Sporting mythology is funny. It often at the same time means different things to different people. It’s rooted in some strongly held cultural cliches, a few lazy stereotypes, and a very peculiar human need to make sense of an outcome that’s mostly the result of a completely random set of events.
The mythologising involves a fundamentally incorrect understanding of how a sporting contest between roughly equal opponents works. It assumes a given outcome is the result of something deeper than what’s apparent.
Given the level of emotional attachment fans follow a contest with, it’s somewhat hard to stomach the fact that the result is entirely determined by events on the field; and that the slightest change in some in-game variables could’ve forced an opposite outcome.
But that’s an inherent limitation of outcome-oriented analysis. It fails to both account for and adequately understand the principle of randomness – arguably the biggest determinant of margins within which a match is won or lost.
Since sport in modern times is mostly consumed on television and the medium requires it to be presented with a certain tonality for effect, the audience has grown increasingly desperate to find explanations for a team’s performance in meaningless intangibles. Tags like ‘serial winners’, ‘chokers’, ‘stepping-up-when-it-matters’ are thrown about loosely and television commentary that assists a fan’s viewing experience does everything in its power to solidify these notions.
While this tendency is prevalent across all major sports, cricket perhaps takes the crown for allowing these empty labels to completely hijack the discourse. The Australians, in this universe of fanciful imaginations, are supposed to have the genetic code to win tournaments with their winners’ DNA while India on the other hand are the perennial chokers now, having upstaged South Africa – who held on to this (dubious) title for the better part of cricket’s television age.
The World Cup final in Ahmedabad, where Australia comprehensively beat India in front of a jampacked Narendra Modi Stadium, reignited this discourse again. The final was supposed to be the culmination point of the perfect Indian dream. The team had entered the final as firm favourites, having won ten games on the bounce. Australia on the other hand had started slow, struggled to find their best combination and almost made a mess of what should’ve been a straightforward chase in the semifinal.
In their ten-match winning streak, India encountered every possible game scenario and came out unscathed. Their bowlers constantly restricted teams to below-par totals when bowling first on slow tracks and at the same time, batting teams out of the contest on flat pitches was no trouble either.
Skipper Rohit Sharma batted with unmatched flair and put the team in a position of dominance game after game. Virat Kohli cracked the perfect pace for the middle order to bat around him for the rest of the innings. And few had answers to deal with the fast-bowling menace of Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami. What exactly was there to stop the Indian juggernaut other than the big game pressure, the fear of failure, and the burden of expectations?
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Sadly, the outcome of a game of cricket for the most part doesn’t have too much to do with any of the above and instead does have too much to do with that 22-yard strip in the middle of the ground. On a sluggish surface where it’s hard to trust the pace and bounce of the ball, India were at a considerable disadvantage having to bat first after losing the toss.
Barring Sharma and to an extent Kohli, every Indian batsman struggled to time the ball and Australia’s meticulously planned bowling tactics didn’t help much either. Sure, the gravity of the final did play its part; in that, it’s hard to imagine India scoring all of four boundaries over a 40-over stretch on a lesser occasion with their legacies not being written about in real-time.
It’s fair to assume the Indian middle order may perhaps have taken a few more risks and pushed the score more than they did were it not for the hype around what was arguably the biggest match of their careers. It’s impossible to imagine two part-timers (Mitchell Marsh and Travis Head) getting away with four overs between them conceding only nine on any other day. But there’s only so much these psychological factors influence the course of a game between two high-quality teams.
It indeed was the stark contrast in playing conditions in the final from the earlier stages of the tournament that completely stagnated India’s scoring rate and kept them well short of what would’ve been a challenging total. Having to chase a modest score by modern standards and batting on a fairly settled pitch under lights, Australia made light work of the target.
The Australian bowlers didn’t fluster despite the early onslaught by India and stuck to their plan of denying the batters any pace on the ball by constantly bowling into the pitch. Captain Pat Cummins in particular had a day he will never tire of talking about for the rest of his life. But to ignore the competitive advantage he gained at the toss on that day would be a dishonest appraisal of his effort.
The chase was even funnier. The entire top order came with a plan to throw their hands against anything remotely wide while the ball was hard and came decently onto the bat. David Warner and Mitchell Marsh perished to this philosophy while Travis Head managed to survive despite no discernibly different technique and lived to tell the tale of his heroics.
Sure, Head went on to ruthlessly dominate the Indian bowling once the ball stopped moving as viciously but his survival to that point involved an insane amount of luck – not some mentality potion to stand up when it counts that the Australians have secretly gotten hold of.
There’s a very clear and coherent cricketing explanation that highlights the difference in how the two teams performed in the final. But to attribute the result entirely to a fairly unintelligent and rudimentary understanding of cultures is laughably reductive. The cricket media and commentary teams, however, wholeheartedly indulge in this exercise.
Pat Cummins celebrates after winning the 2023 Cricket World Cup. Photo: Twitter/@cricketworldcup
Weak narratives
Much of cricket’s punditry today borrows their perceptions of Australia from the indomitable team under Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting that bagged three World Cup titles on the trot. While the aura of that team indeed was extremely intimidating, the dominance was simply down to them being remarkably better than everyone else.
But even if it’s conceded that cricketing prepotency lent them some mental edge over opponents, it’s fatuous to assume that mentality transcends across eras and that an Australian team today – with no trace whatsoever to that one – continues to be of similar mental makeup. The implication is insincere and borders on a belief in racial supremacy.
Similarly, the narrative formed around the current Indian team is on equally thin grounds. That India has failed to win a relevant trophy in limited-overs tournaments for ten years now is linked to the team’s failure to handle pressure in high-profile knockout games.
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A very cursory glance at these handful of games would reveal India got outclassed at least twice by decisively better oppositions (Australia in the 2015 ODI World Cup, and England in the 2022 T20 World Cup). In the 2019 ODI World Cup, the conditions suited New Zealand’s seam bowling perfectly, whereas India paid a heavy price for losing the toss in their defeats to Sri Lanka and West Indies in the 2014 and 2016 T20 World Cups respectively. The 2017 Champions Trophy thrashing to Pakistan is the only one hard to explain in plain cricketspeak but that it was an anomaly is sufficiently proved by India’s treatment of Pakistan in ODIs on either side of that game.
The two World Test Championship (WTC) final defeats are now added to the list of India’s glorious big-stage failures. This argument perhaps stands on the weakest legs, not that the others are particularly sound. The WTC final is a one-off exhibition Test match played in conditions where India starts at a massive disadvantage against the teams it’s realistically likely to face.
The current Indian Test team’s two series wins in Australia are a far bigger accomplishment than a WTC title, literally invented to infuse artificial excitement in Test cricket. Winning a single Test in Australia is objectively harder than qualifying for and winning the Test championship. For India to have won a series and repeat that again is a generational achievement.
None of this is to suggest fans should have no qualms over India’s lack of silverware. But to imply they lack the bottle to deliver on the proverbial big day is both amateurish and lacks a nuanced understanding of sport.
Certainly, players experience greater pressure to perform on big occasions. This may show up in a more guarded and tentative approach they take. Batsmen may carry more self-doubt to execute some risky shots. But much like most games of cricket, the big ones too swing one way or the other based on the same set of variables – pitch, conditions, toss, and some happenstance.
There was nothing about Virat Kohli’s game that explained the returns of 9, 1, and 1 in the three World Cup semifinals he’d played before the 2023 edition. And even a magnificent hundred in his fourth attempt doesn’t guarantee he could be dismissed cheaply in the next one – should he make it that far again.