Bossing white-ball cricket with eyes on new frontiers

After another T20 title win, India must ace tough conditions at the ODI World Cup

- Rasesh Mandani rasesh,mandani@htlive com

India’s white-ball cricket was at its lowest phase at the 2021 and 2022 T20 World Cups. Having failed to get out of their group in the UAE, they were bulldozed by England in the semifinals next edition, losing by 10 wickets in the semifinals in Adelaide. The eventual winners went past the 169-run target set by India with four overs to spare.

India’s inaugural T20 World Cup triumph in 2007 led to the launch of the Indian Premier League. But it took the back-to-back setbacks to finally jettison a conservative batting approach and embrace the all-out attacking philosophy that league cricket embodied.

Lessons learnt from the T20 World Cup setbacks hastened a limited-over revamp that took India to within one win of the 2023 ODI World Cup. Since then India have become the white-ball powerhouse, winning the 2024 and 2026 T20 World Cups, and the 2025 Champions Trophy and T20 Asia Cup.

As India bask in the glory of their latest triumph, the 96-run victory over New Zealand in the final on Sunday—after scoring 255, the highest total in a final—shows how far they have come to dominate white-ball cricket. Be it at home or in conditions not too different from that in the 2024 competition in the USA and the Caribbean, India seemed to have surged well ahead of their main rivals.