India Vs Australia First T20I: The conundrum of playing 3 keepers and 3 spinners 

#1 The Plight of three spinners

Mayank Markande made his T20I debut at Vizag

Another important factor noticed in Team India’s team composition at Vizag was the presence of 3 spinners in the playing XI. It is fine to have 3 spinners on home conditions. Mayank Markande, who made his debut at Vizag, is an exciting prospect. But playing 3 spinners spells trouble when you are going in with only 5 bowlers and that too when your fifth bowler is Umesh Yadav.

As expected, Umesh Yadav leaked plenty of runs both in the powerplay and at the death. The result of the match was a foregone conclusion when Umesh Yadav was slotted to bowl the last over, as he nullified the efforts of Bumrah.

The ideal combination for India would have been to play 3 fast bowlers, 2 spinners and a part-time spinner like Kedar Jadhav. In this context, one could imagine how much India missed Suresh Raina and Yuvraj Singh as part-time bowlers who could give the team the vital breakthrough.

The problem in playing 3 spinners is that who should bowl in the powerplay overs. If the team has two strong opening bowlers like Bhuveshwar Kumar and Jasprit Bumrah to bowl two overs each in the powerplay, there is no concern and the spinners can take over from there.

On the other hand, if the team has only one good fast bowler with no back up 6th bowler, the Captain’s job becomes that much more difficult in rotating the 3 spinners in different phases of the innings.

At Vizag, India had to open the bowling with Chahal who seemed to be in control until Maxwell arrived at the crease. Before that, Umesh Yadav in his first over had brought Maxwell into action by conceding 3 boundaries. That had forced Kohli to give Bumrah one more over in the powerplay.

In the absence of a third seamer, Kohli had no other option except to bowl Chahal in the last over of Powerplay which went for 13 runs. The fact that India had no sixth bowling option did not help India’s cause either in the middle-overs.

In today’s T20I scenario, India is perhaps the only team to go in with only 5 bowling options. All the other teams have six or seven bowling options.

The third seamer option instead of the third spinner could have given India a better control both in the powerplay and at the death at Vizag. The general presence of specialist bowlers has lengthened the Indian tail and forced Dhoni to play a strange inning denying a lot of singles which could have made all the difference to the end result.

The Indian tailenders should learn from their Australian counterparts Pat Cummins and Richardson. Both came to the crease in the last over of the innings and knocked off the 14 runs required for the win without any fuss. Richardson was batting only in his 3rd T20I innings. Thankfully, for the Aussies, there was no specialist batsman around attempting to farm the strike.