Surprises Aside, Are IPL 2018 Performances a Worry for Team India?
With varied performances, the Indian cricketers have left much to be desired in IPL 2018.
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With nothing but perfection expected from the Indian cricket team at all times, the players have to bear the brunt of intense scrutiny and analysis in every series they participate in. The Indian Premier League too is no different and while it has seen some brilliant individual performances by the Indian international stars, the overall performance of the T20I side has been dismal. A culmination of jaded legs with the failure to push towards higher glories has meant that the Indian players have often been under the radar.
Though the emergence of Sanju Samson, Shreyas Iyer, Rishabh Pant, Prithvi Shaw and Shubman Gill has helped divert attention from the poor form of the Rohit Sharmas and the Jasprit Bumrahs, the indifferent form of the stalwarts does remain a cause of worry ahead of the tour to Ireland and England. Even if they can change their fortunes in Europe, they left much to be desired in the eleventh edition of the IPL.
Surprise Performers in IPL 2018
The three surprise performers this season have been wicket-keeper batsmen KL Rahul, Dinesh Karthik and MS Dhoni. While the presence of Dhoni in the T20I squad had became the matter of much debate, KL Rahul’s absence despite some stupendous knocks had risen eyebrows.
Though Dhoni had a strike-rate of 140.41 in the T20I circuit in the last two years, it had been his inability to finish off games when the team needed him the most that hurt India. Often, the former skipper would come into the crease and score at run-a-ball, taking around 23 deliveries on an average to settle in. By this time, the match would have slipped beyond India’s grasp and even when Dhoni smacked a few sixes in the end, it was often too late. His failure to find the gaps led to cries over his departure from the shortest format of the game, but this season of the IPL has changed just that.
He has been timing the balls to perfection and his 29 sixes show how dangerous he has been – almost like the Dhoni of folklore!
KL Rahul’s story meanwhile is vastly different and while he had two half-centuries in December in T20Is against Sri Lanka, he was benched in the series in South Africa. With India already possessing Rohit and Shikhar Dhawan at the top and KLR being an opener as well, Virat Kohli kept him away from the final 11 despite his T20I strike-rate of 146.62. However, a slew of phenomenal performances for the Kings XI Punjab this year as an opener, in which he has scored 652 runs at a strike-rate of 160.98, might mean that KLR opens the innings in England, while Rohit Sharma is pushed to number 4, a position he is familiar with.
Karthik has been in and out of the team due to the presence of Dhoni and many had even claimed his knock of 29 in just 8 balls in the Nidahas Trophy finals was a fluke. However, the KKR skipper has carried on the momentum, scoring 412 runs with a strike-rate of 152.59. He has held the young team together with his consistent scores and remains one of the surprise performers this season.
Unexceptional Indian Players in IPL 2018
Much was expected from Suresh Raina, Rohit Sharma, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Bumrah – India’s biggest match-winners in recent years.
Rohit in particular had been in fine form before the IPL started, with a strike-rate of 158.60 since October 2017 and he, along with Dhawan, had been giving India blazing starts at the top. But he has been unable to put up a decent show, scoring just 273 runs in 12 matches with two fifties. While the numbers might not be deemed as poor, it did not create impact which was hoped from him.
Raina has scored 315 runs from 11 games but with only 9 sixes this season, he has not forced one to sit up and observe his feats. He has been overshadowed by the likes of Ambati Rayudu, Shane Watson and Dhoni in the Chennai franchise, very similar to Mumbai Indians’ Bumrah, who impressed only in the 50th match of the season, as he picked up 3/15 in his 4 overs against Punjab.
The biggest disappointment has been the performance of Bhuvi. The speedster has just grabbed 8 wickets in 8 games and has conceded more than 8 runs an over for the first time in an IPL season. The fact that Sunrisers Hyderabad are one of the strongest bowling units despite Bhuvi’s below-par performance shows the impact of Rashid Khan, Sandeep Sharma and Siddarth Kaul, who has received a call-up to the national team after picking up 13 wickets this season.
Below-par Indian Cricketers in IPL 2018
Bhuvi’s SRH teammate Manish Pandey was having one of his worst IPL seasons as he had scored only 189 runs at an average of 21 before he struck a well-crafted 62 in just 38 deliveries against the RCB. His strike-rate of 111.17 before the match was unacceptable in the format and it was rather surprising to see him being picked in the T20I squad ahead of Rayudu or Pant, who have been brilliant with the bat. However, he showed his mettle in the high-scoring encounter, where he kept his nerve to almost hand Hyderabad a win.
Anpther two cricketers from whom much was anticipated, Yuzvendra Chahal and Kuldeep Yadav, have failed to live up to the hype.
After they had bamboozled the opponents in South Africa, their respective teams had wished for an encore, only to be left disappointed.
Axar Patel, Vijay Shankar, Shardul Thakur, Jaydev Unadkat, Deepak Hooda and Mohammad Siraj were players selected in the last two T20I series that featured India but after a string of unimpressive shows, they have missed the cut for the tour next month.
Kohli, Hardik Pandya and Dhawan have been performing consistently and India would hope that despite the varied performances of their stars in the T20 league, they can come together to put on dominating performances on the tour from next month.
*All stats are updated till Royal Challengers Bangalore’s game with Sunrisers Hyderabad on 17 May 2018.
(Sarah Waris is a postgraduate in English Literature has taken on the tough task of limiting the mystic world of cricket to a few hundred words. She spends her hours gorging on food and blabbering nineteen to the dozen while awaiting the next Indian sporting triumph. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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