Stars may snub England ODI series for IPL
India’s captain confident as one-day series starts today England’s returning ODI leader must find his form
England are strongly considering allowing their star players to miss the one-day international series against Ireland and play the majority of the Indian Premier League – with the exception of captain Eoin Morgan.
Director of England cricket Andrew Strauss believes that the likes of Ben Stokes, Jos Buttler and Sam Billings would benefit from maximum exposure to world-class Twenty20 competition and is prepared to let them stay in India until the middle of May.
Meanwhile, the England management are set to summon Morgan back at the start of May if he earns an IPL contract. Such a scenario would be less likely, in any case, if his availability were limited to just three weeks.
But with Ireland arriving to play two matches at Lord’s and Bristol – their first bilateral series in England – and the Champions Trophy commencing on home soil at the start of June, there is value to having the England captain available to face the nation of his birth.
Morgan already has plenty of IPL experience, having played five of the last seven seasons with Kolkata Knight Riders, Sunrisers Hyderabad and Royal Challengers Bangalore.
Buttler is already believed to have told the Mumbai Indians, his IPL fran- chise, that he will be available for most of the tournament.
Billings turned out for the Delhi Daredevils last year and was retained by the franchise for the 2017 season.
Stokes revealed on Friday that he would be entering the auction in Bangalore next month. Alex Hales and Jason Roy have also confirmed their intention to seek a deal. But Joe Root, who became a father for the first time before flying out to India for the ODI series that begins today, is not thought to be putting himself forward this year.
The arrival of Virat Kohli is heralded, long before you actually see him arrive, by a chorus of barking dogs and screaming humans. His gait is quick and relentless, his immense entourage struggling to keep pace, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses as he enters the press conference room.
The dogs are guard dogs, who are being kept at the Maharashtra Cricket Association stadium in Pune ahead of the first one-day international against England, which starts this morning. The humans are the ground’s staff, contractors and manual workers, craning and straining for a glimpse of India’s captain like breathless teenagers seeing the Osmonds for the first time.
For the foreign visitor, and even after everything you have seen and heard from afar, there is something weirdly arresting in watching a cricketer – a cricketer! – being feted like this.
Often, when you see celebrities assaulted by the full glare of their fame – and a celebrity is undoubtedly what Kohli is – they look either abashed or entirely absent, either discomfited by the brouhaha or deaf to it altogether. Sachin Tendulkar once told me that he is so shy among large crowds that he often struggled to maintain eye contact with people for fear of embarrassment.
You suspect that Kohli is not one of those people. Already the Test captain, Kohli has just replaced Mahendra Singh Dhoni in the other two formats as well, and there is no other international captain right now who so immediately exudes leadership. Whether it is appealing, addressing his bowlers, admonishing his fielders, there is… not an ostentation, perhaps, but a sort of hyperawareness. Kohli knows he is being watched. He knows people like watching him. And he likes that people like it.
Often it is said that Kohli represents the brash face of the new India. The loud tattoos. The endless gym selfies and unapologetic cult of self-improvement. Since 2012, he has transformed himself into one of the fittest and most versatile players in world cricket, but on his own terms.
Explaining his decision to skip a practice session earlier in the week, he said, with a shrug: “I wanted to rest. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
Kohli leads by charisma, but he also leads by example. At the age of 28, he is the batsman who has perhaps come closest to perfecting all three forms of the game. In 2016 he became the first player in history to average 75 in all three international formats, all while breaking the record for the most runs in an Indian Premier League season and captaining his country to the longest unbeaten Test run in their history.
Half an hour later, England captain Eoin Morgan enters the same room almost unnoticed, accompanied by a single press officer. Morgan claims not to be perturbed by criticism – “I’ve built up a decent tolerance to it,” he said yesterday – and rarely seeks out the spotlight. But he goes into the series with a number of problems on his agenda: some of his own making, some not. It is hardly his fault, for example, that his bowlers look utterly innocuous in these conditions. Or that Kohli’s side are in such irresistible form. But his own form certainly is a concern: just two half-centuries in his last 28 innings for England. In an era when his team-mates are setting new benchmarks for rapid scoring, Morgan’s career strike rate is actually lower than it was a year ago. On a personal level, he was heavily criticised for skipping the recent tour of Bangladesh, and his return means that two of England’s most in-form batsmen, Jonny Bairstow and Sam Billings, may not feature at all. If Kohli’s time is undoubtedly now, then Morgan could be forgiven for wondering whether his time will ever come again. It is only a few years since he was one of the most breathtakingly innovative batsmen in the sport, but in those years limited-overs cricket has been transfigured beyond recognition. A strike-rate in the eighties would once have marked him out as one of England’s aggressors; now, they are the numbers of a middleorder anchor. The trademark reversesweep is working less and less for him. There is a worrying tendency to offer catches on the off side. When England have wickets in hand, Jos Buttler is often promoted above him in the order. The irony is that Morgan has been left
‘To be a consistent performer in this format, you need to understand strike rotation as well’
behind by a white-ball revolution he largely inspired. In many ways, his captaincy philosophy is not so different from Kohli’s, with its emphasis on aggression and expression, individuality and instinct. “He’s the driving point of what we want this one-day team to be about,” Ben Stokes argued on Friday. “If he’s not scoring runs, he’s leading the team very well.”
A doctrine of untrammelled aggression will only get you so far, though, as Kohli pointed out with the sort of brutal frankness that only the truly selfassured can convincingly muster. “They seem to be quite fearless, which is always a good thing,” he said of Morgan’s England. “But at the same time, to be a consistent performer in the ODI format, you need to understand strike rotation as well. You can’t just go in with one sort of momentum.”
Of course, Morgan could yet have a fine tour. He could score a match-winwith ning century this afternoon. Only the other week, he won a Big Bash game for the Sydney Thunder with a six off the last ball. It would certainly be a very Morgan thing to do. And any side boasting the power of Buttler, Stokes, Jason Roy and Alex Hales have a puncher’s chance at the very least.
But England will probably lose this series, and if they do it will increase the pressure on Morgan to abandon the ship he helped to build.
One day, as impossible as it is to envisage, Kohli will fall, too. The timing will go, or the responsibility will finally overcome him, or the appetite for punishing gym sessions and egg-white omelettes will finally wane. And as he puts his sunglasses back on and leaves the room, launching another torrent of flashing cameras and barking dogs, one is struck by the thought that maybe the difference between success and failure is simply time.