India have played so well... should you be worried?
"Murphy's law doesn't mean something bad will happen. What it means is whatever can happen will happen."
In the super-hit sci-fi drama Interstellar, an astronaut, Cooper explains this to her teenage daughter, Murph. She had angrily asked him why he named her after Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr., the aerospace engineer who was known for his adage, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
Cooper's positive interpretation of the law calmed Murph down and made her smile. Indeed, the adage is a popular but watered-down version of Murphy's original quote: "If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way."
The shortened law makes it seem like something negative. Academicians have said Murphy didn't intend it to be a warning. Instead, it was a precautionary note that if you leave a fault in a machine's design it'll be exposed someday.
Something similar rings true for Rohit Sharma's India in the 2023 World Cup. They've played well but because the scars of previous ICC tournaments are still fresh, there's tension in the air before Wednesday's semi-final against New Zealand which can roughly be put into the words as: "What will go wrong this time?"
But is there a Cooper-style positive spin to it? Let’s start from the start.
Top-order collapse — who?
Before the tournament even began the team's journey was interpreted like this - win some, lose some in the league stage, reach the semi-finals, collapse in the powerplay against swing bowlers, and go home.
The voices peaked in the first match itself when Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc shot India down to 2/3 in the second over. That's two runs for three wickets. To quote the GTA meme, it was simply "Ah, s***, here we go again."
But Virat Kohli and KL Rahul played villains. They put up a 165-run stand and killed the chase by the time the former got out in the 38th over. This wasn't luck. Kohli was dropped at the start of the chase but the only flaw in Rahul's knock was the match-winning six which he later said he hit "too well" for his liking.
Rahul had been trained for just this role — a specialist at changing gears — at No. 5 for the past three years. He suffered multiple injuries but was always backed.
When Ishan Kishan played the crucial 82 (81) against Pakistan in the 2023 Asia Cup group stage, many experts said he should be India's first wicketkeeper for the World Cup but not Dravid.
Kishan wasn't just any backup either. When you can have only four reserves in your World Cup team, there's ideal space for just one pacer, one spinner, one all-rounder, and one batter.
As that batter (plus 'keeper), Kishan was specifically given time in both middle-order and top-order positions before the World Cup. Even when he failed, he was backed.
Now, like the 2019 World Cup, India have been lucky with either of Rohit and Kohli making it big in almost every match. But unlike 2019, when Gill was unavailable, India didn’t need to reshuffle their entire batting order. This was because the first 11 had played a lot in their favorite position and the backup batter was versatile enough to play anywhere.
Shreyas Iyer's situation was no different to Rahul's or Kishan’s. Despite being India's best batter at No. 4 since the 2019 World Cup, there were calls galore to drop him after every poor knock. Dravid stuck with him despite the short-ball troubles and injury issues and he improved and reposed the faith immediately.
In 2019, India had the best average in the middle overs. In 2023, it’s almost identical and still the best. However, in 2019, India used seven players in the middle order (number four-seven) who jointly scored 804 runs at an average of 33.50 and a strike rate of 89.83. In 2023, they used five players to score 977 runs at 57.47 and 103.38, respectively.
In 2019, India required Rohit, Kohli, Shikhar Dhawan/Rahul to score runs even in the middle overs. In 2023, the resources have been distributed.
India are yet to look back after the top-order collapse vs Australia
The results are obvious now but after the first match, it felt too early to say whether India had fixed their most popular problem of top-order collapses.
From the second match onwards, Rohit made sure the problem didn't arise at all. Shedding the old way of building runs with Dhawan or Rahul on the other end, he became the most brutal destroyer of the new ball and the new-ball bowlers' confidence. No one in the top-10 run-scorers of the tournament has a better strike rate than him.
Against New Zealand in Dharamshala, he gave aggressive treatment to Trent Boult and Matt Henry (the same bowlers who tormented India in the 2019 World Cup semi-finals) and neither could recover.
Against South Africa in Kolkata, he was criticized for playing a 'rash' shot that saw him get out for 40 (24). But as it turned out, it was an inning where he tried to make the most of the new ball on a pitch that got slower and tedious to bat on. That knock made sure Kohli and Iyer could take their time in the middle.
It takes conviction of the highest order to keep playing such knocks when you are the captain, and everything you do is put under the scanner more than others. It would have taken courage to continue even after Hardik Pandya got injured.
India were never supposed to deal with Pandya's injury. When Dhawan’s injury derailed their campaign, how could they recover from the most crucial player to the team's balance, the irreplaceable quality enhancer? But India did replace him. With two backup players. And got better.
There's no X-factor in India's 2023 World Cup line-up
Playing with five batters, a wicketkeeper, and five bowlers looked like going back by 10 years. It was completely at loggerheads with the 2019 World Cup strategy where the talk was more about the need for an 'X-factor', whether that was Rishabh Pant or Vijay Shankar. The thought was you needed something new to win, to awe and shock the opponents.
That strategy could have worked too, who knows? But a lack of X-factors in the current Indian set-up is telling. There's no one to win games on his own. But that’s not a bad thing. It also means there’s no pressure on one young batter or bowler. The 11 is made of players who have done a certain job and are expected to do just that, not less, not more.
Instead, there's absolute role clarity - Rohit gives quick starts and Shubman Gill looks to time the ball. After that, every batter plays according to the situation. Kohli and Iyer rebuild/build on, Rahul looks to make 100 (95)/100 (50), Suryakumar is free to invent and hit the spinners, and Jadeja does the same vs pacers.
Suryakumar and Jadeja's lack of contributions before the World Cup were also tapered on when they got a chance against South Africa.
Had Iyer and Rahul not been as good in the middle order, the focus would have surely shifted to, ‘Oh what is X-factor Suryakumar doing?’ Now, he has quietly gone about giving India two or three big finishes and no one seems to laud or criticize because it’s his job.
The same goes for the bowlers. Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj take the new ball, Mohammed Shami comes first-change, Kuldeep Yadav and Ravindra Jadeja finish things off. The lack of X-factor focus means that when someone like Siraj has struggled a bit, others have stepped up together.
There's no need to speak much about Kohli and Bumrah. It was once feared that the team might be doing too much 'building around' its best two players. Now, ironically, by spreading the responsibility, the team has unlocked Kohli and Bumrah further. It has allowed them to go about their processes and just accumulate runs or dot balls. They win and the team wins.
The law of averages might not apply to India
India have ticked off every single box they needed to before the semis. After the Australia match, they haven't even given any opposition even a whiff of a chance.
It has almost looked like all opponents have come up with strategies that have worked against India in the past. But the hosts, despite playing almost the same 11 for the last many years (bar injuries), have looked like a different beast altogether.
That’s because none of the old weaknesses — slow starts, non-reliable middle-order, lack of powerplay wickets, dependency on two or three players, lack of good finishes — still exist. It’s all been rolled over neatly and precisely with good Plan Bs in place.
Consequently, different players have stepped up to lead wins at nine different venues. No other team has played at as many different venues and no other team has gone more than three matches without being troubled, let alone seven.
Still, some people believe that it's good to have a loss before the semis, just so you can go through all the bad luck and mistakes before the big stage. But out of the 12 World Cups so far, four (West Indies in 1975 and 1979 and Australia in 2003 and 2007) have been won by sides going through it unbeaten.
That's one-third. It doesn't happen in many sports. Momentum plays a big role in cricket. The ‘fielding medal’ ceremony in the dressing room only got much better, more wholesome, and funnier after each win. Sprinkle a couple of losses in there and that morale would’ve been the same, even if India had still qualified at the top.
It has been proven that there’s nothing like 'knock out' pressure for the Men in Blue either. It doesn't affect their 'intent' or effort. It’s just weaknesses springing up and the wrong time.
The team in the 2022 T20 World Cup had some glaring bowling issues, which were almost like a ticking time bomb. The 2019 World Cup semi-final and the 2017 Champions Trophy final looked like aberrations but the signs of an undercooked middle-order were always there.
There's no such clear sign in the current team yet. Even the sixth-bowling option (more important for mid-game injuries than team balance), looks to have been somewhat solved with the Netherlands match. Not ideal, but for the current strategy, it works.
But, but, cricket's life at the end of the day. Anything that can go wrong, will probably go wrong against New Zealand at the Wankhede. But that doesn't mean something bad will happen. It only means that anything that can happen will happen.
India have made sure that there are as few faults in their design and as few possibilities of a catastrophe, as possible. They are as close to unbeatable as those great Australian and West Indian teams. They know, it seems, that Murphy's law also means that if you've made sure only good can happen, it will.