WHAT THIS WORLD CUP HAS IN COMMON WITH THE 1992 TOURNAMENT IS UNPREDICTABILITY. SOUTH AFRICA ARE NOT THE FAVOURITES AND AUSTRALIA ARE NOT INVINCIBLE
captive to that image of his on the Lord’s balcony, toothy grin, arms wrapped around a trophy no Indian had at the time imagined getting his hands on, Dhoni will forever be defined by the image that captures the lofted six that brought India the winning runs: the expansive backswing, the eyes fever bright, pupils dilated at the point of ferocious impact, the enormous follow through of the bat, the ball soaring, becoming a white speck in the dark night sky.
An awful lot has changed in Indian cricket since April 2011. Only three players from that World Cup winning squad — Dhoni, Virat Kohli and Suresh Raina — figure in the current one. There is no Yuvraj, player of the 2011 tournament. This is the first World Cup since 1992 in which the team has not a single member of India’s golden generation of cricketers. Dhoni, who reached the peak of his career with that triumph, has been stumbling and sliding his way downwards. He is no longer India’s Test captain. And he is certainly playing his last World Cup.
Today’s team is brimming with explosive young talent and potential. Rohit, Dhawan, Rahane and Kohli (who has been racking up ODI records in the way a globe-trotting CEO racks up air miles) are all proven match winners. Add to that Dhoni, the finest
ODI finisher India has ever had, and you ought to have a formidable line-up. If only they were not so infuriatingly inconsistent: they have blown not so much hot and cold as hot and glacial. On occasion they have looked as out of place against decent opposition as a man who is used to a leisurely swim on Sunday mornings would at an Olympic event. They won the Champions Trophy in England in 2013.They beat England in the ODI series in England in 2014, the first win for India in a bilateral series in England in 24 years. And yet they won not an ODI in South Africa and New Zealand last year. They won nothing in the recent tri-series in Australia.
The bowling, riven with injuries, is looking fragile. The fast bowlers are either not fast enough or are erring in line and length in trying to be fast enough. The spinners need to attack rather than contain. Staunching the flow of runs in the final overs will be something India will worry about. In a warm-up game, India failed to bowl out even Afghanistan, who had clattered away to 153 for 2 at one stage. The batting has often launched spectacular assaults in the past 12 months; but the bowlers need to avoid making the sort of mess that cannot be cleaned up by aggressive batting.
The World Cup returns to Australia and New Zealand 23 years after the tournament that saw the birth of the modern ODI as we know it. That edition introduced coloured clothes, white balls, pinch hitters, opening the bowling with spinners. It was, as Martin Crowe wrote in a recent essay on ESPNcricinfo, the time when “one-day cricket was its freshest and most unpredictable”.
The lexicon of the game has evolved a great deal since 1992 (we now have the switch hit, the scoop shot, the power play and plenty more), as has the game itself. The Twenty20 format has infused the 50-overs game with an armoury of strokes that would have been unthinkable in those days. Approaches to batting have changed. What a team would have considered more than respectable in 1992 — 264 — was scored by Rohit Sharma in one innings last year. In these times of batting porno with heavier bats and shortened boundaries, it now seems only a matter of time before a side breaches Fortress Five Hundred in an innings.
What this World Cup has in common with the 1992 tournament, though, is unpredictability. It will be the most close-run tournament of recent times. South Africa, despite their strength, cannot be called favourites because they carry the tag of chokers in big tournaments. Australia are a cracking side, but they are surely not invincible. New Zealand, with home advantage, will be a handful. The West Indies and Pakistan are as likely to be in disarray as deadly. England are playing their best ODI cricket in years. And notwithstanding the fact that they will have to adjust to alien conditions, Sri Lanka are always capable of springing a surprise or two.
The open nature of the tournament was revealed in the warm-up games in which New Zealand walloped South Africa; Zimbabwe humbled Sri Lanka; and Pakistan comfortably beat England. Any team, really, is capable of beating any other on any given day. There is no single dominant side such as Australia was at the turn of this century or the West Indies in the early years of the World Cup. When the competition was last held in Australia and New Zealand, India failed to make it to the semi-finals. What will it be like this time around? The fan will always hope. (And proclaiming that we don’t stand a chance, that it will be dire, is also a kind of hoping, an assumption that if we are pessimistic, the opposite is likely to happen.) The format is such that it is reasonably certain that India, along with the other seven top Test-playing teams, will make it to the quarter-finals.
After that, two good days. A few of the batsmen do what they are capable of, the bowlers get it a bit right, perhaps the opposition has a day off, and we can see ourselves in the final. On the other hand, one bad game and the story is over. Till 2019. When millions of adoring cricket fans will again start getting caught up in the fever that is peculiar to the World Cup, hoping that, yes, this year will be ours.
(Soumya Bhattacharya’s book, After Tendulkar: The New Stars of Indian Cricket, is in stores now.)