At 155-2 in the 30th over, with Babar Azam on 50 and Muhammad Rizwan on 47, India could see the writing on the wall. It didn’t make for happy reading – a total of 280-plus for sure, and maybe even in excess of 300. Mohammed Siraj, who had had a quiet start to the competition, was taken for two fours in the first over of his second spell, but perhaps purely because of instinct, Rohit Sharma kept him on.
It was the kind of scenario that Babar feeds on. Take your time, get set and then make the opponents pay. Then came that ball from Siraj, which jagged back ever so slightly. Babar erred in trying to dab it to third man for a single. For me, that shot was on because you don’t expect the ball to jag around on this deck, and that too with a 30-over-old Kookaburra. That was the moment where the game turned on its head. Rizwan followed soon after, bowled by, who else but, Jasprit Bumrah. A slower one, the ever-dependable off-cutter – or off-spin as Bumrah himself jokingly described it – gripped the surface and castled Rizwan. With that went the backbone of the Pakistan innings.
Once those two were back in the pavilion, the rest of the batters were no match for the guile of Kuldeep Yadav. Kuldeep Version 2.0 has been a revelation. His changed run-up, a lot straighter compared to the angular one he had earlier, has bio-mechanically allowed him to get through the crease quicker, culminating in the ball being quicker in the air. Now, with the skill-set Kuldeep has, and the variations that come with his trade, batters need a little extra millisecond to a) pick him better and b) wind up for that big shot. That millisecond is now gone, and with it the extra liberty that the batters had.
On another note, that No. 8 position in the Indian team has been much talked about. The most common theme doing the rounds is that if seven batters can’t do the job, eight wouldn’t be able to either. I’m not sure I buy into that. In the last T20 World Cup against Pakistan, it was R Ashwin at No. 8 who hit Mohammed Nawaz over mid-off to win India the game. The ball before, he had the presence of mind to move slightly towards off stump to pick up a wide. That was a 120-ball game, and now we are in the middle of a 300-ball tournament, so your lower order is of even greater relevance.
That is now remembered as Virat Kohli’s game, but that would not be the case if the No. 8 did not hit that four. In the 2011 World Cup that India won, there were many instances where numbers 8 and 9 bailed them out. Now, when I say bailed them out, I mean they lent a hand to the frontline batter at the other end. Our lower-order batters in the 2011 World Cup were Harbhajan Singh and Ashwin, with multiple Test hundreds, and Zaheer Khan, who could hold his own with the bat. In this edition, our bowlers – Kuldeep, Mohammed Shami, Bumrah and Siraj – do not contribute as much with the bat.