Of India’s debacle and the IPL

There seems to be no end to the post-mortem analysis of India’s exit from World T-20. Some of them have been objective but most of them have been outrageously over the top. To begin with, I must state that I am highly skeptical of this analysis-paralysis surrounding T-20 performances. Going by the record in both int’l cricket & IPL so far and common-sense, it appears way too random to draw any definitive conclusion. India won the inaugural world T-20 when no one expected us to win and have been struggling to win a single match at the business end of the tournament, since then. Pakistan won the second edition but was almost knocked out of the tournament in super 8’s stage this year. And now, the 8th seed Australia (this alone is reason enough for us not to take T-20 results too seriously!) and of all teams England have made it to the finals! Has any team found the code to sustainable success in this format yet?

The story is not too different in IPL either. Rajasthan Royals won the first edition when they were least expected to. Next year, Deccan Chargers won the title after finishing last in the table, the previous year. This year, Mumbai looked good to take home the trophy, despite not being able to make it to the semi-finals in the last 2 years. Of course one can always point out CSK’s and Pakistan’s consistency in this format, but let’s not forget that a lot of things went in favour of Pakistan and CSK to make it to the SF of this year’s World T-20 and IPL respectively.

Does this mean, we can’t be critical of the team’s bad performance because of the inherent randomness prevalent in this format? Of course not. My only point is we shouldn’t go by the end results alone. For a problem with multiple causes, our media is guilty of navel gazing. They want to zero in on exactly those factors which resulted in our early exit. So conveniently they found the most easily bashable thing going around at the moment - it’s a free for all bashing - the IPL.

The media has built a nice story around IPL as if that’s the reason for our losses. How many of us want to be bluffed into this story that we were world beaters before and then the IPL beast came in and made us susceptible against short balls, made Dhoni a bad captain and fast tracked Ravindra Jadeja* into the playing XI? C’mon guys, outside of the Fab 3 and Sehwag (with his own methods), our batsmen have never taken a liking to the rising ball. Suresh Raina (who was a success in the World T-20) is the biggest culprit of them all. He’s spent close to 5 years in int’l cricket and can’t play good short bowling to save his life (that slog pull is not an improvement but a desperate measure). And what did the selectors do? Dropped him for the Champions Trophy in SA and brought in Rahul Dravid, only to induct him back for the next home series, giving Dravid the axe!

Another most debated point is about how Yusuf Pathan is only an IPL specialist and not fit for int’l cricket. What has IPL to do with it, if he’s not able to make the transition (Let’s not forget that he made his debut for India even before IPL came into existence). Ranadeb Bose was picking wickets at Hadlee’s rate in Ranji Trophy for a couple of years, but we all knew he would never be a great success at the int’l level, does that give us a right to blame the Ranji Trophy for it? I agree that we ought to, at a broader level, that the competitiveness of the Ranji Trophy is not great due to lack of adequate number of quality players and all that. But Ranji Trophy as a platform is doing what it can do best. What’s the point in denigrating it?

Similar is the case with IPL. Murali Vijay’s brilliant batting in IPL raised our expectations, but that’s what we expected, right? For god’s sake let’s admit that there is a world of difference between the quality of Cricket in IPL and int’l cricket. The other day - in “Yorker” (Yahoo’s Cricket Chat show) - I had to select what according to me would constitute the ideal T-20 team for India. After 8 names, I was struggling to fill up the team, I didn’t want Nehra in my team but had no other alternative, even worse had to go with Sreesanth to complete the XI. If this pool of talent is divided into 8 teams with 4 *8 (32) foreign players thrown in, what you get is an attractive, even glamorous but more importantly sub-standard (relative to int’l cricket) cricket. So by design, there’s always a hit me bowler (sometimes a few of them) or a specialist batsman who bats at 7 or 8 in each team.

It’s true that IPL didn’t live up to its promise of identifying and developing young Indian players and help them make the transition to international cricket successfully and all that. But hang on, who made that promise? Lalit Modi. Why would anyone take anything that he says seriously is beyond me. IPL is a domestic tournament with a few foreign players participating as well, just like the English county system. Has England produced world beaters in Test Cricket? No. Blaming the IPL for being a tournament which is unable to produce quality players for India at the int’l level is convenient but utterly illogical (Though IPL has a lot to be blamed for, otherwise). Can you expect a Bangladeshi Premier League with millions of dollars of investment from private enterprises to turn Bangladesh into world beaters? As a country, this is all the talent we have in supply. IPL can’t create test tube cricketers, no?

Having said all this, we do need to ask serious questions about the way the team is shaping up - even if India had made it to the SF by beating Srilanka by 20 odd runs and then gone onto the win the title. The number of promising fast bowlers who have lost their way after making a mark early in their career, is alarming. And that’s primarily why we haven’t been able to defend even high scores comfortably, both in T-20s and ODIs. Why was Piyush Chawla picked ahead of Pragyan Ojha and Amit Mishra (this may not have made any difference to our fortunes in the world T-20, but an awful selection nevertheless, anything but meritorious)? Why do we keep packing in 7 batsmen for a 20 over game? And what are we going to do to enable the young and the not so young batsmen to handle the short balls better? Just what exactly is Ravindra Jadeja’s role in the team? How long will Harbhajan continue to be our strike bowler without being consistently penetrative?

But there are no instant ready-made answers available. It’s a complex system. Not a video game, where you click a button and we start playing the bouncing ball better or produce an assembly line of fast bowlers. We need a structural solution. Instead of focusing on IPL, getting into the bottom of what’s happening at the National Cricket Academy would be a good place to start.

*For those who think that Ravindra Jadeja made it to the Indian team primarily because of his performances in IPL (which is not a bad thing at all), let me remind you that one Mr.J.P. Yadav played for India in the pre-IPL days.