It is an irony. Pause and think about it. India changed the contours of T20 cricket even before it really became a thing or at least became the beast that it is today. Back in 2007, nobody had given MS Dhoni’s men a chance in South Africa – yet, a young Indian team defied the odds and won an absolute thriller to be crowned champions of the world in the shortest format of the game.
A few months later, the Indian Premier League captured the imagination of the entire world. Cricket wedded entertainment and the result was mesmerising. Gun players who were rivals and often traded nasty exchanges on the field were suddenly the best mates. Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh were protagonists in one of the ugliest cricket controversies and here they were, wearing the same jerseys and sharing the same dressing-room. It was the IPL, the big league! And the world loved it then and they love it now, 15 years later. It’s 2023 and there are more T20 leagues in the cricket calendar than you would care about.
India did it first and took the lead in the fast and the furious lane.
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Strangely, that style of cricket which endeared MS Dhoni and a few of his uber-aggressive batters, began to fade away. Over the next several years, Indian batters were happy to run ones, twos and threes but those big shots went missing. There was so much premium on wickets that it often became unbearable to sit back and watch India play T20 World Cups.
Not that Indian cricketers lacked the smarts, the guile and the ability to play white-ball cricket. But they missed out on glory at world events because several teams started to push the boundary in the shorter formats and more and more players started doing things scarcely believable. Ironically, they learnt a lot of those ways from India. Sachin Tendulkar is the first male cricketer to hit a double hundred. Rohit Sharma would go on to hit three double hundreds! One of them was nearly a triple century.
Yet, Indian batters struggled to make it count in clutch games, in clutch situations. There are several examples where you could look back and wonder what went wrong but let bygones be bygones. If you do want more recent summaries, look no further back than the T20 World Cup semi-final defeat to England last year or the ODI World Cup final defeat to Australia just this month.
Virat Kohli’s half-century against England in that 2022 semifinal raised so many questions about the lack of intent from a team which loves intent. It was baffling. Yet, these same batters go and plunder runs like few around the world can. What happens to India in major ICC events – they haven’t won any of those over the last decade. Shocking for a team with such a wealth of talent.
India were sensational in the 2023 ODI World Cup. They won 10 matches on-the-trot and their batters decimated the best bowlers in the world without any thought to their reputation. Rohit Sharma was brutal, Virat Kohli was relentless, Shreyas Iyer shrugged off a poor start and basked in the glory of his success in the middle-order and KL Rahul proved all his detractors wrong with some real panache down the batting-order.
Then, it all changed in the final. It was a tricky pitch but apart from Rohit Sharma, the other India batters went out of character. The India captain was merciless and while he was the crease, Australia looked mortified. Once he fell, the Indian team threw intent out of the window. For the remaining 40 overs of their innings, India hit just four boundaries. Never mind that partnership between Virat Kohli and KL Rahul – it is extremely forgettable.
India and Australia were tasked with playing a bilateral T20I series days after that World Cup final. There is obviously a lot more focus on the T20 format now – the IPL is just a few months away and the world has already started gearing up for the T20 World Cup. Talk was always going to center over intent and India showed what they could do.
Without the usual stars in the line-up, India raked up 3 200+ totals against Australia, becoming just the second team after Nepal to do that in T20 Internationals. Yashasvi Jaiswal is unstoppable, Ishan Kishan and Suryakumar Yadav are scary (for opposition bowlers) and Ruturaj Gaikwad has enhanced his reputation as an artist.
India’s current T20 team is relentless and the batters just keep coming at you. It’s because these guys belong to a generation which has grown up to an overdose of T20 cricket. They know the art of destroying bowlers. They know the importance of hitting sixes and they also understand the skills needed to manipulate cricket fields and outfox opposition captains. India are 2-1 up in a 5-match T20I series against Australia even without several of their first choice bowlers.
There will certainly be a few changes to the list of personnel for India in the lead-up to the T20 World Cup but never before has the team had such depth. For years, there was an overemphasis on the need for anchors while the world moved on and readied specialists. India have finally moulded their immense resources and are now in such a cool position to challenge the best in the business in the T20 game.
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