Much of the thought behind the buildup to last year’s Cricket World Cup was focussed on who would occupy the extremely integral number four position for Team India in the batting lineup during the tournament.
There were numerous auditions, several confirmations, many withdrawals from commitments and whatnot. Eventually, India entered the semifinals with Rishabh Pant and Dinesh Karthik at the number four and five slots respectively; a mismatch, a decision that went haywire despite them having better alternatives at disposal at that very point in time.
Regardless of that, they have tried making changes to that spot, post the debacle in the semifinals; and finally roped in the player who had been knocking the door for so long that it was almost on the verge of breaking down. Shreyas Iyer has been nothing short of remarkable in his short stint as the vital cog in the middle-order for the Indian team so far.
There are a lot of people who would anatomize his batting technique and overlook how he could battle the severe challenges that are on his way soon.
However, there’s another aspect to cricket, its players, the gameplay that the masses tend to disdain quite often. There’s always a human behind the helmet, a personality that backs the brain that carries out those shots, arrogance, an attitude that encompasses the player and carves him into entering the caverns of success that one desires for.
There has been a stark contrast behind how India’s top-order approaches their innings against how their middle-order does. The men who open along with Kohli, coming at number three, always have a sense of innate self-belief, ooze quality and have the ability to be the sole game-changers on their own. However, they never override that dose of confidence either; the self-belief is flexed but hardly ever overemphasized upon. Risks are taken, but often calculated ones. They have found a way to strike an imperious balance between their credence, class and never let it hamper the demands of the situation at that point in time.
India lacks a character like that in the middle. MS Dhoni spent almost a decade and a half seamlessly donning that role, acting as a pillar in the middle-order, an obstacle for the opposition that they simply couldn’t tackle for a considerable period of time. He had that persuasion, that conviction.
Shreyas Iyer throws in a reminder of the same. There is a prototype for a middle-order batsman that selectors often ponder upon whilst searching for a viable option; particularly for the number four slot. That specific player should be comfortable in playing at 20/2 and 220/2; both these situations. His batting should rake of game-awareness, a concrete decision-making ability to figure out the shots to be played at that point in time, how to accelerate or decelerate or stabilize the innings, how-to guide the partner at the opposite end along with him amongst many other factors. He should boast of a certain level of maturity, an understanding of the intensity to which he can stamp his authority over the game.
Iyer might have some trouble with pace bowling. He has at times looked rather a bit uncomfortable in dealing with the outright raw velocity at which the leather is directed towards him. However, he has immensely shown the above-stated factors in his gameplay to be given a chance to cement his spot in the team. Firstly, batting at number four, Iyer would ideally come to bat in the 15-25th over, the mark when the spinners would be operating in tandem. As he has shown, quite ostensibly in recent times, Iyer can send the best of the deliveries from the spinners marauded into the stands.
Streamlining his natural attacking instinctive tendency, Shreyas manages to play the spinners through the line of the delivery and picks the length quite early too. This probably helps him time the deliveries commandingly and hence extract the maximum number of runs through the same. India has missed a player who could steer and improve the scoring rate in the middle overs and Shreyas is someone who does that job efficiently well, from a balanced perspective too.
For far too long the Indian team has meddled with many middle-order players, and hardly given them the requisite number of opportunities at a stretch or back them after superlative public statements to build their confidence gradually. Iyer comes into the team with a dogma that emanates some belief to the men beyond the boundary ropes too. He has come at the back of a stellar domestic career so far and has managed to translate it into international cricket to a huge extent too. With six half-centuries from 11 ODI innings so far, he has a strike rate of 103.7 and has looked ever so reliable in the middle. He appears to be someone who has space to grasp constructive advice upon his game and accordingly act on it adequately to take further progressive steps in his career too. The pacers might trouble him on occasions, but Iyer does seem to be someone who would take inches of a step forward to improve him on that aspect in the coming times.
Additionally, you don’t really fill the loopholes in your side merely by emphasizing on the best players qualitatively or statistically rather. Often, the XI in a team is comprised of individuals who are precisely capable and trained to execute the demands that their position is appropriated with. Shreyas Iyer has that required threshold of level-headedness, match-awareness, the ability to alter the pace of the game according to his own will and then take up the mantle responsibly, on its very head. Give him some time.
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