Performance analysis of all teams since World T20 Championships 2014: Where does India stand?

England have the best T20I record since 2014 World T20

It’s not something a puritan wants to go on record saying and certainly not one he wants to believe, but somewhere beyond its many shortcomings, lies the fact that T20 cricket has never received the credit it is worthy of. For the major fraction of the last decade it has been denied the designation of ‘real cricket’ and has suffered much ignominy, courtesy a certain Indian Premier League.

However, it would be helpful to remember that the IPL does not exhaust the meaning of the shortest format of the game and that T20 internationals are a different stage altogether. Countries are involved and the redundant glamour and ostentation are done away with – an aetiologically significant detail, given that there has been no report of scam yet involving a T20I.

T20Is call for astute cricket, smart leadership and thinking brains. For instance, Pakistan’s Misbah-ul-Haq is known to read the game so well that he could correctly predict who would be bowling the 15th over by watching the one delivering the seventh over.

While Misbah remains somewhat of a benchmark, there is no denying that current skippers do have to be ahead of his opponent throughout the match unless he wants to catch up in the dying moments, for T20 is more of a 100m sprint than a marathon.

So how have the teams fared in the last couple of years?

Talking about Pakistan, it comes hardly as a surprise that they have been quite successful in this format since the 2014 World T20 Championship. In fact, of the 13 matches they have played during this period, they have won 7, lost 5 and tied 1. To put this into perspective, only England and Australia have a higher win percentage than Pakistan among the Test playing nations.

Performances of top eight teams since 2014 World T20 Championships
Teams	Matches	Won	Lost	Tied	NR	Win/Loss
England	7	5	1	1	0	5.00
Australia	5	3	2	0	0	1.50
Pakistan	13	7	5	1	0	1.40
South Africa	12	7	5	0	0	1.40
West Indies	8	4	3	0	1	1.33
New Zealand	8	4	4	0	0	1.00
Sri Lanka	5	2	3	0	0	0.66
India	5	1	4	0	0	0.25

As for 2007 champions and 2014 runners up India, a lowly 0.25 win/loss ratio puts them below even the likes of Oman and UAE. They lost the one-off match against England at Birmingham before travelling to Zimbabwe and leveling the series 1-1 this July. Three months later, they surrendered meekly to South Africa twice in four days to complete 4 defeats in 5 matches.

A second-string squad was sent to Zimbabwe after the solitary T20 against England last September, but the results continued to remain a worry. The batsmen lacked application and the bowlers were lackluster. None except Robin Uthappa managed decent figures but he was dropped anyway when South Africa’s flight landed in India in October.

Where is Indian cricket lagging behind?

The two T20Is against South Africa explicitly portray the chasm between India and the other nations. That India ended up losing the first match – that too by 7 wickets – despite Rohit Sharma’s century and piling up 199 runs is a testament to the dilapidated condition of their bowling line-up. All except Ravichandran Ashwin had economies of 10 or more which implies they had collectively contributed to almost 90% of the target within their quota of 16 overs.

A look into the top 3 teams in the ICC T20I rankings would suggest traces of individual brilliance. Chamara Kapugedera and Shehan Jayasuriya have stepped up for Sri Lanka while Chris Gayle and Andre Fletcher have ensured West Indies a 4-3 record since the World Championships. Similarly, sporadic successes of Steven Smith and James Faulkner are the reason why Australia sits at No. 3 with the same number of rating as second-placed West Indies.

The highest win/loss ratio however belongs to England who have played 7 matches and won 5. Curiously, the only time they lost – the other being a tie against Pakistan – was also the only time they chased.

Looking at the stats, the captain has led from the front with 214 runs in 6 matches at 42.80 and a strike-rate of 153.95. Having scored in excess of 100 runs in aggregate, Joe Root and James Vince complete the list of batsmen averaging more than 30. The bowling department has fared decently too with Liam Plunkett producing the goods at 8 balls per wicket and 6.75 runs per over.

In contrast, the numbers for Indian bowlers appear disastrous once again. The highest placed Indian in the list of highest wicket-takers in T20Is during this span is Axar Patel at 59th. His tally of 5 scalps from 4 matches is marginally better than Mohit Sharma’s 4 from 5 matches, the latter averaging 1.5 times more than that of Axar. Even Ashwin has been disappointing with figures of 12-0-87-4 from his 3 matches.

So is the bowling department all that is wrong with the team?

This table here shows some very interesting numbers for India as a bowling outfit. Not once have they managed to bowl out the opposition completely in the five matches; the closest they have come to doing that was when they picked up 7 wickets on three occasions.

Further, there have been two instances – once against the Proteas and once against Zimbabwe when the Mohit Sharmas stretched the match till the last over, the eventual results being a defeat and a victory. While defending a paltry 92 in the last T20I, they succeeded in sending 4 South African batsmen to the pavilion and clinging on to the match till the 18th over which is around the same time they had been dismissed batting first.

Therefore, the bowling woes are not the entirety of the problems. Among the batsmen, only MS Dhoni (courtesy two unbeaten innings out of three) and Uthappa average more than 40, not considering Rohit Sharma whose 106 against South Africa shot his average up to 64.00. Even last year’s World T20 Championship star Virat Kohli has scored only 44 runs this year at 22.00. No other batsman has a highest score of 35 or more since the end of April 2014.

No wonder, more than a few eyebrows were raised when Brian Lara lately declared India as the favorites for 2016 World T20 Championships. Even for the mighty chokers South Africa, the prospects look better than those of India with the likes of JP Duminy and Kyle Abbott in prime form, if recent results are to go by.

All said, it will be a folly to forget India’s records in multi-nation tournaments and base calculations on one-off matches squeezed in between Test and ODI series. With the tournament still a few months away, it remains to be seen whether Lara turns out to be another Misbah, this time the result boding well for India.