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The selectors’ job is to pick winning teams, which sounds simultaneously obvious and odd. Winning is the final justification for any team picked on any criterion, from performance to politics. The World Cup is for winning, not building for the future or playing fantastic cricket without a trophy to show for it. Cricket, which for generations emphasised the process over the result, now has a format where the result alone matters.
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India have picked their T20 World Cup squad some three weeks ahead of deadline.
Co-hosts Sri Lanka are the only other team to have done so, announcing a 25-member preliminary squad. Changes can be made later, which means the five-match series against New Zealand next month might have a role to play still.
If India win the World Cup in February-March, then the team will be seen as an inspired selection. If they don’t, the air will be full of ‘I-told-you-so’, and recriminations.
The selectors, of course pick the team before the event, the criticism comes in hindsight.
Not a science
Team selection is not a science because cricket is not only about numbers (if that were the case, a calculator could pick the team based solely on averages and strike-rates). Importantly, selectors make judgement calls. An enduring cliché is: form is temporary, class is permanent. And this is where there is a fundamental divide between team selection for Tests and T20. Class carries greater weight in the longer game, but, as Shubman Gill (among others) has discovered, in T20 form trumps all. Gill is a world-class player, and India’s best batter, but he hasn’t made a 50 in T20I this year.
You could assume that in Test cricket he would play himself into form, as he did so brilliantly on the last England tour where he made his first century outside the subcontinent, and then added another three. But T20 doesn’t look for balance in the Test match sense.
It looks to manage uncertainty, and to have both captain Suryakumar Yadav and vice-captain Gill struggling ahead of the competition might be a compromise too far.
As former England batter and selector Ed Smith has pointed out, T20 is a game of restrictions.
A team plays just 120 deliveries, bowlers can send down only four overs each, there are field restrictions and time limits. T20, which began as a game of possible strokes made consistently has evolved into one of implausible strokes. It hasn’t changed in one sense — see ball hit ball was the original philosophy and that remains — but is unrecognisable in another, in how these shots are made.
Plan and counter-plan
This change has been led by the franchise leagues around the world. Every plan quickly finds a counter-plan among analysts in the opposition. The trick, then, is to break pattern, to become unpredictable and surprise the rivals.
A ‘balanced’ team in a Test match sense might not be a team capable of winning. Sometimes lopsidedness might be the answer. Every team needs a disruptor, a player who is capable of inventing shots spontaneously and is given the confidence by the management to override failures. ‘Balance’ suggests harmony, but often means compromise. India’s young players show a fearlessness and lack of selfishness that the team was once famous for, and this has taken them to the top of the rankings.
Intriguing format
T20 is an intriguing format. What works in one season or tournament might not work at another. Selectors have to be constantly ahead of the curve; specialist selectors might be the norm soon.
Arguments about selection are seldom about cricket, though.
They are about belief — the belief that somewhere, just outside the team, is a player who would have made all the difference. In a game built on glorious uncertainty, that might be the most comforting constant of all.
