How India have found a hero in every crisis

In the long arc of T20 cricket, batting almost always used to gravitate towards a single, central star.

- Somshuvra Laha

India's Abhishek Sharma (L) and Ishan Kishan run between the wickets.

Australia once orbited around David Warner. England's white-ball revolution ‘was inseparable from Jos Buttler. Even India, for much of the last decade, found its T20 identity braided tightly with the genius of Virat Kohli in the middle and Rohit Sharma at the start. Over the past two years, however, India systematically dismantled and democratised that reliance. The result is what you see today.From Abhishek Sharma's uninhibited powerplay assaults to Ishan Kishan’s elastic stroke-play, from Tilak Varma’s middle-overs poise to Suryakumar Yadav's angle-defying audacity, from Shivam Dube’s matchup-based muscle to Hardik Pandya’s dual-role flexibility and Sanju Samson’s high-variance elegance, India’s T20 batting has morphed into a constellation of high-performance generators. Samson’s calm, collected and match-winning 97 on Sunday once again underlines how India have created an effective and aesthetic structural reliance under Gautam Gambhir’s supervision.

‘Not just Samson. Had it not been for Dube’s two quick, pressure-releasing boundaries in the 19th over after Pandya’s dismissal, the asking rate could have been different. Suryakumar's strike rate was only 112.5, but paramount was the 58-run stand he helped stitch with Samson. Ditto for Varma, whose 15-ball 27 helped add another 42 runs. All these contributions compounded together into a win that couldn't have come easy.