By the end of June 2024, two wonderful things happened in Indian cricket. While most of us rejoiced at our men’s team winning the ICC T20 World Cup, the achievement eclipsed the achievements of our women’s cricket team which was simultaneously making the South African team bite the dust.

Let it be ‘ladies first’ for this article, and more so because many of us may not have followed the remarkable performances of Harmanpreet Kaur and company. Smriti Mandhana was undoubtedly the player of the One Day International three-match series. She scored back to back centuries in the first two ODIs and missed the same by just ten runs in the third outing. While the second ODI finished as a close one despite the Indian team having set up a mountain target of 326 runs for a South African victory, the first and third ODIs failed to see any South African challenge worth the name.

Moving from white ball to white dress cricket, the Indian team was once again on top with the opening pair of Shefali Varma and Smriti putting up a record 292 runs for the opening stand. In the process, the Indian team declared the innings at 603 for 6 wicket; the highest ever total accumulated in any women’s Test match. While Shefali scored a double hundred, Smriti scored a century, once again. However, when the Indian team won the Test by 10 wickets, it was spin bowler, Sneh Rana, who was adjudged as the Player of the Match for bagging 10 wickets. She is only the second Indian player after Jhulam Goswami to have bagged 10 wickets in a Test match.

In men’s cricket the scene was very different. It seemed more than once that the Indian team would lose its T20 encounter. The first such occasion seemed to be against Pakistan but some immaculate bowling by our bowlers coupled with some rash attitude of the Pakistani batters end up with an Indian victory. The danger appeared to be the same even in the title contest against South Africa when the opponents required just 30 runs off 30 deliveries, but just one over from Jasprit Bumrah, a great catch by Suryakumar Yadav despite being under tremendous pressure, followed by a miserly penultimate over of just four runs by Arshdeep, turned the probable result of the match upside down in India’s favour.

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Fame is the very first part of his name and he has stood by it. Yashasvi Bhupendra Kumar Jaiswal has come to stay in international cricket and it seems to be on his very own terms. The 22-year-old left-hand batter made his Test debut against the West Indies in July 2023 and joined the select band of cricketers who have scored a century on debut. It just wasn’t an ordinary century but one that went well above the 150 mark to finish at 171. In the history of Test cricket, only ten batters have scored more runs in their debut Tests and the two Indians among that list are Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma.

Knowing that the best place to get the right cricketing impetus at a young age of just twelve years, Yashasvi moved from his village residence of Bhadohi in Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai. Life was tough; there were days when he had to go to sleep hungry but the determination in the young lad decided to overcome it all. He earned a few bucks at times through some part-time business but it was never enough to give a growing boy the nutritious diet required to gain the strength necessary to blossom into a hard-hitting batter.

Yashasvi was fortunate that coach Jwala Singh assessed the potential of the then teenager and took him under his tutelage. Thereafter, there was no looking back for Yashasvi Jaiswal. Yet to achieve his age of majority, Yashasvi scored two hundreds, one double hundred and an unbeaten half century in the Vijay Hazare Trophy.

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“In sports, there’s nothing more satisfying than hearing a big crowd go silent and that’s the aim for us tomorrow,” said Pat Cummins, Australian cricket team Captain, the day before the ICC World Cup final match held on 19 November.

And boy, did his team silence the crowd at the Narendra Modi Stadium that Sunday. The silence was deafening.

I’ve been cricket crazy for well over half of my life now. I still remember — I was home studying for my grade 11 exams, and my dad, who was the most hardcore cricket lover in the world, was watching an India-Pakistan cricket match. I walked into our living room, sank into our couch, and asked him what the fuss was about. Eight hours later, I was well and truly sucked into the cricket frenzy that grips most Indians. And the rest, as they say, is history. I went on to watch every match India played for the next few decades.

So, I was one of the ‘over a billion’ silenced spectators of that World Cup final match a few weeks ago. After the utter heartbreak at losing a match we were so confident of winning subsided, it struck me that there are several life lessons neatly tucked into this loss, which could even translate into New Year’s resolutions for 2024, if you are on the lookout for some.

I’m listing five life lessons for you to ponder on below:

1. Don’t get predictable

The Indian cricket team played sublime cricket all through the tournament. They won all ten matches in the run up to the final. You can’t help but feel for them. But when I think about it, they stuck to the same game plan in every match. The game plan worked like a charm — Rohit Sharma came in, smacked the ball around, got India off to a flying start; once he got out, Virat Kohli aggressively took over… it was a set formula that they’d perfected over ten prior matches. Which brings me to the lesson here — India became predictable.

When you are predictable it’s easy for your opponent to ably counter you. Keep your opponent guessing, have a few plans in the pipeline, change things around constantly… stay unpredictable, stay impossible to conquer.

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In the November 2019 issue of The Teenager Today, many cricket fans would have been surprised at my statistical revelation that Ravindra Jadeja was India’s greatest all-rounder of all time. At that time, his all-rounder’s average (batting average divided by the bowling average) of 1.37 was the best-ever by an Indian cricketer and the sixth best in the world. Since then, Jadeja has fared even better to take that average to 1.51 and displace South Africa’s Shaun Pollock at the all-time fifth place in the world.

On the other hand, since then Ravichandran Ashwin’s all-rounder’s average has slipped by a fraction from 1.16 to 1.13. However, rising up the Test arena is now a third all-rounder for India in the shape of Axar Rajeshbhai Patel, and what may surprise every reader is that in a short Test career of just 11 Tests, Axar has an all-rounder’s average of 2.07 which is far better than any of the best-known in the world; Gary Sobers (1.70), Jacques Kallis (1.65), Imran Khan (1.65) and Keith Miller (1.61).

What is more remarkable about Axar’s achievement is that after the end of eight Test matches in which he represented India, his all-rounder’s average stood at 1.58. However, Axar’s phenomenal rise has come in the last three Test matches against Australia in which he played till the time of this article going to the press. In fact, in the third Test match of the series where most of the Indian batsmen fell cheaply to the Australian spinners, Axar showed the batting technique required to tackle the Australian attack; mixing defence with aggression, he kept the Australian spinner at bay to remain unconquered.

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In 2007, when the inaugural ICC T20 World Cup tournament was to be played, India had hardly any credentials worth the name in the shortest version of the game. So a team under Mahendra Singh Dhoni was dispatched in which many star names were conspicuous by their absence. So no one would have grumbled even if the Indian team had returned without winning any of its matches. However, what followed is now history.

Matters have changed since those yesteryears and now the Indian men’s team is ranked among the best T20 teams in the world. In contrast, the Indian women’s cricket team has yet to inscribe its name on any of the ICC World Cups. The closest that it came to doing so was when under Mithali Raj the Indian team entered the final of the WODI but lost rather badly to the same English team that it had beaten a few days earlier.

The Under-19 inaugural T20 World Cup for the girls was to be played in South Africa in January 2023 and the timing of the tournament could not have been any better for the Indian girls. Although Virat Kohli gave the Indian team a motivational talk before the team’s departure, there were two major factors that turned out to be favourable for the Indian contingent.

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The current Indian cricket team has had the luxury of two genuine all-rounders in the shape of Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja. However, more often than not they have been competing for the same spot in the team specially whenever the Indian team is on an overseas tour and the pitches are not very conducive to spin. Ever since the exit of Kapil Dev, the Indian team has lacked an all-rounder who can form a part of India’s pace battery. For some time, Hardik Pandya seemed to be a bright prospect, but somehow, he has not been able to carry his limited over heroics to the longer version of the game.

The advent of Shardul Thakur, however, has brought in high hopes as one who can be accommodated in Kapil Dev’s rather oversized shoes. This rather fresh entrant to the Indian Test team has proved his worth on foreign soil and his two half centuries in the crucial fourth Test against in the recently-concluded Test Series against England have established beyond doubt that this lad can handle pressure at the highest level of the game.

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For the second time in succession, the selectors of the Indian cricket team have failed, but in the last venture the blame for this failure has to be shared more by the Board of Control for Cricket in India than the selectors or the players.

The final of the Test Championship has been absolutely heart-breaking for Indian cricket fans and supporters of the Indian cricket team. Before the final test, India was in the final by virtue of its heading the points tally with 72 points and this despite the rule for the point system being changed half way through the competition. New Zealand, on the other hand, was a close second with 70 points. It was a hard-earned entry for India into the final but what happened in the final Test of the Championship was not what was expected by any stretch of imagination.

Heading the points tally, India went into the final Test as the favourite to win the Championship mace. On paper, India definitely looked the better side. India had better batsmen and a more balanced bowling attack with three pace men and two world class spinners. Then how and why did things go wrong?

The last Australia tour does not seem to have left any learning for our selectors; the dependence once again seemed to be on past experience than on current form. Take the case of Jasprit Bumrah. Not only has his bowling lost most of his bowling sting but he remains a total liability as a batsman and on many an occasion even as a fielder. Once it was decided to go into the Test with just five recognised batsmen, it would have been only prudent to include Mohd. Siraj in the playing eleven instead of Bumrah. The former may not be a great batman but if averages are to be considered, he scores seven more runs than his counterpart in every innings and is definitely a better fielder.

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A tour Down Under may prove to be the Waterloo for many a cricketer not only because the Australians play very competitive cricket but also because the pitches there are fast and bouncy. While it may be a paradise for the faster bowlers it may be a deluge for batsmen whose batting technique lacks the capability to handle the short pitched deliveries — used mercilessly and frequently by the Australian bowlers.

However, it was that one last innings of Rishabh Rajendra Pant in the last Test against Australia that all too suddenly not only changed the public opinion about him but also his fortunes. The young Rishabh Pant was recognised to have come of age and capable of not only being a responsible batsman but also capable of taking up the responsibility of leading an illustrious team; the latter role having come up accidentally due to an injury to Shreya Iyer, the designated skipper of the Delhi Capitals team in the Indian Premier League. Leading a team in the IPL can be actually more demanding than leading a national team due to the heterogeneous composition of team members with some of them having joined a team for the very first time and little being known about their psychology which at times may be more important than an individual’s playing skills and talent.

Born on 4 October 1997 to Rajendra and Saroj Pant at Roorkee, in the state of Uttarakhand, Rishabh began his cricket training at the Sonnet Cricket Academy, in New Delhi under Tarak Sinha. As Rishabh was not a resident of Delhi, his training was limited to the weekends when he would be accompanied by his mother to the country’s capital. The training brought results when in a match between Delhi and Assam, Rishabh scored 150 runs in the second innings of the match after having lost his wicket irresponsibly in the first innings with his individual score at 35 and when he seemed well set for a big score. An international breakthrough came for Rishabh, in December 2015, when he was named as one of the members of the Under-19 World Cup team.

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No victory seems ever so sweet as in bearding the lion in its own den. After India’s disastrous First Test performance in Australia in the last Border-Gavaskar Trophy, what followed was beyond imagination of all and sundry. A team that in an innings was ignobly crushed at its lowest historical score of just 36 runs was definitely not expected to raise its head again during the rest of the series. However, what followed is now history and will be talked about for years to come.

In the absence of Virat Kohli, who was granted paternity leave after the First Test, the writing for the Indian team seemed to be on the wall, but for the present Indian team, most of whose young guns have been nurtured under the guidance of the legendary Rahul Dravid, surrender is not there in their dictionary. At the end of it all, a new chapter in cricketing history was written at Brisbane where the home team had not lost a Test match in the last 22 years.

One may wonder as to what helped India win the series and perhaps the obvious answer would be the series of injuries to its players, as some of the players who contributed to this historical series may have continued to sit on the bench in the presence of their more illustrious team mates.

Some truth may be concluded regarding my above statement if one is to compare the composition of the Indian team in the first Test with that of the fourth and final Test. Prithvi Shaw with scores of 0 and 4 in the First Test was consigned to the bench as was Wriddhiman Saha who could muster only 13 runs in the two innings. Injuries to Umesh Yadav, Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami made way for two bowlers who were otherwise retained in Australia mainly for bowling at the nets.

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When the inaugural T20 World Championship was to be played, no one gave India even a slender chance of winning the Championship. Some of the better-known names were missing from the Indian squad and Mahendra Singh Pansingh Dhoni was made the scapegoat captain to lead a team that would not lose face even if it returned without a single victory. What happened finally is history but above all it brought into limelight a new potential captain for the Indian cricket team.

Dhoni was no Samson with all his strength in his long hair but a captain who remained cool as a cucumber even under the most stressful situation. It was only a matter of time before M.S. Dhoni would be handed the reins of India cricket to be in the safest of hands. Dhoni appeared at the international arena in December 2004 when he made his One Day International debut against Bangladesh.

Perhaps the month of December had a special significance in Dhoni’s career; he made his Test debut against Sri Lanka in December 2005 and the following December, his T20 debut against South Africa.

Dhoni draws his ancestry from the District of Almora in Uttarakhand but was born in Ranchi, then in the State of Bihar and now in Jharkhand, the district to which his father moved for employment. Since the Bihar youth teams of various age groups were not all that strong, Dhoni had to put up outstanding individual performances to remain in the limelight. However, once in the Indian team, he remained an invaluable asset for the team in all the three forms of the game and once the leader, his achievements remained unparalleled.

In 90 Tests, Dhoni known lovingly as Mahi, scored nearly 5,000 runs at an average of a fraction over 38 but it was his efficiency behind the stumps that accounted for the 256 catches and 38 stumpings. However, Mahi’s achievements in the shorter version of the game remain enviable. In 350 ODIs, he scored 10,773 runs at an average of 50.53 with a highest score of 183 not out and a record number of victims behind the stumps; 321 catches and the number of stumpings with the integers reversed standing at 123; a total of 444 victims. In 98 T20 Internationals, Dhoni scored 1,617 runs at an average of 37.60 and accounted for 91 victims behind the stumps in the form of 54 catches and 37 stumpings.

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