Once exotic, now IPL mainstream: Evolution of the lap shot from the days of Douglas Marillier to AB de Villiers and Rishabh Pant | Cricket News
3 min readMar 25, 2026 10:55 AM IST Indian audience of a certain vintage would remember Sachin Tendulkar kneeling down and lap-sweeping medium pacers on sluggish tracks of the subcontinent at the wink of this century. Australia’s cricket chroniclers claim the legendary aboriginal cricketer Johnny Mullagh played a stroke on one knee, wherein, ”the ball would touch the blade, and shoot high over the wicket-keeper’s head to the boundary,” a report during his tour to England in the 1870s read. Zimbabwe’s Douglas Marillier and Australia’s wicket-keeper Ryan Campbell produced intrepid versions of the lap sweep. Scoop to some pundits, and sweep to some others, but the stroke has existed in the fringes of the game before T20 cricket made it integral to the canvas of ambitious batsmen. But none perfected, polished and popularised it as AB de Villiers. He cut the risk out of it by making it look as normal a stroke as a cover drive or a flick. He had so much time that he began the elaborate movements just at the microsecond …