Dhoni needs more intelligent support from coach, selectors, board

The Super 8 game against Australia was lost long before the Indian batsmen’s inadequacies against the short and the quick were exposed. The match really was lost when the Indians allowed the Aussies to score 184, which was way above par for the track in Barbados. Remember it’s been mostly a low-scoring affair at the Kensington Oval, with a spongy sort of bounce making fluent strokeplay difficult.

There is no doubt the Indian batsmen made themselves objects of ridicule in the way they shaped up against bouncers, but a lower target would have allowed them to leave the odd bouncer and wait for the ball to lose its bite. This option was taken away by the profligacy of the bowlers, the chief culprit among them being Ravindra Jadeja who conceded a whopping 38 runs in two overs.

It was the same story against the West Indies. India mostly kept the Windies batsmen in check, even after dropping Chris Gayle, except for the couple of overs from the hapless Jadeja who just kept getting thumped for sixes each time he came on to bowl. Of course, the captain MS Dhoni should have kept him out of the playing eleven, let alone give him over after over at critical junctures even after seeing his lack of confidence and match-readiness in previous encounters against, first the South Africans, and then the Aussies. But what about coach Gary Kirsten? Did he have no say in picking the lineup of bowlers for the crucial Super 8 matches?

Clearly the selection of Jadeja was the biggest blunder of India’s
T20 World Cup campaign. It seems to have been guided by his performance in the one-dayers against the South Africans in India before the IPL. The selectors led by Krishnamachari Srikkanth did not take into account his long layoff after he was banned from this year’s IPL. Nor did they take into account the fact that part-time spinners like Jadeja were more likely to be effective in Indian conditions than in the West Indies, and especially Barbados.

If Jadeja can be one of India’s main bowlers, how come Michael Clarke, who almost won a Test match for Australia with his left-arm spin in Mumbai, doesn’t play that role for Australia to accommodate an extra batsman? The answer is simple: Australia relies on at least four specialist bowlers, fiddling only with the fifth bowler’s quota. It’s strange that India, which until recently seemed always in a quandary whether to play five specialist bowlers or four, should now opt for eight batsmen and only three specialist bowlers. And with eight batsmen in the lineup, they crawled along at 7 an over against the Lankans, after being 90 for 1 in 10 overs, in a match they were supposed to win by a margin of 20 runs. It defies logic and exposes a more fundamental problem than the usual litany of complaints about fitness and technique.

No plan B
It’s not that India did not have a plan for the World Cup. It’s just that it did not work, and there was no Plan B.

Srikkanth and Dhoni, who were brand ambassador and captain respectively for Chennai Superkings, seem to have got carried away with their success in using spinners to win IPL3, and thought they could do the same in the West Indies. It’s true the pitches there have slowed down over the years, but still the ball doesn’t grip and turn the way it does on a reddish brown Indian turf, like the one in Navi Mumbai where the IPL semis and final were played.

Even in the so-called spin-friendly St Lucia ground where India won its first round game against the South Africans, the pacers Ashish Nehra and Praveen Kumar had far more economical figures than the spinners. It was hard to time the ball against Nehra and Kumar, because of the dual-paced character of the pitch, but Dhoni did not seem to realise this as he gave them only 5 overs out of 20 while the part-time spinners Jadeja and Yusuf Pathan got their full quota of overs and went for plenty of runs. This was also glossed over in whatever analysis went into retaining the same side for the Super 8 games, although those were to be played in Barbados, which has the only relatively quick, bouncy track left in the West Indies.

No specialists
Dhoni seemed to be in a time warp, imagining he was still captaining a side in Navi Mumbai, not Barbados. But these are also decisions taken by the think tank before the game, and so the onus cannot fall only on the captain. Every modern cricket captain can expect support from a top-notch coach who can step back from the hurly-burly of the action and provide intelligent inputs, and the Indian board is certainly rich enough to be able to afford the best in the business. So what was Gary Kirsten doing? Was he not part of the think tank?

More than fatigue or technique, fielding or fitness, discipline or attitude, what let India down most of all was the poor planning and thinking. What Srikkanth failed to understand was that Chennai won the IPL primarily due to a strong bowling performance by specialists like Bollinger, Ashwin and Muralitharan.

They won because they did not hesitate to think outside the box and use two specialist off-spinners in the same side, simply because they were the best bowlers available for those conditions. That’s not something you see very often. And yet, when it came to the Indian team, even though the choice of the playing eleven with two pacers showed the plan was to rely on spin, only two specialist spinners were sent to the West Indies and only one of them was played in the first two Super 8 games.

Everyone knows Chris Gayle is vulnerable to spin because he doesn’t use his feet much. But India simplified his gameplan by their team selection. All he had to do was to be circumspect against Harbhajan Singh to begin with, and then have a go at Pathan and Jadeja, knowing that they could barely turn the ball and he could just hit through the line without bothering about where the ball pitched. It’s this inability to turn the ball that probably made Jadeja try for yorkers, but his lack of match practice resulted in full-tosses instead which were easily dispatched out of the ground. Piyush Chawla might have been a better bet, especially with his googlies against the left-handed Gayle, but Dhoni seemed to have little faith in him.

Why Amit Mishra, Pragyan Ojha or even Ashwin, who outperformed Chawla by miles in the IPL, were not made available to Dhoni and Kirsten, Srikkanth only knows. That Kirsten is now complaining he was not consulted before the team for Zimbabwe was picked seems to suggest Dhoni and Kirsten have little say in selection, in which case the primary responsibility for the debacle in the Windies should lie with the selectors who picked a weak bowling attack.

Chawla did get to play in the last Super 8 game against the Lankans, which India had to win by 20 runs to sneak into the semis, but here the team contrived to mess things up in another familiar way. After getting off to a great start and coasting to 90 for 1 in 10 overs, India ended up with a paltry 163. Dhoni said after the match that the Lankans bowled really well at the death. What did he expect, that he would score at 12 an over against yorker specialist Lasith Malinga? India lost the plot much earlier, between overs 10 and 15, when they had nine wickets in hand and yet tapped a part-timer spinner like Dilshan around for singles instead of jumping down the track and tonking him. Dilshan bowled two overs for 14 runs, in a match where India was supposed to be desperate to win by a big margin. Contrast that with the 38 that the Aussies took off our part-timer Jadeja, and you can see that it’s in the planning and thinking that India were found short.

In fact, even in the IPL, Chennai often left too much to do for the last five overs, so this appears to be a blind spot that Dhoni has developed. The tactic of keeping wickets in hand for a slog at the end can come unstuck, especially in a T20 game where one or two good overs can upset calculations and usually the best bowlers like Malinga are reserved for the end. Rohit Sharma, the only one who got runs against the Aussies, did not even get to bat against the Lankans, so obviously India failed to fully utilise their resources.

No time to prepare
No amount of lectures to players on technique or discipline can sort out these fundamental issues which are mainly related to administration and selection, planning and strategy. It’s true Dhoni was found wanting in his tactics, but what can you expect if the IPL is scheduled to end just days before the World Cup? Captaincy is mentally draining and Dhoni was pushed to the limit, first in squeezing Chennai into the semis and then in overcoming the iconic Tendulkar’s team in front of a Mumbai crowd. It’s only natural that a dip in intensity will follow an event like that and it was the BCCI that let Indian cricket down by not giving its captain and coach a reasonable period of time to prepare for their World Cup campaign, not so much in match play as in strategy and tactics. It’s true other countries too had players participating in the IPL and some of them have done well in the World Cup, but no other country had their captain and selector caught up with the IPL semis and finals.

It’s not about the IPL being good or bad for Indian cricket; it’s about its apathetic scheduling for which the officials are squarely responsible. If not for the IPL, we would not have known how poor the selection was for the World Cup; so it does serve a purpose as a showcase for talent. It’s another matter that the selectors are blind to the show.

Yuvraj Singh’s poor form and fitness were evident right through the IPL, so why select him and then crib about it now? With a striker like Yuvraj, one can at least be excused for gambling that he will click in a crucial game, but there can be no excuse for not picking any of the spinners on view who were the leading wicket-takers in the IPL. T20 games are not just about containment, matches are usually won by wicket-taking sides as Chennai, Mumbai, and Bangalore demonstrated in the IPL. All these were valuable inputs from the IPL that were totally ignored in whatever strategy discussions were held for the World Cup, if at all.

These are just basics. We’re not even talking of intelligent selection, which should anticipate requirements. For example, an out-of-the-box idea would have been to field the off-colour Ishant Sharma in Barbados. He has always done well in bouncy conditions abroad. The way he rattled the South Africans with bouncers in one match-turning session at the Eden Gardens, suggests that he might have been more than a handful at the Kensington Oval. Ishant Sharma is a tall fast bowler who can hit the deck, and that’s a rare breed in India. Kirsten is right in criticising his omission from the Zimbabwe tour, because it’s a real disservice to Indian cricket to give up on him. It’s on foreign tours that he can get his confidence back after being ground to dust on lifeless wickets in India.

No support systems
What fans and the media should demand from our cricket administrators, selectors and coaches are more intelligent inputs prior to tournaments that will help our team to be more consistent, instead of expecting MSD and co. to keep pulling one rabbit out of the hat after another, against all odds, and then coming down hard on them if they don’t.

As a captain, Dhoni is still a work in progress. In cricketing tactics, he is found wanting from time to time. But what he has achieved both for India and his IPL franchise is more than any other captain has done for India and that is both amazing and beyond anybody’s expectations. Remember that he took on the mantle at a time when Indian cricket was in a shambles, getting thrashed by Bangladesh in the one-day World Cup and then by England in a seven-match series. He is calm and a proven captain who leads by example. He’s also the best bet for the future, given what we have seen of Sehwag and Gambhir as captains of Delhi Daredevils, a team loaded with talent that has been on a decline in the IPL.

What Dhoni needs is better support. A board that will pay heed when the captain sounds a caution about too many extra-curricular demands being made on young players. A selection panel that will be just as accountable as the captain, when it fast-tracks a player (like Murali Vijay) into the T20 opening slot on the strength of a couple of big knocks on a flat track where 470 runs are scored in 40 overs. A coach who will be accountable for strategic blunders in planning and selection of the playing eleven, things that are worked out before the game.

In other words, it’s the administrators, the selectors, and the coach who should bear the cross for the World Cup debacle, along with the captain and players — and in that order.