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There’s winning a game of cricket, and then there is using a part-time spinner at what should be a crucial part of the match. But you actually know it is completely over, and it’s almost for fun.
When Tilak Varma got the ball, Pakistan’s chances were less than 1%. And yes, there were some cricketing reasons to bring him on. Spin was doing well. Pakistan had used a load of them themselves, of course. And so having someone who can bowl a little bit of part-time spin at that point makes sense.
But it’s also pretty funny when you’re bringing on a bowler who has three wickets in 42 T20Is to bowl in a game like this. It can only ever mean two things: you’ve completely won the game, or you’ve completely lost the game. And in this one for India, it obviously meant the former.
After India’s innings, you can make some sort of a case for Pakistan chasing that down. It still would’ve been tough, but at the very least a one-in-four chance seemed likely. By the time Tilak Varma came on, there was almost no chance. And then he got a wicket first ball.
It’s already embarrassing enough that India have brought him on, and now he’s taken a wicket before he’s even had time to warm up. Pakistan had a genuine chance to win this game, and it was not Tilak Varma who ended it.
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This match actually started at the press conference. Well, actually it started in the boardroom. Actually no, it probably started in the political channels. Actually, it probably started in Telegram groups. But the most recent thing that we had seen, of course, was the press conference where Pakistan were like, yeah, we’re obviously happy to go up against Abhishek Sharma. And SKY was like, okay, that’s good, because he is fit again.
But it didn’t quite work in the middle. He made what was a very slow duck for him. Not exactly the kind of innings you expect to see from Abhishek Sharma.
And the problem with a player like Abhishek Sharma – and we’ve seen this before in many dominant opening batters in the T20 format, and even in the one-day format if you want to go back to Brendon McCullum in 2015 – is the games when they don’t make any runs. They’re like energy collapses sometimes. The whole universe just sort of shrinks in. Because when they do go wild, it completely changes what kind of cricket match this is. It goes from being a normal contest to being all about one guy and how quickly he can score. And so when they go out, it really does change the way your team plays.
That isn’t really the case now, because India have gone with Ishan Kishan. It probably wouldn’t even have been the case if Sanju Samson had played. India have decided to just continue to push through.