Amazing as the attacking opening stand that set a new world record of 118 runs in the six Powerplay overs was, it was perplexing that one of the protagonists, even if he was the minor partner in the run heist, was made to sit out in the next two T20Is.
The series was done and dusted after Abhishek Sharma’s astounding offside attack on the Kiwis that saw the ball sailing into the popular stands. But the youngsters, mainly Abhishek, had shown us more than a glimpse of the future of the T20 game itself as they stretched the limits of probability in putting on runs at nearly 20 an over.
Coach Gautam Gambhir may be well-known for eccentric experiments. Some of them may even have paid dividends in the past. But in dropping the precociously talented prodigy of a white ball striker in Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, he may have done no favour to the confidence levels of a young player.
They named the selection decision to bring back the injured Ishan Kishan as part of a desire to win the series 5-0, according to the captain Shreyas Iyer who seems to have fallen into the Gambhir trap. The young batsman may not have achieved much on a bouncier pitch in the chase of 260 seeing that Abhishek failed too, but he had every right to be in that XI while Kishan should have come in for someone else,
Team India is full of batting riches, and the willow collective has done extremely well in Gambhir’s stint as coach. The team has also won all the big cup competitions like the T20 World Cup and the Asia Cup and the Champions Trophy in the ODI format in that time. It hardly matters that Team India ended up losing two T20Is after sealing the series win in New Zealand. But the omission of the prodigy came about because Gambhir, like a scientist in his lab, loves to tinker.
Of course, where Team India needs more introspection is about the composition of the bowling attack in T20Is. They were under far less than full strength as the leaders of the fast-bowling brigade in Jasprit Bumrah and Md. Siraj were not in the lineup and Varun Chakravarthy has not been a first choice T20I spinner for a while now.
What the series proved was that the decision to bring back Bhuvneshwar Kumar was retrograde as he could do little about the runs that the bowling combinations leaked right through the series where totals more than 200 were commonplace. It would appear logical that the coach turns his attention to sorting out the bowling conundrum.
Gambhir would be well advised not to do any more damage to the precious weapons of mass destruction in the Powerplay that he has in the free strikers of the ball like Abhishek, Samson, Kishan and Sooryavanshi. To keep all in the XI and play the T20 game the most modern way of outright aggression, especially in the first six overs when the likes of Abhishek find there are runs to plunder around the ground.
The top six batsmen, including Shreyas and Tilak Verma pick themselves and since two wicket-keepers are already in the mix, there are plenty of options for the all-rounders slots as well as the bowling lineup. To find five bowlers working together to squeeze the run rate has been a challenge that the selectors have not been able to sort out despite their experiments. They need to rake some independent decisions if a limited-overs combination of pace and spin bowlers are to be effective enough to help Team India keep its white ball supremacy.
(R. Mohan is Resident Editor of Chennai and Tamil Nadu editions of Deccan Chronicle)
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
