View: The way forward for Team India

Please give me a break!” Many watching England trample India by 10 wickets in the semi-final of the T20 World Cup in Adelaide would have left scratching their heads as to what India’s batsmen were trying to do when they came out to bat. Were.

Conventional wisdom goes out the window in a 20-over game. You should not put a premium on your wicket as the available balls are limited and the wickets are still the same as in a Test or an ODI. You can’t spend an over to get your look. It would be better not to confuse T20 as a game of small differences, where the decision you make now won’t cost you too much down the road.

There will be a lot of postmortems on India’s campaign in the World Cup in Australia, but a realist would admit that reaching the semi-finals was a good result. The T20 game has changed dramatically with each passing year, and ironically, the nation with the biggest and most competitive franchise tournament, which has been going on for over a decade, is yet to embrace some of the basic realities .

You can’t get into T20 cricket like other formats and expect to be successful. And, when you have been conditioned to believe, in order to quit, you must have great mental strength and lateral thinking. The easier thing to do, and the more obvious, is put people in key positions – selection, coaching, sports – at different levels, who instinctively think in T20 mode.

When players are bringing the lap sweep paddle over long leg in front of a fast bowler who is sending them down at 140 kmph on the first ball, coaching young hitters to keep the ball on the ground. Doesn’t make sense, as it happened. Forever in cricket. Suryakumar Yadav’s free mind and boldness of expression is an example of this.

At a time when batsmen make the most impact when they play fewer than 20 deliveries, strike at astronomical rates and tilt the balance of the game in their team’s favor, there is no point in selectors looking at batting averages. are. Dinesh Karthik is an example. In an era where a player is most valuable when he is able to contribute in more than one discipline, there is a real need to seek and nurture the most versatile players at the forefront rather than investing in experts. Ravindra Jadeja, and to a lesser extent, Hardik Pandya are in the case. Readers may wonder why the people who are being blamed the most for the loss on social media are yet to be named. This is because each World Cup marks the end of one phase and, hopefully, the beginning of planning for the next cycle.

In two years’ time, it is difficult to see Rohit Sharma or Virat Kohli being part of the main batting group, or even KL Rahul, who has in the other two years but has dramatically revamped his T20 game. They need to start with if they have to be relevant. Till the next World Cup, DK will be in the commentary box and R Ashwin will not be asked why he is taking a place that Yuzvendra Chahal would have used better.

There will also be no Mohammed Shami and Bhuvneshwar Kumar, and Jasprit Bumrah is expected to show the way forward like Arshdeep Singh, whose bowling is very clearly built for T20 cricket.

The defeat against England was a brutal one, but it is an opportunity to draw a line in the sand, stop looking backwards and instead embrace the brave new world of T20 cricket for what it really is.

Originally published at Pen 18