T20 World Cup: Renewed India face Pakistan in opening test

Numbers often don’t tell the entire story. They can be twisted to project favourable records and win-loss ratios. Like India’s. More than a decade’s bilateral superiority, however, can’t compensate for a bare World Cup shelf. It wasn’t supposed to unfold like this.

The 2007 T20 World Cup win was fortuitous but by the time MS Dhoni’s India had lifted the 2011 ODI World Cup at home, the Indian Premier League had been synonymous with Indian cricket for three years. New benchmarks were being set, rules were being rewritten. Over the next few years, India were producing finishers, wicketkeeper-batters, slog-over specialists and 19th over bowlers. But in more than 10 years they haven’t been able to assimilate a World Cup winning team.

It’s a reality check that’s bound to mess with the psyche of a group. And it rarely helps if Pakistan keep resurfacing as the first team to test their renewed mettle. The clock has been reset after last World Cup’s group-stage ouster but playing Pakistan continues to be a constant. Pressure? More like a challenge, feels skipper Rohit Sharma. “Yeah, look, I don’t want to use the word “pressure” because pressure is constant,” he said at a press conference here on Saturday. “It’s not going to change ever. I would like to take this as a challenge. I want to use that word challenge a little more. This Pakistani team is a very challenging team. All the Pakistani teams that I’ve played from 2007 until 2022, they’ve been good.

“It’s just that I believe ‘on that particular day’ kind of a thing. On that particular day, if you’re good enough, you’ll beat any opposition, you’ll take the win and you’ll go home. That is what has happened in the last so many years. Pakistan were good in the last World Cup. They beat us. They were good in the Asia Cup. We were good too, but we won the first game and they won the second.”

Over and above how this game pans out, there is also a sense of improbability surrounding India’s Cup chances. The bowling has visible gaps and the batting is still reeling from a series of experiments for the last 10 months. Most apparent is their reliance on matchups and data. As much as it can liberate a player’s vision and improve his game, data also tends to limit the overall vision. Which is why Dinesh Karthik has to be shielded till fast bowlers come into play in the slog overs. And then there is the weird logic of playing Ravichandran Ashwin only against left-handed batters because right-arm slow apparently gives right-handed batters an edge. It’s one of the by-products of metricising T20 cricket, putting too much power into the tools of strategy that have come into being due to the boom of franchise cricket.

Yet, not everything can be dictated by data. Yuvraj Singh hit those six sixes because he rode the momentum, not because Stuart Broad was bowling bad deliveries. Robin Uthappa and Virender Sehwag were Super Over picks because Dhoni knew they could bowl dead straight—the basic prerequisite for hitting the stumps. India probably need to turn back the clock and give instinctive cricket a chance. Sharma too is for a middle path.

“You’ve got to be instinctive as well. Yes, you have to look at the matchups as well. We’ve been going through a lot of numbers all these days, about how people have been successful in Australia. Although it’s a different time, not a lot of cricket has been played this month in Australia, it was important for us to get some kind of data around what happens in October-November in Australia and what are the kind of people who have been successful here.

“We saw a lot of things about how you need to be successful, firstly as a team and then as an individual as well. We went through all of it, but obviously it’s a bit of both. Sometimes you just feel that this guy is bowling pretty well, you need to just get him to play the game; he’s in good form. On the other side, you will look at the matchups as well. On that given day, whatever we feel is the right playing eleven, we will go by that. I certainly want to keep my mind open on that. We don’t want to get stuck with one particular way of making your playing eleven.”

Sharma is happy with the preparation given how rare it is for India to actually take out two weeks ahead of an ICC event. Acclimatisation done, a win in the first game is just the start India need now. The weather has been fickle though. Sporadic showers in and around Melbourne apart, the sun played hide-and-seek the entire day. The Bureau of Meteorology here has downgraded the rain forecast chance from 95% to 70% but since the prediction is still on for the evening, both teams are gearing up for a shorter game.

“We need to come here thinking that it’s a 40-over game,” Sharma said. “We will be ready for that. If the situation demands that it’s a shorter game, we will be ready for that as well. A lot of the guys have played such kinds of games before and they know how to manage themselves in a situation like that.”

Pakistan captain Babar Azam too is hoping for a full game. “Weather is not in our hands,” he said. “A lot of people are waiting for this match. We want it to be a 40-over match, but whatever happens we are prepared for it.”