Just as the Astroturf changed the one dimensional monopoly of India in men’s field hockey and pushed them out of the top
five of international hockey for the better part of the last four decades the Twenty 20 or T20 format in
cricket seems to have levelled the field somewhat against Australia’s monopoly. Australia’s domination of world cricket both at the test and ODI levels has been near total for most of the last fifteen years with three world championships in a row and the number one position in tests by a long way. The former Indian opening batsman Sunil Gavaskar noted after Australia’s poor run and eventual exit from the T20 world championships in South Africa that, “Australia is still the team to beat”. It’s just a question of time though, before Australia plugs up the loopholes in its T20 standards and goes all out to grab the world championship. However they’re not going to find it as easy to dominate this format as they found the test or ODI formats. In fact much of what Australia prided itself on for its success in the test or ODI formats has been blunted by at least three sub continental teams and it won’t be long before the fourth follows suit. If the trend in the T20 world championship ’07 is anything to go by then it’s not a game for cricketers on the wrong side of thirty although the odd exception would be there. This is not to say that the game could do without experience but the experience has to be specific and not speculative or general. The intensity of this format requires the restlessness and exuberance of youth and the ability to react fast. Honestly Australia has all these attributes and they’re known to have played their game ‘hard’ and with a lot of intensity. In most cases they’d just smoke the fight out of their opponents with what one of their former captains, Steve Waugh admitted, was ‘psychological disintegration’. This is an integral part of an Australian cricketer’s training where he is taught to disorient his opponents on the field with intimidating chat or what is known in politics and diplomacy as brinkmanship. From the batsman’s point of view cricket is a “you miss, I hit” affair and success depends on focus as much as it depends on talent and fitness. Generally the batsman doesn’t get a second chance to make good on any error unless he’s lucky to be let off which is rare against Australia. Teams other than Australia especially from the subcontinent are slowly learning to look inward, identify their areas of weakness and plug them. At the same time they’re studying the opposition more intently than they’d ever done before and are ready to rattle them with ‘sledging’ (the cricketing slang for intimidating on-field chat). The gap between the cup and the lip in such cases is when teams are not able to strike a balance between their intensity and their performance as it happens so often with a team like South Africa. But T20 ’07 has seen both Australia and South Africa crashing out to a youthful and intense India that was not just ready to stand up to their bullying but also give back in the same coin. In fact Australia were rattled in their very first match by ‘minnows’ Zimbabwe and later lost to a resurgent and youthful Pakistan as well.
Fielding and bowling used to be a major weakness of the Indian team and although Pakistan always had good bowlers their fielding used to be like India if not worse. But T20 ’07 revealed a new India and a new Pakistan that outshone all other teams simply with their fielding and bowling let alone batting. They seemed to have adapted better than Australia and South Africa both of which couldn’t reach the finals. While T20 has catapulted the fielding standards of India and Pakistan to levels comparable to that of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand it revealed a couple of other strengths in India’s game. The long held belief of these teams and a few others about the inabilityof the Indian batsmen to play the rising ball had been blown apart. In this tournament the Indian batsmen seemed to have realized that the best way to play the rising ball is by attacking it and this seems to have got them good results with bowler after intimidating bowler getting deflated like flattened tyres against their strokeplay. The Australians will realize it before long that basing their strategy on bowling to intimidate Indian batsmen with short pitched stuff might be costly, especially in the flat Indian wickets. On the other hand, depending on how the Indian pace bowlers feel about using green wickets to their advantage the groundsmen in India would prepare the pitches. India played and won in style most of its T20 ’07 matches at Kingsmead, Durban which has the fastest pitch in South Africa and there’s no reason why they can’t carry that confidence into the ODIs and tests. After all it was never lack of talent that haunted India in the past but the right application and strategy. Just as the Indian hockey team is slowly getting back its bearings with good application and strategy the cricket team too has learnt a thing or two in the T20s.