In a 20-over game, conventional wisdom goes out of the window. You must not put a premium on your wicket as the balls available are limited and wickets still the same as in a Test or an ODI. You can’t spend an over getting your eye. You better not confuse T20 being a game of small margins with one where decisions you make now won’t cost you too much down the road.
There will be plenty of postmortems of India’s campaign at the World Cup in Australia, but a realist will admit that getting to the semifinals was a good result. The T20 game has changed dramatically with every passing year, and ironically, the country with the biggest and most competitive franchise tournament, running more than a decade, is yet to embrace some basic realities.
You can’t approach T20 cricket like you do other formats and hope to succeed. And, in order to abandon when you have been conditioned to believe, you must have great mental strength and lateral thinking. The easier, and more obvious thing to do, is put in place people in key positions — selection, coaching, playing — at different levels, who innately think in the T20 mode.
When players are bringing out the lap sweep paddle over long-leg to a fast bowler sending it down at 140 kmh off the first ball they faced, there’s little point in coaching young hitters to keep the ball along the ground, as has been the case for evermore in cricket . Suryakumar Yadav’s free mind and fearlessness of expression is a case in point.
At a time when batsmen make the most impact when they play fewer than 20 balls, striking at astronomical rates and tilting the balance of the game in their team’s favour, there is no point having selectors who are looking at batting averages. Dinesh Karthik is a case in point. In an era where a player is most valuable when he’s able to contribute in more than one discipline, there is a real need to seek out and push to the forefront multifaceted players, rather than invest in specialists. Ravindra Jadeja, and to some extent, Hardik Pandya are cases in point. Readers might wonder why the names of those being held most responsible for the defeat on social media, fail to find mention yet. This is because each World Cup marks the end of a phase and, hopefully, the beginning of the planning for the next cycle.
In two years’ time, it is hard to see Rohit Sharma or Virat Kohli being part of the core batting group, or even KL Rahul, who has a few years on the other two but needs to reinvent his T20 game dramatically if he is to stay relevant. By the next World Cup, DK will be in the commentary box and R Ashwin will not be asked why he is taking up a space that Yuzvendra Chahal might have made better use of.
There’ll also be no Mohammad Shami and Bhuvneshwar Kumar, and hopefully, Jasprit Bumrah will be showing the way forward to the likes of Arshdeep Singh, whose bowling is very clearly built for T20 cricket.
The loss against England was a brutal one, but it is also an opportunity to draw a line in the sand, to stop looking backward, and instead embrace the brave new world of T20 cricket for what it really is.
