India's Batsmen Lost The Adelaide Match - by Mukul Kesavan

An unsurprising thing happened at the Adelaide Oval: England's T20 specialists flattened an Indian Test match eleven. In his post-match remarks, Rohit Sharma threw his bowlers under the bus with the rear-shielding reflex that's the hallmark of the desi leader: they hadn't turned up, he said. 

The problem wasn't that India's bowlers hadn't turned up; the problem was that its opening batsmen had. It has been apparent for a while now that India's top order is a triumvirate of cricketing uncles, batsmen who play T20 cricket like a speeded-up version of the five-day game. 

If Sunil Gavaskar had abandoned his commentary post and walked out to open, no one at the Adelaide Oval would have been able to tell the difference. Like Gavaskar, Sharma and KL Rahul do things by the book: they suss out the conditions, minimize risk, work the ball around, hit the loose ball, give the first half hour to the bowlers and...never get it back.

To be fair to the Indians, the Pakistanis play the T20 game the same way, with Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan settling in for the duration. That didn't stop them from making the final. But Pakistan needed a miracle which was duly supplied by the Dutch and it's hard to do miracles on demand.

Adelaide was a tale of two Powerplays. India managed 38 in the first six overs for one wicket, at just over a run a ball. England got 63 in theirs without losing a wicket and then carried on as if the fielding restrictions had been indefinitely extended. This had something to do with the quality of India's bowling, but bowling wasn't the reason India lost.

India lost because its batting order is designed to achieve par scores in the hope that the infirmities of the other team's batting will see India through. Rahul, Sharma and Kohli are better Test batsmen than Jos Buttler and Alex Hales but in a T20 fantasy league, swapping the three of them for the English openers would be a winning trade.

That's because Buttler and Hales have been socialized out of the belief that their job is to stay in, take the game deep and smash the ball about with wickets in hand in the last five overs. Successful top order T20 batting is founded on an unnatural selflessness. The openers have to believe that they are expendable, that what really matters is maximizing the run rate when the Powerplay's fielding restrictions are in place for the first six overs. 

The better someone is as a top order Test batter, the harder it's going to be for him to risk his wicket for quick runs because the nature of Test cricket has brainwashed him into believing that survival is a virtue, and a big individual score is an unqualified good. This conviction is strengthened by the commentary around the game. In a carry-over from Test cricket, the telecast showed viewers Kohli's batting average in matches in this format played at Adelaide. The number of runs Kohli averages per innings in T20 Internationals is unimportant. What matters is his strike rate. 

Yadav's 14 off 10 balls was more valuable than Sharma's 27 off 28, because a batter who scores fewer runs at a higher strike rate is better for his team than one who scores more runs more slowly. The latter, by using up precious deliveries, limits the opportunities of subsequent batsmen to raise the run rate. A higher strike rate and a lower average suggests the opposite: a batter who takes risks, scores fast and allows others to carry on where he leaves off.

This assumes that there are effective batsmen to follow. In T20 cricket, this is a reasonable assumption because this most compressed of formats still allows the same number of batters per innings as Test cricket does. 10 wickets over 20 overs as opposed to 10 wickets over, say, 90, means that the risk of losing all ten wickets in an innings is smaller and so batsmen can risk their wickets in a search for rapid runs in a way that they can't in Test matches. "He put a high price on his wicket" is a compliment in Test cricket, but T20 batsmen must be strategically open to selling their wickets cheaply by taking risks for quick runs. 

It's odd that Surya Kumar Yadav, the world's top-ranked T20I batsman, follows Sharma, Rahul and Kohli to the crease. Given that a T20 innings lasts an hour and a half, it's not as if the conditions faced by an opening batsman are going to be appreciably different from those prevailing ten overs later. Why doesn't Yadav open the innings or walk in after the first wicket falls?

The answer to this question seems to be that the Indian team needs an orthodox batsman like Kohli to anchor the innings from start to finish. This is arguable; the English team has prospered without Joe Root, Kane Williamson has been a drag on the Kiwis, and Steve Smith barely makes the Australian T20 team. But even if we allow that Kohli is central to the team's balance, his position at No. 3 is tenable only if the openers score rapidly, in the way Buttler and Hales do. Since the Indian openers don't score rapidly, this leaves the team weighed down by three anchors, not one, which, unsurprisingly, leaves the innings becalmed.

India's T20I teams are chosen by timid actuaries who plan for respectable par totals. This works some of the time, especially when they meet teams that play the same conservative game, like Pakistan. But against a side like England that embraces the logic of the short game and commits its batting order to serial aggression, Indian teams are liable to be overwhelmed as they were at Adelaide. This team needs remaking. "Recklessness over respectability" should be its founding mantra.

Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in Delhi. His most recent book is 'Homeless on Google Earth' (Permanent Black, 2013).

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.