“I think when we have bad days with the bat it can potentially look worse than it is, but we play an aggressive brand of cricket … It’s something we pride ourselves on, taking the attack to the opposition, and that’s the way we want to play … For us, losing like that is better than losing by 10 or 20 runs playing in a completely different manner that doesn’t suit us.”
“We were actually thinking if we get to 300, it will be a great effort … but from there, getting those 35 extra runs was purely down to his (Rishabh Pant’s) counter-attack, and then Hardik (Pandya) finished it off strongly.”
The first of these two statements came from a captain whose side had fallen 67 runs short in a chase of 318, after having been 135/0 in 14.1 overs. The second, from a captain whose side had seen their score of 336 gunned down with 6.3 overs to spare.
There has been one more famous, mountainous run-chase achieved with exactly 6.3 overs to spare, also on Indian soil: Playing Australia in Jaipur, India crossed their target of 360 in 43.3 overs. The architect? Virat Kohli, who blazed to 100* off 52 balls – the fastest ODI century by an Indian, then and now.
But that was October 2013, and seven-and-a-half years is a long, long time.
Long enough for England to embark upon a ‘data’ revolution, ditch it after a horror combustion of a World Cup campaign, kickstart another revolution, 'become New England’... and be crowned world champions.
If it was clear enough in the words of the skipper after the series-opener on Tuesday that this England will not be looking back, the team – even in the absence of the man helming the revolution, Eoin Morgan – announced it loud and clear with their actions to draw level in the three-match contest on Friday.
It was, arguably, the biggest talking point from the second ODI between India and England at Pune.
Approaching ODIs: The Yin
In the four years leading up to the debacle of 2015, England had played 82 ODIs – and managed all of five 300+ scores, with a highest innings total of 325.
Since the 2015 World Cup, England have scored 300+ runs 47 times in 103 completed ODIs – with 18 scores above 350, and four in excess of 400.
When Morgan says “this is the way we play, and this is the way we will continue to play”, it’s no passing comment. This is a team that has scored at more than six runs per over in 60 out of 103 innings, and more than seven per over in 28 of those 60.
They have faced targets bigger than Friday’s 337 on seven occasions in these last six years, and finished victorious four times; in each of the three defeats, they scored at least 365, and never lost by more than 15 runs.
This is a unit that hasn’t merely raised the roof, it has shattered the ceiling.
Of course, if you live by the sword, you die by it – and Morgan’s grace in the face of the post-match poking he was subjected to showed his complete acceptance of the same. But when you ‘die’ as infrequently as England do in ODIs on this side of March 2015 – 31 defeats in 103 completed matches, comfortably the best record among any of the top-10 teams – that sword is worth sticking by, and sticking into, as they do, to most opponents, on most days.
Approaching ODIs: The Yang
Now to the other end of the stick. Let’s go back to that Kohli quote.
“We were actually thinking if we get to 300, it will be a great effort,” said the Indian captain, and he wasn’t way off the mark in the context of where India stood: 112/2 halfway through their innings, and 158/3 when Kohli himself departed at the end of the 32nd over.
Generally speaking, 300 is far greater than par in ODIs – a concept fascinatingly broken down by Jarrod Kimber recently – but what is ‘par’ against a team that has been batting at 6.26 runs per over for six years? That means, numerically, 313 is ‘par’ against England.
Add to this a much-lighter-than-usual bowling attack – devoid of your (and the world’s) gun limited overs pacer, your most regularly striking pacer, your most successful spinner of the last four years, and your ‘safety net’ spin-bowling all-rounder – plus defending in conditions that aren’t the easiest to defend in, plus, knowing the opponent, the world’s number one team, is smarting from losing a game that was pretty much won… and even that already-inflated ‘par’ needed adjusting.
If you were to warrant a guess at the start of the game, all these factors considered, you would’ve probably hedged around the 335-mark. So, given that India scored 336, where’s the problem?
There isn’t, largely speaking, if we’re basing this on results. India are the only team that comes close to England’s high success rate of 69% in the last six years, with a more-than-credible 64% wins since the end of the 2015 World Cup.
The problem, instead, is of ‘settling’ to conventional norms. So what if the global par total in ODIs is 266? Where is the harm in playing to your own maximum potential, if it happens to overwhelmingly overshoot par?
India scored 224 runs in the last 25 overs of their innings, only a shade under nine per over. In the first 25 overs – despite losing only two wickets – they had scored exactly half the runs. (It’s not like they did much better with more wickets in hand either, having sauntered to 117/1 in the first 25 overs of the first ODI.)
In the first 30 overs of India’s innings, there were 50 boundary runs (11 fours and a six); in a crazy passage of just three overs, between the 33rd and 35th overs of the chase, England had blasted 54 boundary runs (three fours and seven sixes).
A lineup that reads Rohit (Sharma), (Shikhar) Dhawan, Kohli, (KL) Rahul, (Rishabh) Pant and Hardik possesses, on potential and performance, a possible ceiling to perhaps even meet the celestial standards of England from recent times. So why ‘settle’?
There is, also, if you go deeper, a problem of stagnation. In the four-year cycle leading into the 2015 World Cup, India had amassed 20 scores of 300+ in 94 completed ODIs, six of which were above 350, and two in excess of 400; in 110 completed ODIs after the 2015 World Cup, India do have 34 totals above 300 – but only eight of those have been 350+ scores, and not once have they reached 400.
In a period where England – the only side in the world better than India in this format – have taken their ODI scoring rate up from 5.25 to 6.26, India’s increment has been a rather modest one, from 5.53 to 5.80.
Both these teams – ergo, both these approaches – are successful. But only one is stamped with World Cup-winning gloss.
We’re all deeply sorry, Rishabh Pant
There was a world, less than three months previously, where your spot in any of the three Indian XIs was up for debate.
There was a world, barely imaginable now, where you went an entire year having played only two out of 20 white-ball games that India played (yep, that is how bad 2020 was).
This writer, too, has been guilty of failing to read your genius – before, belatedly, catching up to your generational gallop.
And here you are, playing almost as though you belong in Morgan’s England (they really would have lapped you up, wouldn’t they, if they could).
You’re quite beyond statistics now, you’re experiential. But when you trot out the kind of numbers you do with your blade, how can we sit back? No ODI innings by an Indian has seen more runs scored at a better strike rate than your blitz through what had been a pretty regular Friday afternoon before you walked out.
But that’s what, right? You’re not regular. You’re Rishabh Pant. You do you, sire.
Rahul: ODI cricket’s false-nine?
In early 2020, KL Rahul was trialled as India’s ODI number five, to stupendous effect: Eight innings in, he’s got 439 runs at an average above 70 and a strike rate near 120.
The innings immediately before his move down to five, Rahul had batted at number three – and scored 47.
His last ten innings before that were all as opener – a position he readjusted to in the middle of a World Cup campaign, thanks to an injury to the incumbent. In those 10 innings, he had scored 509 runs, with two centuries, three half-centuries and seven innings of more than 30.
On Friday, after a year of stellar occupation of the three-down spot – typically, with India’s batting, a purely finishing role – Rahul found himself moving up again. By batting position, it was only one spot earlier; by batting entry, it was a different ball-game altogether, with his team two-down inside the first 10 overs.
And he succeeded again. With an innings progression that was precisely, and pretty much perfectly carried out: 26 off 38 balls between overs 11-20, 23 off 25 between overs 21-30, 35 off 33 between overs 31-40, 24 off 16 before his dismissal in the final 10 overs.
Slowly, but surely, Rahul is positioning himself as an untouchable in the ODI setup.
Any of his ardent admirers, though, are probably hoping he doesn’t keep shutting out all the ‘noise’ as he transitions back to T20s next week.
Kuldeep slides further towards the abyss
And it’s getting painful to watch now. A slide that began at the start of IPL 2019 before hurtling towards free-fall is crying out loud for the parachute to open up.
In this time-period, Kuldeep Yadav has 18 wickets in 19 ODIs, at an average of 57.67, an economy of 5.83 and with a wicket every 59 balls. In 44 games before this phase, he had 87 wickets at an average of 21.74, an economy of 4.93 and with a wicket every 26 balls.
Fortune and form have deserted him everywhere in these two years.
He’s been part of the Test squad all along, from the tour of Australia to the home bubble against England, but the only game he got brought with it a meagre two-wicket haul.
He’s now out of the T20I plans, having leaked 10.37 per over for four wickets in three appearances during this period. And that followed from a particularly wretched run in the IPL, where he saw Varun Chakravarthy dislodge him as Kolkata Knight Riders’ first-choice domestic spinner – not particularly surprising, given Kuldeep’s returns of five wickets from 14 matches over the last two seasons.
It feels unfortunate, this decline – you want the young, prodigious spinner to rediscover the mojo that had the world gaping from 2017 to early 2019. But along with the rediscovery, whenever that happens, it will also be imperative for Kuldeep to discover newer facets of his bowling.
India need Kuldeep Yadav to have sound advice in his ears – not just motivational, but also technical. At 26, there’s still a lot of time for India’s first left-arm wrist-spinning men’s international.
from Firstpost Sports Latest News https://ift.tt/3w483jK
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