Is this India’s best-ever ODI team?

On Sunday, the much-hyped contest between traditional rivals India and Pakistan turned out to be—literally and figuratively—a damp squib. All the buildup to the match focussed on how the teams had to handle the pressure and perform; ultimately, only one team—India—turned up on the field. They played with a confidence and assuredness that fans of another vintage could only dream of, and in clinical fashion, dismantled the Pakistani team. In short, it was business as usual.

For fans who have watched this team in action over the last three calendar years, the result wasn’t entirely unexpected. Since January 2017, India’s record reads: 65 matches played, 46 matches won; a Win-Loss (W/L) ratio of 2.875 (nearly winning 71% of the matches). In this time period, India made the 2017 Champions Trophy final (where they lost to Pakistan), and won all other series apart from the away one in England (where they ran the hosts close), and the recent, unexpected reverse at home to Australia. All this begs the question—is this India’s best-ever ODI team?

There are many ways to look at this question. One way is to check the progression of the team with respect to the overall records (all statistics correct until 18^th June 2019).

Decade	Matches	Won	Lost	W/L	Win%
1970s	13	2	11	0.181	15.38
1980s	155	69	80	0.862	44.52
1990s	257	122	120	1.016	47.47
2000s	307	161	130	1.238	52.44
2010s	237	149	149	1.960	62.87

The overall record certainly suggests so.

India were a pathetic ODI team in their early days and have seen an upward trajectory ever since. Even in the 1980s, when India won two major world tournaments, the team had more losses than wins. The team slowly climbed out of the red in the 1990s and saw an upturn in fortunes in the next decade. And in the present decade, their record is nothing short of commendable. But what if we dice the data further?

Period	Matches	Won	Lost	W/L	Win%
2000-04	153	77	70	1.100	50.32
2005-09	154	84	60	1.400	54.55
2010-14	136	83	45	1.844	61.03
2015-19	101	66	31	2.129	65.35

Taking a closer look at the data since 2000, some more insights emerge. The team that played under Ganguly (mostly) didn’t achieve much success overall despite a strong showing in ICC tournaments; this generation also lost a large number of finals. Under Dravid’s leadership (and later on Dhoni’s), the team’s record improved considerably and India fixed the longstanding chasing problem by discovering fantastic chasers such as Dhoni and Gambhir. And since 2010, under Dhoni and Kohli, the team has performed at another level altogether, comfortably ahead of South Africa and Australia (whose W/L ratios are ~1.7 and ~1.6 respectively). It is in this era that India made the semifinals (or better) of 4 consecutive ICC ODI tournaments, and few would bet against India making it into the top 4 in this edition as well.

What about the personnel?

The easy way to think about it is to ask a follow-up question—how many players from this team are claimants to a spot in all-time India XI or a present-day World XI? Fielding-wise, this is without a doubt India’s best-ever side. With regard to the question posed, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, and M S Dhoni are no-brainer choices. What about Jasprit Bumrah? In spite of him being relatively young, he should walk into the side—this says as much about paucity of quality Indian fast-bowling options as it does about his own ability and potential. With regard to the spin twins, it is still early days but one of them might end up with a mighty ODI record. The rest of them are fairly close as well. If one were to order Indian players on the basis of batting and bowling averages (with a 1000 run and 50 wickets cutoff respectively) to get a rough sense of players’ performances, today’s players crowd the top of the list. Only one name from an earlier era (Sachin Tendulkar, who also played briefly in this era, and Kapil Dev) feature in the top 7; even players such as Shami and Jadhav also have had good starts to their careers, as does Rayudu who didn’t find himself on the plane to England. Granted, these are still early days in today’s players’ careers, but it nonetheless does tell us the level at which they have performed so far.

But what about run inflation you ask? Do you find yourself pooh-poohing today’s batsmen since they score on flat pitches against ordinary bowlers? Where are the bowlers today in the class that earlier players had to face— Waqar Younis, Wasim Akram, Saqlain Mushtaq, Shoaib Akthar, Glenn McGrath, Brett Lee, Shane Warne, Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh, Chaminda Vaas, Muthiah Muralitharan, and the others? Valid question. But also consider at the same time, today’s batsmen are feasting heavily; so shouldn’t bowlers such as Rabada, Kuldeep, Bumrah, Starc, Rashid Khan etc. get credit for doing exceptionally in today’s times? Also, one can only play against the opponents facing them. And, even if runs were “inflation adjusted”, Indian team players feature at the very top of recent statistics as well.

Another way to look at it is to ask how many players from India’s past ODI teams would walk into this squad and improve it? Sachin Tendulkar and Kapil Dev surely; Yuvraj Singh, Virender Sehwag, Anil Kumble and Zaheer Khan could be considered at their peaks, but there would be question marks about some of their fielding abilities. And after this, there is no one else. One could argue that the 2011 World Cup team possibly had equivalent batting in its era, but this was a batting unit that did well for a handful of matches (with at least 3 players dropping off after that).

Is today’s team perfect? Far from it. Though it is more well-balanced, it is still facing a philosophical battle with the present-day English team; then there are well-documented weaknesses with the new ball bowling and middle order dawdling. But probably for the first time in India’s ODI history, the team can defend a low-ish score and can win matches on the basis of bowling as well; earlier Indian teams needed insurance to close out matches as they weren’t similarly equipped.

How does this Indian team compare to the legendary West Indian and Australian teams of yesteryear? See and decide for yourself:

Period	Matches	Won	Lost	W/L	Win%
WI (1973-1989)	193	139	52	2.673	72.02
Aus (1999-2008)	281	205	61	3.360	72.95

The West Indies dominated ODI cricket in its infancy for nearly 2 decades (and played less than 200 matches during the time), winning 72% of the matches played. They had the best bowling attack and had a few champion batsmen as well. But the Australians around the turn of the millennium were from a different planet—they had it all: a pioneering keeper-batsman, batting depth, class-leading fielding, and miserly bowling. No wonder they dominated every team for a decade (nearly 300 matches).

Therefore, though India are the standout ODI team of the decade, they are still a few steps behind the legendary teams of ODI history.  That the champion teams performed at such stratospheric heights for a decade shows what this team is up against. One also suspects that India will have to win the big tournaments consistently to remain in the memory as a champion team; after all, another exceptional team—South Africa—did well (W/L ratio of ~2 between 2005 and 2017) but couldn’t etch themselves in stone as they didn’t have any big, shiny trophy to show at the end of their reign.

 

Moving on from India-Pakistan match frenzy

Dear reader, if you’re an Indian cricket fan (unless you’ve been living under a rock), you must have spent much of the previous Sunday watching  the hyped India-Pakistan match at the 2019 ICC World Cup. The pre-match buzz from both sides of the border built to a crescendo, but the match itself was one-way traffic. Watching outbursts and self-deprecating remarks from passionate supporters of the Pakistan cricket team reminded me of a time when a bad performance from India would evoke similar emotions in me—but not anymore. Of course, it helps that India won this match. After an utterly clinical performance from the Men in Blue, I wondered if it was fair to call it a rivalry anymore, and hence the time is right for reflection.

If you are in the mid-30s as I am, and have grown up watching and supporting the Indian team through the dark days of the 1990s as I have, this might resonate with you. This post is also a departure from the usual commentary and analytical posts that we write up for this paper on a regular basis; this is a post that is more personal in nature—built on recounting how my feelings and attitude towards this match have shifted over time. Right now, in my mind, India-Pakistan matches have lost their traditional sting or relevance, and I have moved on from getting hung up on this matchup.

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Back in the 1990s, when I was growing up, India was clearly the inferior team. Out of the 45 ODI matches played against the neighbour, it won only 17—a W/L ratio of 0.65 or a Win% of 37.7%, you choose). But to strip this contest to mere numbers is an enormous disservice to the context in which these matches were played.

Though I have lived most of my adult life in South India, far removed from the horrors of the aftermath of the Partition and subsequent wars, Pakistan was always known as the enemy country—the country that represented so many things that India wasn’t: it had a state religion, for instance; democracy wasn’t a given; and in a cricketing context, on a note of neat symmetry, it had the kind of players that India hadn’t—great fast bowlers. This also has to be seen from the backdrop of geopolitics; both India and Pakistan had gravitated towards the embrace of superpowers on the other sides of the Cold war (though both were officially non-aligned).

And for a long time, it seemed as if India, the poster-child of the third-world, had chosen the wrong side. India was the underconfident, chubby kid that hadn’t been part of the gang of cool kids in school. Pakistan, the smaller, more-nimble nation had its house in order in the 1980s, or so it seemed. In the words of Amrit Mathur, former India team manager and BCCI administrator:

Telephones worked. One could simply pick up the phone and connect cross-country, as if making a local call back in India. Press boxes in Pakistan’s World Cup venues were well-equipped with telephones and telexes, and there was plenty of food, because the hospitality in Pakistan is always a notch above that in other countries.

There was another first in Pakistan. In the press box at the National Stadium in Karachi, an attendant went about distributing bottled “mineral” water to working journalists. I remember being unsure of whether, as co-hosts, India had progressed that far.

Our size seemed our biggest disadvantage. Millions of brains and twice as many hands but as many hungry stomachs to feed. A per-capita income that was much smaller than the people next door. But there is an upside to having a neighbour. It gives you a reference point to which you are compared to, or a motivating factor; call it sibling rivalry, by another name; or cue in a thousand “Sharma ji ka beta” memes.

My father, who only rarely watched television was suddenly motivated to impulsively buy a big TV—in a show of one-upmanship—because he ran into his neighbour who had recently purchased a new TV at the local electronics dealer. We got a bigger and better TV, of course; never mind that I was in the all-crucial tenth standard. Maybe I should have tried to arrange a meeting earlier rather than badger my dad to get him to the local dealer to check out the various models?

The cricket on the field was the barometer of the national mood. India was a middling team with one world-class, all-weather performer. And yet, we would choose to berate him for not doing enough and take the team across the line. Why? We knew that the others weren’t as capable of moving the needle as he was, so we pinned all our hopes on this one man. And since we didn’t know better and had little else to cling on to, cricket became an outlet for our hopes and aspirations. Watching India-Pakistan matches, especially in Sharjah (that too on a Friday) meant bracing yourself for ritual humiliation on a stage built by Bukhatir.

Period	Matches	Won	Lost	W/L	Win%
1978-1986*	16	8	7	1.142	50.00%
1986-2003*	69	21	45	0.466	30.43%
2003-2019*	47	26	21	1.238	55.32%

*refer to the fateful days of 18^th April 1986 and 1^st March 2003.

Much has been spoken about Miandad’s immortal six in 1986—about how it was a body blow to India’s cricketing self-belief and confidence; Pakistan became India’s cricketing nemesis, and looking at the above record, it certainly seemed so. India’s victories against much stronger Pakistani teams in the World cups of the 1990s seemed like an aberration—a pleasant surprise, even. And knowing all this, it wouldn’t be hard to understand why Venkatesh Prasad’s reply to Aamir Sohail meant so much to Indian fans; it was a rare occasion that an Indian player stood up to the opponent and walked the talk—never mind it came from a player who had half a dozen slower balls and not from a spiritual successor of a tall, strapping fast bowler. You wouldn’t grudge us for gleefully bursting firecrackers after every (rare) Indian victory. The situation demanded it.

Things suddenly changed on 1^st March 2003 when Sachin Tendulkar upper-cut Shoaib Akhtar over third man for six. Though it wasn’t a decisive blow, the hex of Miandad’s six was finally lifted and India have not looked back since. Though India did lose matches and series to Pakistan after that, it didn’t seem catastrophic. And after 2005, India had a W/L record of 1.8, dominating Pakistan ever since. The shoe was suddenly on the other boot—apart from a few high-profile losses (2009 and 2017 Champions Trophy matches come to mind). In fact, India and Pakistan haven’t played as often over the last decade; if they had, I’m pretty sure India would have turned the overall record in its favour from the present 73-55 (in favour of Pakistan).

And suddenly, the point of reference to which we compared ourselves to shifted. We weren’t looking at what the neighbour was up to. We stopped obsessing against Pakistan and focussed on ourselves instead. Not playing matches against Pakistan may have added to this as well (in the current ODI squad, only Dhoni has played test matches against Pakistan) as they had no point of reference. Virat Kohli’s quote before the match summed up the attitude best:

“We’re not focusing on the opposition, so for us no-one’s a threat. For us, no one player matters more than the other for us. It’s about going into the park as the Indian cricket team and taking on whichever team is in front of us…”

Sure, India will surely lose matches to Pakistan in the future. There are going to be days when the Indian team will be bad. But I am lot more secure of my own self right now than I was twenty years ago, when I had to use the crutch of a result to prop up my self-esteem. And just like that, by moving on from the past, the India-Pakistan contest has become what it should have been in the first place—a cricket match.

 

 

An analytical look at an all-time Indian XI at the World Cups

In a few days, India will begin their World Cup campaign against South Africa. On paper, India are one of the stronger sides coming into the big tournament and will look to add a third world title to their kitty. Barring a major debacle, India should finish in the top 4 and make it to the semifinals; and after that, it is a matter of two good knockout matches for any team looking to lift the title and make cricketing history.

Throughout India’s ODI world cup history, several illustrious players have served the Indian team well, bringing honour and distinction in the process. But who are the Indian players who have lit the world stage = at cricket’s biggest tournament? Are they the usual suspects such as Tendulkar, Kapil Dev, Dhoni, Virat Kohli (who are sure-shot walk-ins for an all-time India ODI XI), or are there other unexpected players who have shone? In order to investigate this, we will undertake an analytical exercise to identify the players who have performed at a high level in the World Cup.

First up, some ground rules. Only world cup performances will be considered (with an 8 match and 2 tournament cutoff). This criterion ensures that players don’t just make it on the basis of a few good weeks, but rather that their good performances were spread out over multiple tournaments, thus rewarding long-term consistency.

What might be a good metric to measure ODI performance? Over the years, we have preferred to use (as have others) Batting and Bowling Index ratios (BaI ratio and BoI ratio respectively) to get a sense of the “level” at which a player operated in the period under consideration. Analysts have traditionally multiplied a player’s average and strike rate (economy rate for bowling) and divided it by a baseline to get a ratio that represents how valuable that player was. While this is a good start, it has some limitations. Hence, we have tweaked this to take into consideration run-inflation over the years and position in the batting/bowling order as different players have faced different conditions and circumstances throughout ODI history. So, the baseline of a player is derived based on weighting the number of matches played in a particular World cup edition and at a particular position—the rationale being, it is fairer to compare a player with his counterparts rather than everyone in the batting/bowling order. With this tweak in place, a player’s performances are largely compared to those of a hypothetical, composite player who faced similar opportunities.

Now that we have defined the criteria, let us have a look at how the players have performed with respect to their baselines.

At the top of the order, the peerless Sachin Tendulkar leads the pack having performed at a level that was ~2 times that of the hypothetical average player who got the same batting opportunities during his era. His partner-in-crime, Sourav Ganguly isn’t far off with a BaI ratio of 1.94. Considering that these players played in multiple world cups, this is an exceptional record. The Nawab of Najafgarh has performed at a high level as well, with Sidhu rounding up the top 4. The current openers Rohit Sharma and Shikhar Dhawan (who didn’t make the cut due to the 2 tournament cutoff) could break into this list with a decent showing in the upcoming world cup.

The middle order springs a few surprises. Virat Kohli may have game-leading ODI statistics at the moment, but he is yet to produce his best at the World Cup. His level is only at 1.16 times the average player—of course, the presence of other illustrious peers in the top order hasn’t helped his cause. Rahul Dravid is easily India’s most valuable batsman from the BaI ratio perspective due to his stellar showing at multiple world cups (and he kept wicket in many games as well). Middle-order stars from more than 20 years ago—Azhar and Jadeja—have also performed respectably for India. M S Dhoni, in his World cup matches, hasn’t hit the heights of his otherwise superlative career but still has played at a very good level; but to be honest, there was no other wicketkeeping contender apart from Dravid. Suresh Raina shows the opposite characteristic of Kohli—he may not have extraordinary stats in ODIs but his showing in the World cup has indeed been very good with respect to his peers.

Now come the multi-dimensional players with two strings to their bow—the all-rounders. If single-skill cricketers could only contribute in one way, an all-rounder’s contribution is effectively the sum of batting and bowling contributions, making them extremely valuable to the team.

Batting-wise, Kapil Dev has been class-leading but his bowling has been rather ordinary at the World Cups. On the back of his impressive showing at the victorious 2011 World Cup campaign, Yuvraj Singh has extremely high numbers both in the bowling and batting departments, and he easily makes the cut along with Kapil. The heroes of the 1983 World Cup, Mohinder Amarnath and Madan Lal have slightly contrasting stories to tell with respect to statistics. According to the methodology, Madan Lal has the highest sum and there is no doubting his bowling contributions; but truth be told, this is an anomaly resulting largely because of his batting numbers racked up from low batting positions. In Amarnath’s case, even though his contributions were very valuable in the latter stages of the 1983 campaign, in the overall World Cup picture, they weren’t path-breaking.

Among the pace battery of the 2003 World Cup team, left arm quicks Ashish Nehra and Zaheer Khan edge the senior partner and mentor Srinath in the BoI ratio stakes. Dovetailing with Kapil Dev, this should be a good pace attack on the whole. The man who was blessed with banana swing, Manoj Prabhakar, has also performed at an acceptable level for India. But apart from these 4 (and Kapil), it is slim pickings (Shami and Umesh Yadav did well in 2015 but didn’t qualify due to the criteria). But this might change very soon—one suspects that a couple of fast bowlers from this tournament will break into this list soon.

Rounding up the team are spinners from south India. Though they weren’t necessarily first-choice throughout their careers, Kumble and Ashwin are the top spin bowlers for India according to BoI ratio. Beyond these 2, there is daylight and then Venkatapathy Raju. What about long-serving Harbhajan Singh? Surprisingly, he has very ordinary numbers in the World Cup.

Now that the analysis has revealed the “value” of each player, who makes the final squad? 10 out of 11 places are automatic picks; the odd one out is the solitary middle order slot. Suresh Raina made his runs over 9 innings; now compare this to Sehwag’s (22) and Azhar’s (25) match tallies. Though all 3 satisfy the selection criteria, Suresh Raina has played far fewer matches for his returns and hence he has to unfortunately sit this one out. So do we ask Sehwag to bat at 3? Or do we go with Azhar’s experience at 4? We prefer the latter. Among all the amazing options, we pick Dhoni to captain this fantasy XI.

All-time India World Cup XI: Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, Mohammad Azharuddin, Yuvraj Singh, M S Dhoni (c & wk), Kapil Dev, Ravichandran Ashwin, Anil Kumble, Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra