To a fan, what’s most hurting about Indian men’s cricket? It’s when they’re playing poorly, generally in an ICC knockout game or final, and one of the ‘star’ players hits a woeful shot to get out and then is immediately with you in the ad break, puffy cheeks and all, selling wares or goading you to build a videogame cricket team, like an IPL franchise. It’s a moment worthy of breaking the television set, because it says the star can play carelessly, fail spectacularly, and still laugh his way to the bank, over and over again.
On evidence of their no-show at the World Test Championship final, there’s been jibing online that the mantle of ‘chokers’ has passed from South Africa to India now. What’s worse, India fans knew it would happen, like the chronicle of a death foretold. To ‘choke’, you need to be in a position where you could win first. In many of the ICC event knockout games in the last 10 years, India has looked lost well by the midway point.
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So, in a nutshell, the country with the most powerful T20 league in the world is unable to translate that into the best T20 team in the world. The richest cricket board is unable to string together teams that can win the ODI World Cup or Champions Trophy, where in the recent past they’ve unravelled in knockout games so badly, making their sizzling form during the groups stage of those tourneys seem like a mirage. Their top-order batting problems have persisted for at least five years now. Five years!
The richest cricket board goes all out to ensure that wickets at home are overly spin-friendly so their team can pull across the line and make it to the World Test Championship final. And then the players get into IPL mode! You get into proper Test mode with the home series against Australia, win it and qualify for the WTC, and then slip straight into T20 mode, and suddenly two months later, get to England to play the Test final. We now play Test cricket with hardly any warm-up games. This is massive mismanagement, but one that stems from showing that Test cricket isn’t centre-stage. Everyone knew the itinerary. In the WTC, Australia had players who played in the IPL, but many others who’d prioritised Test cricket. Throughout the match, Australia looked fresh, and India burnt out.
Just reckon with these ironies. Indian cricket has rolled the red carpet to the IPL, and yet has no ICC T20 or other white-ball glory to show after M S Dhoni’s exit as captain. India won two great Test tours in Australia but have otherwise struggled on pacier tracks in South Africa, New Zealand and England, where they’ve had chequered results. The WTC experience epitomises what India has got wrong. For all its worth, the IPL is the elephant in the room that is harming it. No eminence grise of Indian cricket will say so. Current stars and elder statesmen are smarting from the fresh wound that the WTC has stabbed into their psyche. Only now, former coach Ravi Shastri has spoken about player workload management. Rohit Sharma said the team needed 20-25 days to acclimatise before such a big game. As if they didn’t know beforehand.
Going by plenty of recent evidence, it’s likely that the Indian men’s team will lose the ODI World Cup at home. It might happen just like how Germany slayed Brazil 7-1 in the 2014 World Cup at the Belo Horizonte. But as their batting collapses or bowlers get clobbered, the ads will continue ad nauseam.
(Rahul Jayaram is a teacher and writer who believes we are living through the apocalypse. @rajayaram.)