High hopes for Team India

Such is the nature of Team India’s fixture list that the painful loss in the World Cup final to Australia has been consigned to the rearview mirror. It wouldn’t benefit anyone to dwell on the failures of the past for an inordinate amount of time. Even as the Men in Blue jetted off to South Africa, thoughts have turned to the World T20 set to take place in the Caribbean and the USA next June. By which time it will have been more than a decade since India won a global trophy.

The scale of the task cannot be overstated, especially in the shortest format, where the team has failed to reach the final since 2014, when it finished second behind Sri Lanka. In the intervening years, three World T20s had taken place and India, home to the most lucrative and most watched T20 league, struggled to give a good account of itself. One positive development is the news of coach Rahul Dravid expressing his willingness to extend his contract. As for the team that takes the field against South Africa, it is shorn of several star players who have either been injured or opted for a break from the hectic calendar. And so it wouldn’t be prudent to attach too much significance to the outcome of the series, win or lose.

Some of the senior members of the squad such as Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and KL Rahul haven’t featured in a T20 since the galling defeat to England in the semifinal of last year’s World T20. Hardik Pandya, who was touted as the heir apparent of Rohit in the T20 format, has been ruled out until early next year on account of an injury he sustained during the World Cup. In their absence it will be interesting to see how the young blood will cope in a land where India had perennially struggled to adapt to the pace and bounce. Given how admirably, Rohit had led from the front, literally and figuratively with the bat as an opener, in the ODI World Cup there is a widely held viewpoint that he could be back leading the team in T20s soon.

Rohit has made no attempt to conceal his hurt at missing out on the ODI World Cup after having dominated, making light work of every opposition, in a manner never seen before until the team met its Waterloo in the match that mattered the most. At 36, Rohit is running out of time to steer his side to a global conquest for the first time. Meanwhile, Team India fans’ gaze will be trained on players like Rinku Singh and Yashasvi Jaiswal who have been making waves since their debut and of whom much is expected. T20s aside, there is also the small matter of the World Test Championship cycle for India to contend with and the South Africa tour provides a wonderful opportunity to record its maiden Test series triumph after narrowly missing out on the last two occasions.

Indeed, if it goes on to win the two-match Test rubber, it would represent a watershed moment for Team India as South Africa is the only Test playing country, no offence to Ireland and Afghanistan, where a series win has eluded it. A team that is still smarting from its World Cup loss would be smacking its parched lips in anticipation of ending a long wait in the longest form of the game.