AA Edit | Team India Must Be Better Prepared For The Future

World champion Team India’s T20 plans lie in tatters after disastrous T20 series defeats at the hands of Ireland and England. A team mentally ill-prepared for such a tour with a new captain and experimental player picks flopped to the extent that a “brownwash” was avoided only because the first of five T20Is against England was a rain-interrupted no-result.

There were only three things in which Team India didn’t do well on the tour — didn’t bat well, bowl well or field well. Some of the performances were shockingly amateur as no batsmen seemed to differentiate between playing in the IPL in flat conditions on slow pitches and drastically shortened boundaries over which even cross-batted and top-edged mishits fly for six and pitches on which the bat must meet the ball far higher.

The IPL is essentially a club competition played in such settings that exaggerate player abilities because the IPL is cricket entertainment business. Sheer lack of will to compete, poor planning, warped selection judgments based on IPL performances and the team coach Gautam Gambhir’s player choices and eccentric experiments in T20 cricket conspired to bring Team India to such a low so soon after hitting the high notes.

The team’s top ranking in T20s has been surrendered to a Harry Brook-led England which itself was in the doldrums after a controversial Test series defeat at home to New Zealand. The point is that Team India, which takes pride in being the undisputed world T20 champion after winning two successive championships and finishing runner-up to Australia in the ODI World Cup, has not shown the ability to motivate itself to sustain its reputation abroad.

It is a cliché to say those who matter in the BCCI’s cricket setup must go back to the drawing board and introspect. However, when they meet, nothing should be sacrosanct, including the choice of coaching personnel and leadership if the team is to be helped to find its feet again and attain a level of consistency in all formats of the game consistent with the talent that abounds and adapt to playing in different conditions.

Team India has suffered much in other formats, most of all in Tests after home series defeats to New Zealand and South Africa, while still being able to win plum trophies like T20 World Cup, Asia Cup and Champions Trophy. Where the difference has lain is that those competitions were played in very slow pitch conditions in Bridgetown, Dubai and India.

English conditions in which the ball bounces a little more and moves in the air sufficed to show up the lack of ability to adapt on judging the conditions, importantly the dimensions of the grounds and the need to hit straighter. Of course, the unavailability of Jasprit Bumrah and other seasoned pace bowlers and an all-rounder like Hardik Pandya may have told. A peculiar facet of the downfall was that the Indian spinners came a cropper.

Considering a lot of the major limited-overs trophies of the next two years are to be played abroad in more challenging conditions, much thinking would be required to pick the right players. The failure was comprehensive to the extent of creating doubts over the teenage power-hitting prodigy because he failed against short-pitched stuff, but India must persist with him for long before arriving at judging him. He should be part of the limited-overs blueprint for the future for which BCCI must begin planning afresh.