Team India had an eventful and enjoyable 2021, barring the T-20 World Cup debacle at the end. Last year it made a perfect beginning by breaching the Aussie fortress Gabba and ended promisingly by conquering Proteas bastion, Centurion. However, unlike 2021, the new year began on a sore note as the team lost the Test series it should have easily won against a weakened and inexperienced South Africa side.
Even in the ODI series, India is looking vulnerable with the team grappling to find answers to a lot of familiar and old questions. With two major ICC tournaments falling in the next two years (T-20 in ’22 and ODI ’23) Team India need to resolve all the major issues quickly. So, it cannot be more opportune time to list out the woes plaguing the Indian team.
The Middle Order Muddle
What the Great Indian Depression of the ’20s and ’30s did to the economy of the country back then, the middle order crisis is wreaking similar havoc to the fortunes of the Indian cricket team for the last few years. Since the exits of players like Yuvraj, Raina, Dhoni etc the team is yet to zero in on reliable middle-order batsmen to take the boat to the shores of safety. Several players have come and gone like Hardik Pandya, Manish Pandey, Ambati Rayadu etc but none have been able to seal the vacant spots.
There are several options for India in the form of Shreyas Iyer, Suryakumar Yadav Venkatesh Iyer etc for the slots, but they have so far failed to provide a meaningful conclusion to the strong starts provided by the main batters such as Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan (only ODI), Virat Kohli etc in the short and shortest formats. So, these new guys should be given the long rope as well as much-needed confidence to emerge as the formidable middle-order batsmen for the upcoming T-20 and ODI World Cups in the next two years.
Lack of All Rounders
In the past everyone from Tendulkar, Ganguly to Yuvraj and Sehwag used to roll their arms over. This liberty is hardly there for Rohit Sharma now as none of the batters, apart from Ravindra Jadeja, can bowl these days. This aspect has been haunting the team and hurting its prospects in the ODIs and T-20s for a while now.
“If you look at the teams that won the 1983 and 2011 World Cups, they were all full of outstanding all-rounders. There were many batters who could bowl and the bowlers could bat. This is the one shortcoming that the Indian team has over the past two or three years, as a result of which the captain has not had many options and the team has lacked flexibility,” Sunil Gavaskar could not have been more forthright. However, there are options such as Shardul Thakur, Venkatesh Iyer, Deepak Chahar etc but they need to be groomed as quickly as possible.
Inability To Take Wickets in The Middle Overs
Be it the Champions Trophy in 2017 or the 2016 T-20 WC Semi, one of the perennial thorns in the flesh has been Indian bowlers inability to take wickets in the middle overs. As a result, not just these but several other games have also slipped away from the grasp of the Indian team. Spinners such as Ravi Ashwin, Jadeja and Yuzhvendra Chahal have been found guilty on various occasions for being unable to exert pressure on the opposition by picking wickets at the middle stages of the game.
“We need to have bowlers who can pick wickets in the middle overs. Our two wicket-taking options, Ravichandran Ashwin and Yuzvendra Chahal, didn’t know where to bowl after the South Africa batters started to use the sweep and the reverse sweep against them,” said India’s former wicketkeeper-batsman Saba Karim after India’s loss to South Africa recently. Hence, we need to be flexible if the present bowling combination is not working by bringing in new alternatives like Deepak Chahar, Kuldeep Yadav, Washington Sunder etc.
