar, ahead by two strokes with four to play and even with Scott with one to go, double-bogeyed the 18th after taking two shots to get out of a bunker. Yeezy 350 V2 Clay Pas Cher . -- Golden State Warriors coach Mark Jackson asked his players a simple question during Fridays morning shootaround: How many of them had ever been on a team 14 games over . Yeezy 350 V2 Antlia Pas Cher . -- Golden State Warriors coach Mark Jackson asked his players a simple question during Fridays morning shootaround: How many of them had ever been on a team 14 games over . Someday maybe Ill remember how to forget - Bob Dylan, Tight Connection to My Heart The cure for a batting slump? Two pieces of cotton wool, one for each ear - Baseball adageSomewhere, whether your subject is evolutionary biology or crickets biomechanics, the conversation is happening.It is not the only conversation, of course, but it is the most evolved, and its spoken in the quickest shorthand, assuming the most knowledge, bringing in the most advanced exponents. This conversation has not yet hardened into conventional wisdom, let alone been oversimplified and corrupted into theory. It is an off-the-cuff conversation between leaders in their field, just chatting, kicking ideas back and forth, and learning partly deliberately and partly accidentally.For when brilliant people in the same field get together, even those subjects they avoid are learning experiences. Where there is heat and protectiveness around an idea - the sideways glance that reveals the speaker thinks he is giving away too much to someone who is a team-mate today but an opponent next month - we glimpse the contours of competitive advantage. The silences are filled with meaning, just as much as the sentences.In the team dining room at Barcelona, over post-match pasta, Iniesta (Spaniard) puts an idea to Messi (Argentinian) and Neymar (Brazilian) about creating space in the final third. Even though the subject is specific to todays match, the three men are using a footballing vocabulary developed by Johan Cruyff (Dutch) and Pep Guardiola (Spaniard). So, three pillars of modern football invisibly support this apparently casual chat: Dutch ideas, South Americas wealth of talent, and the finishing school of Spanish football. It is, as youve guessed, the conversation.In the era of the Champions League, Europes great cities - London, Manchester, Paris, Munich, Milan, Madrid and Barcelona - have hosted an extended conversation about how football can and should be played. It is not the pasta and the espresso, however good they might be, that have led Europe to become footballs high table. It is money and status. Though it sounds vulgar, money attracts ideas, in sport as in everything else. Constantine P Cavafy, the early 20th century Greek poet, had a neat riposte to snobby artists who disliked business and money: Money manures art, he would say.The conversation in cricket has, for some time, been happening at the IPL - the games most lucrative event. The leagues political and reputational problems, sadly, have partly obscured its development as crickets technical, strategic and tactical cutting edge. Where is cricket at? Where is cricket going? Trying to answer those questions without experiencing the IPL relies on a lot of second-hand knowledge - like trying to understand football without knowing the Champions League.During the winter of 2015-16, Daniel Vettori, coach of Royal Challengers Bangalore, invited me to act as a consultant to the team during the lead-up and early games of the ninth season of the IPL. My job was to help the franchise in any way I could - to observe, to analyse and, where appropriate, to feed ideas into the brains trust. In reality, of course, it was two-way traffic for a writer trying to understand modern cricket, especially how batting is changing. I was living among the worlds leading practitioners.The batsmen at RCB included Chris Gayle (who has scored more T20 runs than anyone), Virat Kohli (who, among a host of other records, is the only man to have scored four IPL hundreds in a season), AB de Villiers (recurrently rated as the worlds leading white-ball batsman), Shane Watson (the most expensive player in this seasons auction), as well as one of crickets prospects, the 18-year-old prodigy Sarfaraz Khan. Bangalore, in other words, is to attacking batsmanship what Barcelona is to attacking football. RCB also draws on the expertise of Trent Woodhill, a batting coach who specialises in helping the worlds leading T20 players.During my immersion, I found my ideas about batting settling into clearer focus. Above all, my experience in Bangalore helped me to look freshly at the way we define batsmen, a process of categorisation that provides the structure of this piece.S ome cricketers are batsmen first and sportsmen second. Others are sportsmen first and batsmen second. In the first category are Geoff Boycott, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman; in the second are Brendon McCullum, Andrew Symonds and Herschelle Gibbs.Imagine that cricket is not just a struggle for mastery but also to establish the terrain of the contest. The first group wants to move the battle onto purely cricketing terms, with their superior knowledge, craft and expertise set against the opposition. The second group, in contrast, backs their superior athleticism and innate competitiveness to dominate the tussle. They want to play sport, not just cricket.The first group has scholars of batsmanship, happy to be quizzed and tested on their specialist subject. The second seeks a more general contest; their cricket-ness is partly incidental, just one of many games they could have chosen. (Indeed, McCullum played junior rugby ahead of All Blacks legend Dan Carter, Symonds considered a switch to rugby league, and Gibbs excelled at just about every game he tried.) The sportsman-cricketer idea is a continuum, of course, with many shades of grey, but it remains a useful framework.Sometimes admittedly, there is a trade-off or compromise between the sportsman and the batsman. When I watch footage of Ross Taylor - playing pure sport - smashing an unbeaten 131 against Pakistan at the 2011 World Cup, I do wonder where that strand of his career went. The answer, probably, is that it was transmuted into a Test average of 45, accumulated using a very different technique: something gained, something lost. With other players, it is when they try to play technically or properly that they are most vulnerable. When I see Eoin Morgan, for example, being too precise and concerned about appropriateness and convention, I think he looks diminished. In contrast, when Morgan is playing sport - instinctive, inventive, accessing a broad range of sporting gifts - thats when he looks dangerous.Something is shifting within the game, however, and its not quite what people assume. The old presumption within cricket used to be that sportsmen-cricketers could be improved by being educated into batsmen-cricketers. The default view, traditionally, was that more and more technique could and should be layered on top of talent. The evidence from T20 suggests this may be the wrong way round. A new breed of elite coach is learning to ask the opposite question: can we identify and help batsmen who have been held back and diminished by trying to be something they are not? After all, when we watch batsmen try to hit the ball as cleanly as possible, we notice all the contortions - or the freedom from contortion - laid bare.Put differently, what if all batting, properly understood, is the search for your own authentic game? Maybe you had it as a kid, lost it due to expert advice, and are now left with a mixed method - one part natural, one part distorted? According to Woodhill, this is the situation in which many players now find themselves.The games typical response used to be that the distortion was insufficiently complete, that more and more coaching was the solution. A different answer, in contrast, is that batsmen should try to reconnect with their underlying cricketing DNA - and the job of a coach is to help him understand and reconnect with that naturalness, to reintroduce the man to the child. You have to find yourself, as de Villiers puts it. You have to find your own unique game.This is not an article, however, against coaching per se. It is really about different types of batsmen, how they are adapting to modern formats, how they are pushing the game forward as they do so, and, centrally, how coaches might help players to adopt a more helpful framework for understanding the role of technique.How you stand, how you grip a bat, how you exert power when hitting a moving object, which foot is dominant, which side of your body is more assertive: might these clues provide the tracing-paper sketch of the optimal player inside you? I think they can.W hen I retired as a cricketer in 2008, I expected to close a sporting chapter in my life. I took a job writing editorials (or leaders as they are called in England) for the Times and wrote a book about luck. I had played sport professionally for 13 years - time for something else.Tennis helped draw me back to sport. I found the four-way rivalry of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray not only thrilling, but also aesthetically fulfilling and deeply interesting. Taken together, the four represented a significant chunk of sporting experience. Their contrasting personalities added up to an extensive psychological map of sport. They had it all, and yet so little overlapped - how was that even possible?Following Philip Larkins advice (Stay close to what moves you), I watched and wrote about their matches in Paris, Melbourne and London. I was certain I was seeing not only their sport evolve, but also sport advance, full stop - skill, athleticism, belief, and endurance in perfect balance. In Bangalore as I watched de Villiers and Kohli practise and compete, I kept hearing echoes of those days spent watching Federer, Djokovic and company.When de Villiers was batting, I found myself gravitating towards his net almost involuntarily - just as I do when Federer is on the practice court. The sound of de Villiers bat was so crisp, the contact so pure, the movement so economical, the shots taking on an aura of inevitability. They were bowling as bowlers do - with a combination of natural and deliberate variety - but it looked like de Villiers was facing a bowling machine on a perfectly predictable pre-set. Did he know at the top of their mark what they were going to bowl? That is mostly an illusion, I think, but a revealing one.Even in matches, de Villiers creates the impression that the bowler is complicit in the shots he plays: that he bowled it there deliberately, drawn inexorably to the stroke de Villiers had in mind, as though the bowler is an excited spectator, not wanting to thwart expectations. We all know that isnt true, and that the bowler is trying like crazy to outwit de Villiers, but it doesnt feel that way - so great is de Villiers apparent suspension of time, so liquid his movement and decisive his strokeplay. Fancy a sweep for six? Coming up AB, no problem. He destroys bowlers while creating the illusion of overall cooperation. We are all friends, arent we? We are helping each other do this, to create these remarkable feats, arent we? This, of course, is classic High Federer: a benevolent dictatorship.In my opinion, de Villiers is the best ball-striker in the world. If cricket had to send a batsman to Mars to demonstrate how to hit cricket balls, Im sending him. Federers Grand Slam record, eventually, may not prove to be his point of difference (Djokovic is chasing him remorselessly). But if you could ask all current professional tennis players to name the games pre-eminent genius, they would say Federer, to an overwhelming degree. Inside knowledge isnt always right, but about pure talent, people close to the subject tend to know. Ask cricketers to name the games freak, theyll say AB. When de Villiers walks into a room you sense exactly that. He does not signal this pre-eminence himself. It is written on everyone else.Watching Kohli, I had flashbacks to another of that tennis quartet: Djokovic. As with Djokovic, Kohli was a prodigious talent who tasted early glory. As with Djokovic, it took a while for that promise and confidence to turn into consistent achievement. Like Djokovic, you sense sport is the expression of his epic personal desire and commitment. Kohlis investment in success is total and self-reinforcing - hard work, desire and self-belief loop back into each other. Like Djokovic, Kohli has turned his body into an agent of that self-belief; a body dedicated to a game that is dedicated to success. Like Djokovic, Kohli combines fierce and literal determination with hints of mysticism - if you want something enough and commit to it sufficiently, good things will certainly happen. Above all, and again like Djokovic, Kohli wants to take the contest deep, right to the wire. He wants to be tired and for the opposition to be a bit more tired. He wants his technique and fitness to get him to the point where the game is more elemental than either domain. Me against you, and what have you got? Because with me it goes deep, very deep.In RCBs second fixture, against Kolkata Knight Riders, at Eden Gardens, needing to win every game to advance to the qualifiers, Kohli split the webbing on his left hand while fielding. He briefly left the field to be patched up and then returned to finish the fielding effort. No surprise. Nor was his subsequent match-winning innings, an unbeaten 75, after which he had to get several stitches. It is difficult to stop Kohli from doing something he wants to do. His next match - stitches still in place - yielded another hundred, his fourth of the season.Five weeks before, in the RCB team room ahead of the seasons first game, I sensed others were thinking what I was thinking. Therell be one day - one perfect day above all others - when those two, de Villiers and Kohli, reach right up to the limit of what can be done with a cricket bat, at the same time.In the summer of 1998, an excited young Andrew Flintoff joined up with the England team for the first time for the usual round of nets and meetings. Two days before his Test debut, the thrilling culmination of a cricket-dominated childhood, the 20-year-old Flintoff was taken to one side by one of the coaching staff. He was told to change his batting grip, on the grounds that the existing grip wasnt appropriate for Test cricket. Flintoff batted three times in his first Test series, scoring 17, 0 and 0.The grip is the first domino of batsmanship. Nothing is more fundamental to technique than the way the person is adjoined to the tool of his craft. Grip is much more fundamental than stance, for example. I could stand in any number of different ways but still feel myself as a batsman. But whenever I changed my grip, it felt as though I was a trespasser inside my own game. It is staggering to think that a coach would even countenance, let alone explicitly advocate, changing a young players grip on the eve of a new and daunting challenge.The grip is also one of the few aspects of batting technique that seldom begins with an intuitive solution. In the vast majority of cases - not always, but usually - someone shows a nascent batsman how to hold the bat. I know this as a cricketer and as a parent. After all, what am I supposed to do when my son, nearly three, picks up a bat? Though I am intellectually persuaded by the merits of an intuitive learning environment, I am also aware that there are better and worse ways to hold a bat - we can all agree, after all, it is easier to present the face of the bat rather than the edge. Even for a resolutely non-Tiger Mom parent, it is difficult, perhaps absurd, to offer no input at all about how a child should grip the bat. So we tend to show kids how to do it, however lightly and vaguely, in the hope that a good grip will help them to hit the ball more easily. Hence we guide naturalness. Though that sounds like a contradiction, it is, in fact, inevitable.The point is that habits form remarkably quickly, which is why every coach and parent makes thousands of judgements (usually spontaneously) about whether to offer advice. It is easier to create a habit than to erase it. If that sounds optimistic, think again: the downside of coaching is greater than the upside.All of this has implications for coaching way down the line, as that bizarre story about Flintoff reveals. The foundations of Graeme Smiths game (extremely closed bottom-hand grip, enabling dominant on-side play but requiring major readjustments in off-side play) were hugely different from the causal chain that flowed through Damien Martyns game (open grip, facilitating late and deft off-side play, but not naturally suitable for powerful on-side shots). The first question, therefore, should be about the first domino: what is it that causes this player to play as he does and how much, if anything, can be changed without damaging the whole?Imagine you have bought a 16th-century house. What should you do to it? The first question the owner or architect should consider is what has already been done to the original. Has it been messed up and distorted, with beautiful features obscured and ruined by rash, cack-handed renovations?The easy thing to do is just to layer on yet more improvements, plastering over previous changes. But the danger with beginning in this way, before youve even discovered whats underneath, is creating yet further distance between the house as it stands today and the house it ought to be. Activity is not the same thing as progress.By the time a sportsman plays at the elite level he may still be young in years, but he is almost always already a mature athlete. Thousands of hours of practice and technical reinforcement are in place. The groove is pretty deep. The sportsman has, almost certainly, experienced thousands of pieces of advice and heard countless recommendations - from peers, parents and coaches. His technique or style, therefore, takes the form of an unavoidable compromise between two sets of factors: first, a unique body directed by a unique mind; second, the many circumstances and outside forces that have shaped and influenced the person and player.In other words, a top-flight sportsman - even a relatively young one - is unavoidably like an old house. He is not, and cannot be, a formless clay model to be moulded at will into any shape of the coachs choosing. The real challenge for elite coaches is to act like a highly sophisticated restorer, to identify and restore the authentic player. The danger is thrashing around like an unskilled plasterer.This is harder than it sounds. The phrase I am paid to get things done has become a mantra of professionalism. Hence professionalism is naturally tilted towards meddling. It is much easier to impress the boss by saying Here is a list of the things Ive done for you rather than These are the things Ive avoided for you.A coach can help a bit, but he can mess you up a lot, Woodhill likes to say. A lot of it is staying out of players way. It takes confidence, however, to stay close to that principle. Above all you have to get the interventions you do make really count. As Richie Benaud nearly said, Coaching is 90% non-intervention, 10% intervention. But dont try it without the 10%.What kind of batsman is he? Traditionally the answers have been framed by two concepts: Is he a front- or back-foot player? Is he an off- or on-side player? Obviously answers to both questions exist on a continuum, with some players well balanced on both counts.But interrogate the question of front- versus back-footedness and it quickly becomes problematic. Ricky Ponting, for example, was in many ways a classic front-foot player. He strode confidently towards the bowler, however fast the ball was travelling. He was the ultimate exponent of the advice take a big stride.And yet many of Pontings most devastating and brilliant shots would be casually filed under back-foot shots. That is because the famous Ponting pull or hook - the shots that revealed his remarkable quickness and hand-eye coordination - were, in fact, played off the front foot. So in this instance, the front or back-foot categorisation isnt that helpful. Ponting was a front-foot player who was notably brilliant at some back-foot shots.That is why Woodhill uses a different framework for understanding Ponting, describing him as left-side dominant. By this Woodhill means that Ponting played with most power when his balance was on his front, or left, foot. These left-sided shots obviously included straight and on-drives, but also encompassed Pontings pulls and hooks. Viv Richards was another player whose signature movement was an aggressive advance towards the bowler, but who was able to pull and hook from powerful positions on his front or left foot.In contrast, lets consider Steve Waugh, who is probably thought of as a back-foot player. It is certainly true his feet were deeper in the crease than m