New Delhi: The recent spate of bilateral men’s T20s around the world as well as domestic leagues played in England and the Caribbean will finally bear fruit over the next month as the next edition of the Men’s T20 World Cup gets way on Sunday.
Less than a year since captain Aaron Finch lifted the trophy for his Australia side in Dubai, the champions will look to defend their maiden T20 World Cup title on their home turf.
But the Ozzies, as well as the other big teams including India, will have to wait until 22 October for their campaigns to begin in the Super 12 stage. Prior to that, eight teams will compete to join the top 8 by playing three matches each between Sunday and 20 October.
These first-round teams feature former T20 World Cup champions West Indies, who are the only team to win it twice in 2012 and 2016, as well as Sri Lanka, who won in 2014 and were also crowned Asia Cup champions earlier this year.
The two historic heavyweights will be competing with fellow Full Member nations Ireland and Zimbabwe, as well as four Associate Nations — Namibia, Netherlands, Scotland and the United Arab Emirates — for a spot in the Super 12.
The eight teams have been divided into two groups of four. While Sri Lanka, Namibia, Netherlands and the UAE form Group A and will play their matches in Geelong’s Kardinia Park, Group B consists of the West Indies, Zimbabwe, Ireland and Scotland, and its matches will be played in Hobart’s Bellerive Oval.
As with last year’s T20 World Cup, the top two teams in each group at the end of the first round will progress to the Super 12. India will face the Group B winners and the Group A runners-up.
In an increasingly crowded cricket calendar, many names across these squads may be familiar to those who watched this year’s IPL, followed India’s busy bilateral schedule since November 2021 or watched last year’s T20 World Cup.
These include nearly the entire Sri Lanka and West Indies squads, two-thirds of the Zimbabwe and Ireland squads, as well as the half-dozen top performers of the Scotland and Namibia lineups that reached the Super 12 stages less than 12 months ago.
Nevertheless, there remain a handful of lesser-known players who had been overlooked by the mainstream cricketing media and T20 franchise owners, but will be key figures to their respective sides’ successes and failures in the first round.
The UAE’s top order trio
In the eight months since they thrashed more fancied sides in Ireland and Nepal during the qualifying stages, United Arab Emirates have been going through a period of off-field turmoil, surrounding decisions made by their cricket board and head coach Robin Singh, the former Indian cricketer.
In August ahead of the Asia Cup, they sacked their acclaimed Sharjah-born captain Ahmed Raza due to poor ODI results earlier in the summer. They replaced him with Kerala-born Chundangapoyil Rizwan but performances only got worse, including two losses to Hong Kong and Kuwait in the Asia Cup qualifiers. Furthermore, their T20 World Cup squad did not include their most experienced player Rohan Mustafa, much to his disappointment, as he remains among the top T20I all-rounders in the ICC rankings.
Amid this baffling decision, the shining lights for UAE in T20s have been their top three batsmen — Muhammad Waseem, Chirag Suri and Vriitya Arvind. While each are in varying stages of their cricket careers, their numbers speak for themselves and their roles in the team’s top order are clear.
Since the start of the pandemic, the trio have scored the bulk of UAE’s runs and in Waseem and Arvind’s cases, at strike rates of 152 and 138 respectively. Suri is the most experienced of the three and even bagged himself an IPL contract several years ago, but scores noticeably slower, playing the anchor role to strengthen a brittle batting lineup, sans Mustafa.
If the UAE are to get past the Netherlands and Namibia to finish second behind Sri Lanka in Group A, Waseem, Suri and Arvind will all need to put in three career-best performances.
The Netherlands’ home-grown batting allrounder
As with every ICC tournament they have played this century, the Dutch have a much-vaunted seam attack that only gets better with time, thanks to their country’s EU status allowing them to play county cricket and obtain long-term work visas pre-Brexit.
But the county system is a blessing and a curse, as the Dutch home season clashes with the English summer, preventing many of their best players such as Roelof Van der Merwe, Colin Ackermann, Paul Van Meekeren and Timm van der Gugten from representing their side on a regular basis.
As a result, the Dutch have had to field imbalanced second-string sides featuring players, especially batsmen, chosen from their home-grown club cricket league. While promising names such as Vikramjit Singh have emerged, this T20 World Cup comes a few years too early for them.
Amid their steep learning curve in which they conceded the highest ever ODI score to England, one local name stood out from the herd of youngsters — 22-year-old Bas de Leede.
Alongside opener Max O’Dowd and wicketkeeper captain Scott Edwards, de Leede has been a permanent fixture in the side since 2020. He also enjoyed a particularly prolific 2022 in the format, scoring 289 runs at a strike rate of 122, and taking 10 wickets at an economy of 5.63, as the Dutch breezed through qualifiers.
Ireland’s tailender-turned death over hitter
Upon hearing the name George Dockrell, longtime cricket fans may associate him with the teenage tailender who batted at 11 for Ireland’s ODI World Cup side a decade ago and bowled passable left-arm spin.
In the years since, Dockrell had faced the prospect of remaining an Irish cricket also-ran as his bowling abilities declined and he lost his place in the starting XI on numerous occasions, with other figures rising out of the country’s growing domestic set-up.
However, the extended downtimes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic provided Dockrell with the opportunity to reinvent his game and re-market himself entirely in white-ball cricket. He always had a greater ability with the bat than his original position suggested, but it was never really a major priority as he never got the opportunity to bat up the order in any format.
This reinvention has already reaped rewards, as in T20Is since April 2020, Dockrell scored 427 runs at a healthy average of 28.46 and a strike rate of 137, significantly higher than anyone else in the Irish squad.
With one of his most impressive innings of the year coming against India where he smashed 34 not out off 16 balls and took his side within a boundary of a maiden victory against the men in blue, Dockrell thus established himself as Ireland’s most important hitter down the order in death overs.
Favourites to qualify under grey skies
However, these essential players as well as the tournament’s bigger sides will have bigger problems to worry about, thanks to the La Nina season that has disrupted Australia’s home cricketing summer.
Linked with the impacts of climate change, weather could play spoilsport particularly in the state of Victoria, which not only hosts all the Group A matches in Geelong but also two of India’s Super 12 encounters in Melbourne. Several warm-up matches for the first round teams slated to take place in Melbourne were washed out completely earlier this week.
The prospect of rain-shortened low scoring games aside, it doesn’t take expert analysis to determine that Sri Lanka and West Indies come into this first round as clear favourites, though they’re not at the same level as each other.
Sri Lanka have visibly found a new level because new head coach Chris Silverwood has capitalised on the foundations built by his predecessor Mickey Arthur, as evident with their stunning Asia Cup victory and bilateral wins over the likes of Australia.
West Indies, on the other hand, have stuttered and reversed course multiple times under head coach Phil Simmons. Last year’s T20 World Cup squad appeared to be “Kieron Pollard and his semi-retired buddies”, while this year’s is a much fairer reflection of their T20 talent pool, except for Shimron Hetmyer’s missed flight fiasco. Overall, they are still expected to have too much pace and power hitting abilities against teams largely ill-suited to Australian conditions.
Predicting the runners-up is a more complicated matter, but the Netherlands have the edge over Namibia and UAE on paper as a significant number of their squad have either spent their formative years or plied their trade in Australian club cricket and the Big Bash League.
Group B could be more of a dogfight, on the other hand. Scotland boast a long aggressive batting lineup, county-level seamers and the two best left-arm spinners in Associate cricket, but could be rusty due to a lack of game time. Ireland and Zimbabwe bring far more experience in the shortest format but rarely translated it into on-field successes until a marked improvement earlier this year.
However, as far as India are concerned, their Super 12 group would likely feature the West Indies as the Group B winner, and the Netherlands as the Group A runner-up.
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