The world champions are fostering a culture where players deliver without worrying about preserving wickets or spots in the squad
Kolkata: Still early days but the results and process makes one feel upbeat about India’s chances of successfully defending the T20 World Cup at home next year. Series wins against Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and South Africa, and now England, make India’s T20 trajectory stand out amid the gloom cast by the Test and ODI transition troubles. Even more when one takes into account that Yashasvi Jaiswal, Rishabh Pant, Shubman Gill, Jasprit Bumrah and Kuldeep Yadav haven’t been parachuted in.
India’s T20I captain Suryakumar Yadav (L) and vice-captain Axar Patel in Pune on Friday. (AFP)
Which is probably a bigger achievement. Yet they have gone about it almost unnoticed. No star culture. Check. No fixed batting order. Check. Just a band of young, skilled and supremely confident cricketers doing their thing without being hung up about career curves. All IPL linchpins by the way.
When skipper Suryakumar Yadav doesn’t make the Champions Trophy squad, he admits to not being good enough. Abhishek Sharma doesn’t count the returns; he believes a ball is there to be hit. The second T20 in Chennai showed no equation is too tough as long as Tilak Varma is at the crease. And at Pune on Friday where India slipped to 12/3 and then 79/5 but still posted 181— showed the mishap chasing in Rajkot in the previous game was but a blip. At the heart of this sustained upswing is the acceptance that not everything can be controlled. It is something India’s new batting coach Sitanshu Kotak touched upon earlier in this week. “If you want to score 200, 225 and if you are careful and trying to save your wicket, both things won’t go hand in hand,” he said.
On Friday, neither Pandya nor Shivam Dube tried to save their wicket. There was a method to their madness, something Yadav is taking a lot of heart from. “We didn’t want to go back, boys know what brand of cricket we want to play,” he said at the post-match presentation. “Three wickets in one over was too much. But the positivity, and the way Dube and Pandya showed their experience in the middle, was great. This is what we have been talking about — expressing yourself and batting the same way as in the nets. The way they practice is incredible, and they do it in the game. I’m happy, I think we’re moving in the right direction.”
Dube was not comfortable against fast bowling, but more than made up by going against spin, creaming Adil Rashid for 25 runs off 11 balls after Jos Buttler put down a tough chance first ball. Many would have paused and reconsidered. Not this generation of Indian batters.
This change was long due. There was a phase when India were stuck in a T20 time warp despite the IPL-reinforced supply system. Dragged down by the fear of losing wickets in Powerplay, too many times did India’s batting lose steam even before it could gather any. This outdated approach was defended even though West Indies and England had long thrown caution to the wind.
A couple of World Cups were lost in the process till India’s stars aligned in Barbados last year. Post World Cup retirements allowed the T20 setup to move away from the glare while the tour overlap paved the way for new players to be introduced. The change came swiftly. No fixed batting line-ups barring the openers, no question mark on the wicketkeeper too. Given how this group thinks and functions, nothing should change despite Sanju Samson’s lean returns with the bat in this series.
That’s another great characteristic of this group — it neither dwells too much on the past nor does it overthink about the road ahead. Cricketers usually fare better when given smaller targets. Surya thus talked about enjoying the journey to the World Cup before the series began. Remarkable however was his confidence that this is the group he wants to play all the way to the World Cup. “We want to make a team, understand which batters work well in which position, which bowlers can win you games single-handedly,” he had said before the series. These appear words that are worthy of hanging on to.
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