A very un-Tamil Nadu-like Ranji season
It is January 5, 2017 in Rajkot. A team that always looks extremely strong on paper and does well through most part of the group stage bows out of the tournament during a knock out. It makes the fan in me disappointed and at times irate, seeing how some teams with far lesser big names punch their way up, beautifully signifying that the whole is better than the sum of the parts and play enterprising cricket in making a mark in a Ranji season.
Why cannot Tamil Nadu do this regularly and go one step further and win that title would be the question that me and a countless other TN fans and critics be flummoxed with, year in and year out.
Not on that day. At least not me. TN seemed to have some kind of a satanic fate that never let it discover a potent long-term pace bowling prospect who can be consistently incisive. The 2016-17 season solved this problem when they discovered a troika in Aswin Crist, T Natarajan and K Vignesh.
They bowled together in eight out of the ten games that TN played, often conjuring up inspiring spells that kept the opposition under the heat and accounted for about 65% of the number of wickets picked up by TN in the entire season. The most exciting part of this trio – their average age is 23, and coaches and fans had a lot to look forward to in the future.
The January 5 loss left me craving to see future success than crib about that day. Besides doing most other things as they would usually do every season such as consistent top order batting and spinners doing their job effectively, this pace bowling turnaround was the greatest gain from the last season.
If all these click yet again for TN, they must surely be somewhere near that elusive title for the upcoming season. If you would have put a Gujarat fan next to me and measured our happiness using some index, I would have won.
Fast forward to almost 11 months and TN fare poorly in the group stage and are knocked out of the tournament, having failed to notch up even a single victory in the process. I seek to analyse a few factors that went wrong in these couple of months – as compared to the previous season – for the TN side which had top players like M Vijay, R Ashwin, Dinesh Karthik, Abhinav Mukund and Vijay Shankar represent the side during distinct phases of the season.