THE WINNING WAY

THE DEPTH OF TALENT IN THIS YOUNG INDIAN SIDE WAS MANIFEST. WHAT WASN'T IN PLAIN SIGHT, THOUGH, IS THE PROCESS OF DISCOVERING AND NURTURING THAT TALENT

- Boria Majumdar

India was in lockdown between March and July 2020 and all sport had come to a standstill. The backrooms of India’s cricket establishment, however, were still abuzz. In May 2020, Ravi Shastri, head coach of the national side, called his deputy Bharat Arun and asked him to work on a new plan. This was for the upcoming Australia tour, scheduled to begin in November and, at the time, still six months away. The plan was a bit counter-intuitive, and “we even argued over it”, says Arun, “but Ravi was like, just spend some time on it and see where it goes”. In a game and in conditions where the quicks try so hard to tempt the offside edge, the Indian bowlers were to take the offside out of the equation. When Arun subsequently asked the team analyst to pull out the stats for Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne—two anchors in the Aussie batting order—they found that “[in] cuts, drives and glides to third man, 70 per cent or more runs had come on the offside”, says Arun. He knew the head coach was onto something, and thus was born the ‘leg-trap plan’ of choking the flow of runs and frustrating the Aussie batsmen into making errors. “Even if Smith scored a hundred—and he is a great player—he had to face 200 balls to get there,” says Arun. (In Sydney, Smith took 200-plus deliveries to get to his only three-figure score in seven completed innings.)

“Why talk only about the Test series?” asked R. Sridhar, India’s fielding coach, during an interaction for this essay. “We were written off after losing the first two ODIs. Many said we wouldn’t win a single game, and when Virat (Kohli) left after the Adelaide Test, we were expected to just cave in.”