India have one year to deal with elephant in the room
Now that Kapil Dev has got the ‘C’ word out there with respect to the Indian cricket team, it is as if the doors have opened and the elephant has been let out of the room. Talking to ABP News after India’s capitulation versus England in the T20 World Cup semi-final, Kapil was empathetic: “I will not go into the details and slam them because these are the same players who have got us a lot of respect in the past, but yes, we can call them chokers. That’s okay. There is no denying it—after coming so close, they choke.”
Given where we are at this point, being called chokers is actually okay. Exactly a year from now, the 2023 ICC World Cup being held across India will be heading towards its knock out rounds. The final is on November 26 and the consensus is pretty definitive — India had better be there. Going by what has transpired in the recent past, the prospects appear iffy. In the ten seasons after India claimed its last piece of ICC silverware—the 2013 Champions Trophy—we’ve made two finals (2014 T20 World Cup and 2017 Champions Trophy) and four semi-finals—two in 50-over World Cups and two in the T20 version.
Yes, the 50-over game is a different brew and home advantage will be an absolute bonus, but all that is working on the assumption that things have stayed the same since the last time we held an ICC event—the 2016 T20 World Cup. While T20 has evolved into a separate arm of the game, if not an entirely different game, its aftereffects continue to ripple across formats. What India need most is a truthful post mortem into why they cannot get across the line. In T20s, the answers are simple and evident enough: a tepid pace at the top of the batting and not enough all-round options in the line-up are fixable problems. If you are willing to accept that there are players who should not feature in your next T20 World Cup and must start saying the goodbyes rightaway.
The 50-over format may at this point appear kinder and more manageable keeping in mind the time available to batters and familiarity with conditions, but that game has also moved up a notch in terms of requiring a dynamism in batting.
India cannot be playing the same old game they have played. In the last four years, England have owned two world white-ball titles because, among other things, they have accelerated the pace of batting. From the 2015 World Cup onwards, England have topped the charts of 50-over scoring rates and with it, win/loss ratios. They have won 80 of their 125 ODIS, scoring at 6.27 runs an over, and made one third of 350+ scores (19 out of 63) in 50 overs.
South Africa are next at nine. Also post 2015, out of the five times 400 has been crossed in ODIS, England have done it four times. England’s post 2015 winloss ratio is 2.285; India are next at 2.038, but in the interim,
England have cleaned out two world titles and India none. India’s run-rate in this time has been 5.80 with eight 350 scores. To believe nobody else has taken note and everything will be evened out due to home advantage plus wall-to-wall chest-thumping TV promos is false bravado.
So, how about we address that choking business? There are dissertations written on the subject and how to overturn the situation. Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 New Yorker article differentiating between choking and panicking was put into cricketing context by Aakash Chopra on Espncricinfo in 2011. Gladwell says, “Choking is thinking too much, panicking is thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same but they are worlds apart.”
The panicked cricketer hits out, flails, unconcerned about the mistakes being made, trying to extract himself from the crisis. The one who chokes tries too carefully to be perfect, to knuckle down so as to not make the mistake. What India were trying to do setting a total for England in the T20 World Cup semi-final. At the heart of the spiral of confusion that the athlete/team finds himself/itself in is the occasion, Gladwell saying, “Choking requires us to concern ourselves less with the performer and more with the situation in which the performance occurs.”
How does it matter whether India panic or choke when they lose in ICC knockouts? It should because it is where the responses and remedies to defeat patterns come from. Other than the 2016 T20 World Cup semi-final where the Indians put up 192 batting first, India’s defeats at these knockout games have been comprehensive. Outside of selection issues, the occasion appears to become a factor, whether individually for key performers or collectively. There is going to be no bigger occasion in the lives of most of India’s young cricketers than the ICC World Cup next year. They have a year to find the right approach to banish the bogey.