Namma Chennai Diary | Team India Set To Make History By Defending T20 World Cup Title

The way in which India annihilated New Zealand in the chase of a not inconsiderable target of 209 in Raipur suggests that Team India is in shape to take on the challenge of retaining the T20 World Cup title. It remains to be seen if the fact that no team has retained the title, nor won this World Cup thrice is a mere statistical quirk that can be defied.

Team India has the batting guns to take on the challenge. No other team might have put together such a formidable combination of big hitters in their batting order. And to think that Rohit Sharma, the captain of the title winning team and one of the biggest strikers of the new white ball, quit on a high and doesn’t figure in this lineup.

Rohit’s departure left the field open for more specialist talent to fill the slots in the T20 team and a number of them have made the grade already, the most recent one being Ishan Kishan who has made a smart comeback after being ticked off for attitude, behaviour and a propensity to disregard domestic cricket even of the white ball variety.

We have all heard of Bazball and how it lit up Test cricket for a while with just a positive mindset. But Team India’s strikers put the concept of attacking batting from ball one to ball 120 quite some time earlier and it was this aggressive mindset that saw the forging of the campaign to take the cup again, which the Indians did in Barbados in 2024.

The bowling and fielding would have to pick up quite a bit for the team to be hypercompetitive. Cup events are different in the sense that once teams move to the knockout stage, each encounter becomes a do-or-die encounter. To be able to produce all-round cricket in a hurry in 20 overs in three successive matches from the quarter-final to conquering the summit is the big challenge.

The fact that Team India could think of keeping going for the runs in the Powerplay, despite being 6-2 with even that one stroke for six having come from a dropped catch on the line, went to show how brilliant in execution of the outright attack that innings by Ishan was. The idea that he should go in early to get some time in the middle before the big event was good tactical thinking by skipper Suryakumar Yadav.

It is this daring, as shown most consistently by Abhishek Sharna, that makes Team India the hottest favourite in history to win the cup. That Suryakumar Yadav also shed his poor T20i form to make a telling 80 is yet another reason why it was easy to conclude that this is the most striking batting lineup for T20 internationals that Team India has put together in quite a while now.

Of course, there are several lessons to be learnt from the Kiwis who were so good in the ODIs as to win their maiden ODI series in India in the five decades that the two have been meeting in this format since they first ran into each other in the first Prudential World Cup, in England in 1975. And it wasn’t just the individual brilliance of Darryl Mitchell that made the memorable upset possible.

Known as the bridesmaid of cricket for their propensity to finish second, which they did in the World Cup of 2019 too when they were really the moral winners, the Black Caps have been a model of consistency while managing to punch way above their weight. It is their national sporting culture of team-first that serves them well in turning things like the team ladder of merit upside down on the field.

The greatness of the Kiwi cricket culture is they don’t play to the gallery. They believe in strategies to enhance what abilities and skills they have, and they have this ability to adapt to situations in which the toughest come through when the going gets tough. Not even Virat Kohli, in his purple patch of form, could upset New Zealand in a massive chase in the decider. And in their sporting culture, there is no exalted place for team coaches, no supremo to venerate more than the 11 players who make a team and play as one.

(R. Mohan is Resident Editor of Chennai and Tamil Nadu editions of Deccan Chronicle)