Morgan explains why this T20 series isn’t a pointless exercise
England’s ongoing ODI and T20 tour of India is shaping up as a taste of international cricket’s future. The International Cricket Council plans to introduce 13-team international leagues in ODIs and T20Is from 2019, under which standard limited overs tours would mimic the format of England’s current tour, with three ODIs and three T20Is apiece.
The move would be welcome. Not just to end the unloved beast that is the overlong ODI series - interminable five or even seven-match series have been common for decades, and snappier, more dynamic series are infinitely preferable - but also to imbue T20 internationals beyond the World Twenty20 with some semblance of meaning and structure. The T20I’s absence of a coherent identity was embodied by the Pakistan coach’s recent call for all bilateral T20Is to be scrapped, and is affirmed by India’s decision to rest the spinners Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, who shared 61 wickets against England across Tests and ODIs this winter, for this series.
The ICC’s proposals to create leagues for ODI and T20I cricket, which would amount to 36 matches for the 13 nations included over a three-year period, would provide a clear answer to the question raised by one Indian journalist to Eoin Morgan: what is the point of this series? But there is also a more immediate answer. It is not just that England would dearly love to leave India after winning one series but that, with T20I cricket increasingly resembling ODIs - in the personnel of the teams, the tempo of matches and the skills required of bowlers and batsmen - the series doubles as crucial preparation for the Champions Trophy, too.
“What we’re seeing is your 50 over team is almost identical to your T20 team,” Eoin Morgan said. “The same risk level and skill level you have to show in both forms is pretty evident. Around the 2015 World Cup you might have had three or four changes between the two groups. You might have had specialist T20 players coming in but we only really have one or two now.” Those two, Tymal Mills and Chris Jordan, are both likely to play in Kanpur. They possess skills - pace and canny slower balls, in the case of Mills, who would be in the ODI squad too if he could bowl 10 overs in a day; and ability to locate yorkers under pressure in the case of Jordan - ideally suited to T20.
The requirements for batting, though, are now almost identical across the two formats; all England’s batsmen for this series played in the ODIs too. As England prepare for this year’s Champions Trophy, fresh from scoring 1,037 runs across the three ODIs, it seems incongruous that their run to the final of the 2013 tournament was underpinned by the steeliness of Jonathan Trott who, for all his qualities at number three, had a genteel strike rate of 77.06 in his career, the product of a cricketer shaped in the pre-T20 age.
Increasingly it seems possible that, while there will be little divergence in the personnel between T20 and ODI cricket, only a select coterie of players will be able to thrive both in white ball cricket and in Test matches. Specialisation “will happen naturally,” Morgan said. “It will be the difference between being a Test player and a white ball player.”
So this T20I series rather has the feel of an extension of the ODIs, such is the convergence between the formats in recent years. Those longing for an end to the rampant domination of the bat over the ball in the record-breaking ODI series are unlikely to find it here; the groundsman in Kanpur has already declared that those who turn up in search of big hits will not be disappointed. England’s fast bowlers will seek to respond with yorkers, which they largely shied away from in the ODIs, perhaps because the delivery has a minuscule margin for error.
Three-match T20I series are ludicrously rare - England have not played one since late 2015 - and, as such, international teams have far less chance to hone combinations, and be innovative, than T20 domestic teams who can play and train for several months together. Still, the series is likely to showcase a few of the growing trends, as T20 cricket is taken increasingly seriously by teams and their analysts. Opening with spin bowlers has been a hugely successful tactic for many years. Morgan, fresh from a stint in the Big Bash League, will have noted the success of spinners. THE INDEPENDENT