After a hiatus of a year and two months since the 2022 T20 World Cup, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma returned to India’s T20 side for the ongoing series against Afghanistan. Clearly, the coach and selectors want them in the squad for the upcoming T20 World Cup in June, scheduled to be co-hosted by the West Indies and the US.

The question is whether that gives India the best chance to win the title that has eluded them since the inaugural one in 2007. It may seem preposterous to think of dropping the two icons, but it wouldn’t be the first time that seniors have made way for the young guns in this slam-bang format of cricket.

Also read: Why India needs fearless batsmen for T20 success

Come to think of it, none of India’s “Fab Four” of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, and VVS Laxman featured in India’s World Cup-winning T20 side in 2007. They opted out, ostensibly to conserve their energies for the longer formats of the game, little knowing that T20s would storm the world of cricket.

Fortuitously, it opened the door for 26-year-old MS Dhoni to lead the side and 20-year-old Rohit Sharma to show his strike power. That they brought home the trophy was proof of the pudding.

While it was a shot in the dark in 2007, with the seniors staying away, now in 2024 it can be a move informed by evidence. The Indian Premier League (IPL) season preceding this year’s World Cup will showcase the country’s T20 talent. If performance takes precedence over reputation and past glories, the young guns could challenge Kohli and Sharma for their places in the T20 World Cup squad.

India’s facile win over Afghanistan in Mohali and Indore, to take an unassailable 2-0 lead in the current series, came from two blistering unbeaten fifties from Shivam Dube at strike rates of 150 and 198. Dube is a 30-year-old late bloomer who found his mojo after moving to Chennai Super Kings (CSK) in IPL 2022. Under Dhoni’s tutelage, the tall left-hander has become a dangerously consistent hitter, especially against spinners.

He joins three other left-handers who have demonstrated their hitting prowess in the middle order since the last T20 World Cup: Ishan Kishan, Tilak Varma and Rinku Singh. Given the advantage of a left-right combination to throw spinners off their rhythm, one or two of them should be strong contenders for the middle order.

If the selectors want to combine one or two of the upcoming left-handers with established T20 power-hitters like Suryakumar Yadav, KL Rahul and Hardik Pandya, where does that leave Kohli?

He came out of a prolonged slump to again showcase his classy batting in Tests and ODIs over the past year. But when it comes to T20s, what matters most is the strike rate. A 30-plus average is good enough when it is combined with a 150-plus strike rate.

Kohli’s struggle to step up his strike rate against spin in the middle overs has been an issue for a few years now. His 50 in 40 balls in the 2022 T20 World Cup semi-final on a belter of a wicket in Adelaide was too slow. Pandya’s 63 in 33 balls took India to 168 but it was way below par on that wicket. England reached the target with four overs to spare without losing a single wicket.

India’s captain Rohit Sharma walks off the ground after his dissmisal during the 2nd T20I cricket match between Afghanistan and India, at the Holkar Stadium in Indore, Sunday, Jan. 14, 2024.
(PTI)

Risk-aversion in the middle order gets accentuated when India have to bat first and set a target. This was painfully evident in the ODI World Cup final last year when Kohli and Rahul had a 67-run partnership in 18 overs at a strike rate below 4 runs an over.

At this stage of his career, Kohli appears suited to play an anchor role, turning over the strike to his batting partner. But it puts too big an onus on others in the team to keep taking risks without a respite when they face a good spell of bowling. Besides, the anchor role has become antediluvian in T20 cricket where a team rarely gets bowled out.

Kohli himself seems to be looking for a new avatar. He came out all guns blazing in the second match against Afghanistan on Sunday. It didn’t last long, but his 29 in 16 balls showed his intention to do what’s required in today’s T20 cricket. The upcoming IPL season starting on 23 March will give Kohli a chance to show that he’s still up for it.

Although he was amongst the top run-getters in IPL 2023, his strike rate of 140 was sub-optimal for a top order batter. He will want to take that above 150, along with a healthy average, to justify his No.3 position in the Indian T20 World Cup squad.

Rohit Sharma’s problem of late is the opposite of that of Kohli. He has been giving India dynamic starts in ODIs but has failed too often to convert those into big scores. The latest instance was the ODI World Cup final when he went for one shot too many in the last over of the powerplay and fell to Glenn Maxwell for 47.

His pedigree as a hitman in white ball cricket is without question. But we haven’t seen much evidence of that in T20s of late. He got out for ducks in the two games against Afghanistan on Thursday and Sunday. Before that, his last T20 game for India was the World Cup semi-final against England in November 2022 where he scored 27 at a run a ball. With the likes of Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shubman Gill outperforming him in the IPL, Sharma can’t take the opener’s slot for granted.

He has underperformed as a batter for several years in the IPL. Sharma made up for that as a captain by winning five titles for Mumbai Indians—as many as Dhoni has won for CSK. But with the last of those titles coming in 2020, and MI’s decline since then, the management replaced him with Hardik Pandya for this season’s IPL.

Perhaps that’s the way to go for India too if Sharma has another below par performance with the bat in IPL 2024. Pandya showed he’s ready for the mantle of India’s T20 captain by winning the IPL title for Gujarat Titans in his very first outing at the helm in 2022. He almost repeated that feat in 2023.

Suryakumar Yadav showed in the T20 series against Australia and South Africa after last year’s ODI World Cup that he’s more than ready to take over in the absence of the injury-prone Pandya.

India’s T20 cupboard is overflowing with talent. Unless Kohli and Sharma have an outstanding IPL, it may be time to move on and let loose the young guns to bring home the T20 World Cup title that has eluded India since 2007.

Sumit Chakraberty is a writer based in Bengaluru.

Write to us at businessoflife@livemint.com

Also read: 5 things we learnt from cricket in 2023