WHEN India landed in New Zealand just two days out from the first T20I after being on road for almost three weeks, if they were offered a 3-2 scoreline in the shortest format of the long tour, they would have taken it with both hands.
Which is why, despite losing the last two matches, including the fifth T20I on Sunday — India scored 191/8 before the hosts chased it down in 18 overs — head coach Gautam Gambhir seemed immensely proud of the side. He acknowledged the planning went behind the scenes, but credited the young team, most of them touring the country for the first, for adapting to the conditions. He also had high praise for Shreyas for leading an inexperienced bowling attack and ensuring the result. "I thought that Shreyas has done a fabulous job with so much inexperience in their bowling lineup because as a captain, you're only as good as how your bowlers or your batters perform," Gambhir said.
As it is known by now, the preparations have largely been focussed on the longer formats with the shadow red-ball tour underway. The former India captain said that the planning happens at the highest level knowing what is at stake. Which is why several Test stars will leave the ODI squad after the third match to prepare for the Tests. He felt his job was to make the right calls and not the popular ones, especially while rotating stars within the squad.
"See, planning happens at the BCCI level, and it is very important to prioritize. For Test players, if they only get three days of preparation, that sure is not enough; only after three one-days, if they get 7-8 days of preparation, they can be in their red-ball zone, which is important. More than preparation, being in that red-ball zone is very important because we all know there is a huge difference between red-ball cricket and white-ball cricket under any conditions. So actually, when they get 8-9 days of preparation time, I think that will be a good preparation if they use it really well."
"My job is to take the right decision, not the popular decision. It's very easy for me to be in that dressing room and take all the popular decisions that people want me to take. But my job is to make the dressing room secure, my job is to give enough backing and credit to people who have done really well over the course of a long period of time," said Gambhir.
As is often the case, this press conference from the coach too had some headline-worthy quotes. Asked if there was any fear going into the series with just a practice session, he said his dictionary does not have the word "fear." "That word does not exist in my life," he said, before going on to add how had India lost the series the lone practice session would not have been a talking point.
"We would have been talking again about how bad the Indian team is, that everything went wrong after the World Cup. That's the reality, and there's no shame in it. In India, only results are looked at, nothing else. My job is to see how best we can prepare the players, whether I can share my knowledge with them and try to keep them in a good space, and make them show that they are absolutely aggressive. Because we have played that kind of cricket for the past two and a half years — high risk, high reward. Sometimes we will lose matches, sometimes we will lose one-sided matches, we will lose going forward too, but our philosophy will not change. You want to play that brand of cricket irrespective of whether we are playing in England, Australia, or in India. And that is how it's going to be."
With the focus quickly shifting towards the ODIs, the senior stars have been in Auckland and training for the last few days, Gambhir felt the 50-over leg would depend on how the inexperienced bowling attack rise to the occasion. India, in recent times, have given a number of debuts to pacers and this series will see a fair few of them take the field due to workload management. Mohammed Siraj and Arshdeep Singh will be there, but there is no Prasidh Krishna or Jasprit Bumrah. The focus will be on Auqib Nabi, Anshul Kamboj and Gurnoor Brar. "If we do well in the ODI series moving forward, the credit will go to this bowling attack. In batting, we have experience. But when you come overseas, your bowlers win the series, especially in one-day and Test cricket. So if we go forward and do well in ODI cricket, a lot of credit should be given to these bowlers rather than talking too much about the batters," he said.
Brief scores: India 191/8 in 20 ovs (Ishan 61, Shreyas 50; Milne 4/19) lost to NZ 195/3 in 18 ovs (Seifert 93, Phillips 65 n.o).
