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Team India needs a reboot.
No one’s denying the fact that we had but one bad day against the Aussies, and Dhoni and co. went down swinging like the 300 Spartans in leather underwear. The battles against South Africa and Pakistan were gritty and intense, while the one against England was a downright massacre. One major Class-4 hurricane against the tenth ranked T20 team in the world and we’re knocked out cold.
Why did things go from good to bad, and from bad to nuclear holocaust, in less than a week? The only team that has played more games on Sri Lankan grounds than India has is Sri Lanka, so you can’t complain about not adapting to foreign conditions. We had the artillery; speedsters and spinners complementing what is arguably the most feared (erstwhile now, I guess) batting line-up in the world. We may have started off losing to Pakistan and almost pulling out a defeat from the jaws of victory against Afghanistan, but things had looked brighter after that. Then began the long sad list of circumstances-screwing-India, starting with “unexpected” showers smack in the middle of the Ind-Aus match and ending with the Great Net Run Rate Betrayal.
In the end, Virat Kohli shed a tear. That’s sadder than Michael Schumacher driving at 20 miles per hour and running over an old lady.
I call it Indian cricket’s Road to Redemption. Nothing too drastic; we are still among the big-shots. Here goes:
1. Secure the seats
Do not make people desperate for their places. This is not Hollywood where you don’t include Spiderman in the Avengers just because his movie doesn’t do as well as Iron Man’s. Virender Sehwag should not have to play in fear of getting his head chopped if he fails and Irfan Pathan or some other experiment replacing him. He, Sehwag, is the best opener we have at the moment (more on that later).
Similarly, be consistent with the middle order. What in hell was all that about cycling Rohit Sharma and Yuvraj Singh around Suresh Raina in every other match? People need to be assertive about their positions in the batting order; you cannot expect them to adapt in the middle of a crucial stage in a tournament. If you had planned for a left hand-right hand combination right through the middle order, stick with it.
2. 6-5 or 7-4, place your bets
One fine day before the party began in Colombo, MS was asked which would be his ideal combo of batsmen and bowlers. “Three seamers and a spinner”, he yawned. Apparently he didn’t want to be the one to break a “50-55 year”-old tradition of Indian cricket.
But then Afghanistan came in charging out of nowhere like a bunch of mountain-gorillas in mating season, and suddenly England was facing the full ire of a five-pronged Indian bowling attack.
Virender Sehwag was made scapegoat for getting the extra bowler in. MS calls it “horses for courses”; apparently he has a fetish for metaphors as much as Navjot Singh Sidhu does, but either way there was no reason to suggest this was anything but a gamble. So was repeatedly sending in Irfan Pathan, a proven new-ball bowler, late into the attack, on one occasion as late as in the 10th over against the Aussies. Also, the itch to throw in three specialist spinners in a side that has an over-abundance of part-timers deserves a standing ovation.
MS blames the “untimely rain” for the Australian debacle. If he didn’t know it, there’s this little thing called ‘weather forecasting’ that people have been at since the 19th century. Colombo had a 50% chance of rain that day. You don’t replace an established Aussie nightmare in a match against the Aussies with a spinner when there is a 50% chance it will pour.
To summarize, quit the cow-cookies. It’s just been a throw of the dice for some time now. Don’t do it.
3. Opening Unceremonious
Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir. India’s two specialist openers are India’s only two specialist openers at the international stage today. You ignore Irfan Pathan’s sad attempts at doing a Shane Watson and you shudder to think what India might have done if one of the two had been injured at some stage in the tournament.
Either way, Sehwag looked rusty and Gambhir’s footwork in the middle matched Ravi Shasthri’s in the commentary room. The former had an average of 18 and the latter 16. Their recent strike-rates haven’t evoked goose-bumps either. It’d do Indian cricket a world of good to begin hunting for replacements. You know, just in case.
There are options here; Ajinkya Rahane and Manvinder Bisla were lethal in this edition of the IPL and there are plenty of Murali Vijays and Ambatti Rayadus out there ruminating in the wilderness. Bring them in; play them as much as possible.
4. MSD needs a wingman…
…and I don’t mean a Vice-Captain. I mean a replacement captain who has ‘got his back’. A polar opposite, if possible. Someone with a set of ideas that radically differ from the captain of 5 years, and who is not afraid to be backed into a corner and strike back if push comes to shove. Every elite team has such a player, come to think of it. Sangakkara has Jayawardene, Swann and Broad for England, Bailey-Clark-White for the Aussies…you get the drift. The point is you need a ‘spare’, someone who can shoulder the enormous responsibility for a while if MSD begins to look a bit off-colour.
Virat Kohli is still much too young, and it’d be better if he is not weighed down with any more responsibilities at this stage. Though ideally you’d try to nurture a skipper from the younger lot, Gautam Gambhir, I kid you not, is an excellent suitor. With massive experience and a certain DLF-IPL trophy to his credit, he may be a neat temp to stand-in for MS if need be.
5. Fresher, Faster Legs. Now.
Zaheer Khan, who has been charging in to fire those 130+kmph deliveries for all these years, is India’s highest-ranked fast bowler. He is also the only seamer who has held on to the Alpha Male designation of the Indian pace-pack with a relative level of consistency. The problem is, he is 34 years old.
India needs seamers who can make an impression at the international level, and India needs them now. We have traditionally considered spin bowlers our trump-cards, and pacers who crop up are few and far between. When they do come up, we tend to put them in a barn like a bunch of lambs, lock the barn from outside and throw away the key.
How else can you explain why a certain Ishant Sharma has faded away from everyone’s memory? Youngsters like Umesh Yadav and Varun Aaron have shown potential, but how can we hope to nurture them as India’s future pace battery if they are not exposed to the heat? Ravi Shastri recently commented that Khan needs to be rested in T20s so he can maintain peak levels of fitness for ODIs and Tests. You know what happens when you milk a cow dry, and keep at it. Well, it bleeds. Nasty sight, really.
6. Kohli and what army?
Gautam Gambhir (L) and Virat Kohli (R) of India run between the wickets
For the past year, Virat Kohli has been doing to bowling attacks what US did to Iraq in 2004. So breathtaking have been his onslaughts, that even his team-mates seem to stop playing around him in awe. He began as a T20 specialist, got promoted to the ODI and Test teams, got promoted to vice-captain, and in recent times, has been promoted to Saviour of Mankind, Indian Cricket Inc.
Among ruins like Rohit “Ten balls or Less” Sharma, captain “Speed-breaker” Dhoni and Twitter-tweeter Raina, Kohli has stood tall, propelling the middle-order long enough to post decent totals. That is, of course, after Virender “I-have-a-problem-with-balls-swinging-away” Sehwag and “Footloose” Gambhir depart after indecent quickies.
When you’ve got a goose laying golden eggs, the priority is to keep it alive. Kohli can only do so much by himself; he may win matches but you can’t expect him to win entire tournaments. You cannot depend too much on one man in any team sport, however proficient said individual is. The rest of India’s famed batting line-up seems to have died and reborn as zombies. Consistency is a gift the likes of Sharma, Raina, Dhoni and Sehwag are yet to receive, in any of the three formats.
There you have it. With the Champions League T20 coming up, you can be pretty sure the Sri Lankan knock-out will fade away soon enough. I hope it doesn’t. These are exciting times in the world of cricket, and we have a lot more this year to look forward to. The Indian cricket team is one of the best in the world, desperate in its need for a shake-down. The Indian Premier League seems to have helped every other cricketing nation but India in terms of revelations and discoveries; our job is to keep hunting. The boys that brought home glory in ’07 have become men now. We need more. We always do.
