Improving India in T20 - Part One

Strategy before selection...

It was interesting to see the job description for the India national selector position recently, particularly the part stating that a player should have retired for at least five years.

As a format, T20 has evolved considerably from 2017 onwards - boundary percentages in major leagues have generally trended upwards, and some teams are starting (but only starting!) to understand more efficient trade-offs between risk and reward.

With this in mind, this rule doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because the person heading up the selection process won’t necessarily have understood the format in all its nuances and changes since they retired. There also seems to be a value placed on the number of matches played in other formats, which again, makes little sense. I found this tweet interesting, and the reply is flattering, albeit an unlikely proposition on my part!

This tweet also was along similar lines, with a similar flattering but unlikely reply:-

As a project, running India in T20 cricket from top to bottom would be as good as it gets. The country has a huge passion for sport, and an absurdly large player pool with which to choose players from. However, in the shortest of the three main formats, it is a squad which has underperformed badly in major tournaments - presumably why the national selectors job is currently being advertised!

The player pool, as mentioned, is large, but it is quite a polarised one. There are an abundance of anchor batters and defensive spinners, but far less above-average boundary hitters and perhaps a lack of trust in attacking spinners. In addition, there is a worrying absence of top five batters who can contribute with the ball (be it middle overs pace/pace off, or match-up spin), and conversely, frontline bowlers who can hit.

This issue leads to huge balance problems because it forces India to play a frontline bowler (recently Axar Patel) at number seven, despite their skillset not necessarily being suited to being a death overs hitter. None of India’s main batters, or reserve batters, bowl much, and Hardik Pandya is the only high quality pace-bowling all-rounder in the player pool. The lack of hitters ensures a long tail, which arguably puts pressure on the top order to preserve wickets.

So, evolution of the player pool is necessary. If I was an Indian batter now, then I’m working intensively on at least being able to bowl some middle overs or match-up spin to a reasonable level - not only will it assist chances of making the national team, but it will almost certainly prove to be a good investment in the open market at auction as well. Likewise, bowlers - they should upskill their hitting. If I’m someone like Sai Kishore right now, a frontline left-arm orthodox spinner who can bat a bit (he averages 16 in the two longer formats), I’m paying for a hitting coach to take my batting to the next level. Again, similar rewards would likely ensue.

Moving on further from this, there has to be a high expected value strategy decided by the management group/selectors, with players selected who adhere to this strategy. This is opposed to trying to pick the perceived best 11 players and then hoping it all falls into place - which I think India have done in the past. The legendary Dutch footballer and coach Johan Cruyff once said, “Choose the best player for every position, and you’ll end up not with a strong XI, but with 11 strong 1’s”. I think this is very applicable to some previous India selections.

So - there has to be clear agreement on what the playing group are trying to achieve. There’s a pretty good template here hidden in plain sight - Eoin Morgan’s revolution of the England team. With the overwhelming majority of T20 teams winning the match when they beat their opposition in the boundary percentage count, it makes complete sense to structure up a team who has the best chances of doing just that. Three anchors in the top three do not achieve this objective.

Finally, for this first part of this two-part article series, I want to briefly discuss India’s recent regimented tactics and strategy, which I did write about here ahead of their World Cup semi-final with England. Here was their World Cup bowling over distributions ahead of that match:-

To me, if I’m scouting an opposition team and see this, I see a regimented, kind of formulaic approach which is extremely predictable. They hardly varied their Powerplay overs, and in fact, in their last two non-DLS matches, had EXACTLY the same over distribution in the first ten overs (vs South Africa and Zimbabwe).

Not just this either - but in Axar Patel’s overs by that point in the tournament, he’s never started an over bowling at two left-handers, so there’s clearly a reticence to use him in this situation. Match-up breakers and blocking Axar’s entry point by utilising left-handers in partnership are tactical ideas which could cause India great difficulty without more of a flexible approach. India’s usage of Ashwin is more rounded, although in only a quarter of his overs in the World Cup by that point he’s started bowling against two right-handers, so again, there’s a preference for him to be matched-up against his more favourable left-handers.

Basically, opposition teams can take advantage of various predictable tendencies from India’s bowling distribution to ensure batters entry points are likely to manifest themselves when the bowling suits them. This has all got to change.

Speaking of change, this brings me to the end of part one. Part two will be far more data-heavy and will focus on which players need to be phased out, and which players should be phased into the core playing group over the next few years.