Why has Team India all of a sudden started looking like a team that would lose? Who would have thought that the back-to-back world champions would lose both their T20Is in Ireland? Although they batted better in the abandoned game against England in the first T20I at Chester-le-Street on Wednesday, it was far from a perfect performance.
The same team, not long ago, was scoring 250-plus scores at will. At the T20 World Cup in February and March earlier this year in India and Sri Lanka, in the space of four matches, they scored three 250-plus scores, never done before in the history of the shortest format at the highest level. And they were all done in important matches: against Zimbabwe (Super 8s), England (semifinals) and New Zealand (final).
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That’s why the game is such a great leveller. It can’t be completely mastered owing to different conditions all over the world. In the last few years, the Indians have been much better tourists than they were before, but it has not been a perfect transformation, and probably it can never be. Even the invincible Aussies of the late 1990s and early 2000s, more often than not, met their Waterloo in India.
The United Kingdom is much cooler than the large part of the Indian subcontinent at present. Plus, the pitches favour swing. In addition, the weather is highly fickle. When it starts raining or when the sun starts beating hard, there is no knowing. As the weather changes, so does the nature of the pitch. It’s not so much the bounce that bothers the Indian batsmen; it’s the swing. It’s the movement in the air as well as off the pitch. So, that’s what has happened so far.
Also, there has not been much time to adapt. The Indian cricket team landed in Ireland just a few days before the first game. The number one T20I team in the world is expected to beat a team like Ireland no matter when they land there. So, complacency is also at the core of it. But it’s understandable, given the amount of cricket the Indian cricket team has been playing over the last few years. Often, they have reached these venues just days before with no preparations whatsoever for the new climate. Back in the day, the touring team would even play a couple of warm-ups before the internationals. But then that was a time when there were no T20 matches, internationals as well as franchise cricket ones.
Scheduling and complacent batsmen
Not just scheduling, batsmen tend to get complacent too. In India where they had been playing non-stop cricket since the white-ball tour of Australia last year in October-November, pitches and boundaries were extremely batting-friendly. At Stormont in Belfast, not so much the boundaries, but the pitches were definitely different, and that impacted the outcome of the matches greatly. Even if they are not complacent, there is no time to apply out there in the middle. Sanju Samson would vouch for that. Such is the nature of the T20s.
Shreyas Iyer’s India are going to play four more T20Is, with the second match slated for Saturday, and three ODIs thereafter. It’s unlikely things would change for the visitors in a drastic way in the coming days. But what this white-ball tour would do is prepare some of the Indian first-timers for the future. That’s how this tour should be taken, a learning experience, and the Indians should not be overly criticised for not being equal to the task at the end of it.