Much has been written and spoken about Team India’s disastrous performance against England in T20s World Cup 2022 cm – how they failed to handle the pressure, how they could not perform with bat, ball or on the field among others. But for me the day the team was selected for the showpiece event, the famous Indian team lost the tournament.
Although Indian fans wanted their team to win the T20 World Cup after 15 years, we accept that the team was not well suited to perform well in the format. it would be a miracle if India The cup will go on winning but miracles happen once or twice, not all the time. Now the discussion should be on how to rebuild a good Indian T20 team that can win the 2024 T20 World Cup.
T20 World Cup 2022: A tournament for the ages!
Let us first analyze where we went wrong and how we can learn many things from England who defeated a talented Pakistani team in the final to become champions.
The Indian team that was ousted from the semi-finals against England was not the T20 team of the 21st century. It was an aging team as over fifty percent of the players were on the wrong side of 30. It wasn’t even the fittest group.
One of the reasons India won the inaugural World Cup in 2007 was that the team was full of youngsters – fit, fearless and agile. India, intentionally or by chance, somehow cracked the T20 code that time. But after that they could not do so and hence failed to win the World Cup again.
The team of 2007 showed us how a group of inexperienced, fearless, physically and mentally fit cricketers can do wonders and bring laurels to the nation.
Despite being superstars of the time, all the big guns – Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly – opted out of the event – and rookies like Rohit Sharma, Gautam Gambhir, MS Dhoni, Joginder Sharma, S Sreesanth and Yuvraj Singh were dropped. Gave permission. Display yourself in front of the world.
But this year’s team was bound to fail as there were old and unfit players like Rohit, KL Rahul, R Ashwin, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Mohammed Shami in the team, while England, or Pakistan, in this case are very young and super players. -Fit team.
In batting, bowling and fielding, they had the flavor of a Test team rather than a T20 one.
It seems the Indian selectors got confused with selecting the T20 team with Test or ODI and forgot that to win in different formats, you need different set of cricketers. India absolutely needed more players with T20 ability like England have in Liam Livingstone, Harry Brook, Alex Hales, Phil Salt who play a new brand of cricket suited to the shortest format.
He may not be a great Test player but he is a T20 star. In batting, they are all 360 degree players who can hit the ball all around the park. He showed courage in selecting his team and did not hesitate to drop Test talisman Joe Root purely on the basis of skill. In India’s batting, we only had Suryakumar Yadav who has this kind of ability. All the other batsmen were more conservative in their approach and that is why they were sometimes slow to score runs or restricted by good, tight T20 bowling as we saw in the first 10 overs against England.
Nowadays in every good T20 team we see one or two high quality fast bowlers and one good quality wrist spinner. Although it is said that T20 is a batsman’s game, but if we look closely, teams with good bowling line-up win most of the matches on nice flat surfaces around the world.
Pakistan won the first semi-final match against New Zealand because of their superior bowling attack. They have three top-class pacers and a genuine wrist-spinner in Shadab Khan and restricted an in-form New Zealand to around 150 which helped them seal a place in the final. Even England have two wrist spinners in the form of Adil Rashid and the improvised Livingstone while New Zealand have Ish Sodhi.
Even a team like Sri Lanka, who failed to qualify for the semi-finals, had a quality legspinner in Wanindu Hasaranga, who was quite impressive throughout the tournament.
Of the four teams that qualified for the semi-finals, India were the only bowling side to lack a quality fast bowler or wrist spinner and were to be thrashed by the hard-working English team at the Adelaide Oval.
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The Indian pace attack of Bhuvneshwar, Shami and Arshdeep Singh was more swing oriented and would have done well in England, but in Australia, with their pace, they would have hit it out of the park as did the England batsmen. Axar Patel and Ashwin’s finger spin was sluggish and not suited to Australian pitches and they were brutally beaten by every team in the tournament.
Has anyone wondered why India batted so slowly in the first six overs after Rahul’s loss in the semi-finals and why England’s top two played fearless shots? It’s not that Indian batsmen can’t play those exceptional shots, but different batting approaches have come from the same psychological aspect.
Whereas England’s top-order batsmen knew when trying to score more runs at the loss of wickets, middle and lower middle order batsmen had the cushion as they bat with plenty of depth. Can you imagine players like Sam Curran and Chris Woakes batting at 8 and 9!
Indian top-order batsmen don’t have that luxury as they have nothing after No. 6 and that has given top England batsmen a psychological edge.
Like class, the current form of a player is also an important factor in winning an event like the World Cup. But India took some out-of-form cricketers like Rohit, Rahul, Rishabh Pant, Akshar, Harshal Patel and Bhuvneshwar. And so, they had to suffer.
As most of us would agree that T20 is a different sport altogether, India needs a new T20 coach and a captain who can introduce new methods to the format. England showed how each team needs to have different plans in their batting and bowling department. His batsmen were more flexible and innovative. There was no rigidity.
The Indian selectors must accept that T20 is a fast-paced format and they need people who are innovative and can stay ahead.
It’s not that we don’t have T20 specialists in our domestic circuit. Batsmen like Ishan Kishan, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Prithvi Shaw, Rajat Patidar, Tilak Verma, Jitesh Sharma, Abhishek Sharma, Yashasvi Jaiswal; All-rounders like Shabaz Ahmed, Raj Bawa, Rahul Tewatia, Washington Sundar; Bowlers like Ravi Bishnoi, Deepak Chahar, Umran Malik, Mohsin Khan, Kuldeep Sen and Karthik Tyagi have done well in the IPL and in the domestic circuit. It is time he should be given a chance in the Indian T20 set-up and see how he handles the pressure of international cricket.
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