Is Indian cricket making a mistake by adding more new players every year?
In economics, inflation is a phenomenon where each unit of currency buys one fewer goods and services; consequently, a bagful of money often results in a handful or fistful of goods. Although the economies are somewhat different, the analogy of inflation - the more disposable reserves for fewer utilities - can be related to cricket.
Take T20 cricket for example, where 11 players a side play a game often what just a combined few could do all that’s needed: bowl and bat for 20 overs. But it’s just not what the 11 chosen ones do on the field. It’s also about all who get selected. The rate at which Indian youngsters are making debut - brisker in T20 International (T20I) cricket - one wonders if there’s an element of India “cap inflation”. To set the record straight, India has seen 17 new players making debut in past two years - highest ever in a two-year period since 2009.
Is the number too many for too little, or is it a much-needed steady supply of talent?
Going by the numbers
T20Is especially grab the eyeballs because India has fielded a large battalion at the war front than other formats. Historically, though matches have been few and far between, India have had 72 distinct players across only 91 T20I games since its inception in 2006. That’s a 0.8 player per match ratio, much higher than what it fares in the other formats; 0.23 in ODIs (220 ODI players for 933 matches) and 0.56 in Tests (289 Test players for 518 tests).
Such a high ratio, of players per match, is somewhat explicable because India had to build teams from scratch for T20Is and the team building exercise went on for some time. However, as much of the cricketing world has already figured out the nuances of the game, there are more to such selection spendthrifts.
More than what meets the eyes
Let’s put T20s aside for a while. Cricket had its fair share of transformation and disruption with the turn of the century. One indicator to depict the revolution and its extent is the number of match days at the international level every year. On an average, in the 1990s, India played cricket amounting to approximately 60 days a year (with the latter half of the decade somewhat skewing the data towards higher numerals): meaning one match in six days. Post-2010, the number has an overshoot to approx. Eighty-eight days a year - a growth nearly by a half-century percentage points (47 per cent to be precise, see the green trendline).
If one is to add the IPL days, the upsurge translates to a 70 per cent match-day increment (14 IPL matches per player per year). Quite amazingly, the stellar growth of this ever-expanding cricketing phenomenon has not been adequately bolstered by a proportionate talent growth. Whereas 79 Indian players have played the game at international level in the 1990s across all formats, only 81 have donned the India jerseys in the period from 2010 to 2017. A 3 per cent increase of personnel to share a 70 per cent increase in workload. As the saying goes, “You can do anything, but not everything”, breeding new talents is more a necessity than an indulgence. That it is happening more in T20Is does not mean other formats are right-resourced. That T20Is are causing more talent influx is much-needed for the overall game.
Master of one versus Jack of all
One may broad-brush the game’s all three formats with a monogram, “cricket”. However, the game is not as homogeneous as it seems. That India could do somewhat reasonable in the 1990s with the same set of troupes featuring in both the longer and shorter (then 50-over format) forms of the game is no longer a valid case. Especially, after the emergence of T20 cricket. The good guiding point is to compare cricketers across formats. In the list of ICC’s top 100 players, as one shuffles from the list of Test players to that of ODIs and T20Is, more and more diverse names come to the game’s exterior.
For example, Trinidadian (West Indies), Evin Lewis, ranks third in T20I batting position, but hardly finds himself in ODIs and Tests; a Mohammad Shahzad of Pakistan ranked among the top 10 T20I batsmen, however, does not feature anywhere in the lists of ODIs and Tests.
There are more such names across those lists. No wonder, the format-specific skill sets required makes it obligatory for the selectors to go "horses for courses". This echoes well with what chief selector MSK Prasad had to say post-selection of the ODI squad for the upcoming series against South Africa.
It’s all to move towards the direction of having specialists for different formats of the game in the quest to secure number 1 spots in all three formats.
It takes all kinds to make a World Cup-11
Many argue that India’s recent streak of squillions of wins is at the expense of quality of international cricket. No matter there are some traces of reality in it, more than the number of wins, India's most significant gains have been their youngsters profiting from relatively low-intensity introduction into international cricket.
Chahal’s debut in Zimbabwe in 2016 and Kuldeep’s in Sri Lanka earlier this year resonate well with that. These cricketers are now nearly relocating dominant incumbents, Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja. Add to that, a Rahane finding it tough to get a game in place of incoming Shreyas Iyer.
There are more reasons than one to explain what goes behind forming a squad. A multitude of decision points come to the selection crossroads; raw skills over experience and fresh limbs over those fraught with an excessive workload.
However, most important of all is, to firm up a core team before the Cricket World Cup-2019. That there is everything in such selection (of youngsters) makes it pertinent to the famous Roger Miller lyrics, “It takes all kinds to make a ….,” well, "a World Cup-11."
I started with economics, so it is only befitting to finish with economics. The IPL which is near-synonymous with T20s has fetched an eye-popping Rs 16,500 crore just a couple of months ago. Such snowballing of cricket-economics in India has a lot to do with the emergence of more and more youngsters. That cricket in India is undergoing a rapid lifestyle change with excess proceeds in the shape of quality players is the by-product of a prospering economy, and is less of the “India cap devaluation or inflation”. If there’s anything cautionary or "depreciating" in it, it will be the selectors’ incapability to pick the right talent at the right time for the right spot.
Such failure, though possible, is difficult to gauge. If at all that could be assessed, it should be based on the number of players disappearing after sporadic early appearances vis-à-vis the number of players overstretching their tenure.
Unfortunately, even though the former can be quantified, the latter would be marred with widespread subjectivity. As long as India wins far outpacing the defeats and keeps its future orientation right (by brilliant World Cup 2019 performance and meeting its target to top all formats), one may say, what Indian cricket is witnessing is a sizeable double digit-esque positive real growth adjusted for inflation, or any currency devaluation.