How the hell do you beat India?

And other things from the first semi-final

The question right now has to be, how do you beat India? 

Every single team in the World Cup has already asked that and they have come up with nothing. A giant donut. They are at home, in form, and have an incredible bowling lineup. They barely noticed the loss of the world's most useful all rounder Hardik Pandya. They started the tournament with a non-playing allrounder in Shardul Thakur. 

So how do you beat them? New Zealand’s plan was new ball wickets.

There are still bits of New Zealand’s new ball bowlers all over Wankhede. After choosing their opening bowlers, New Zealand made three more bowling changes.

That’s like setting fire to your plan. But New Zealand didn’t start the fire, Rohit Sharma did. 

But why did New Zealand need early wickets? Because India’s biggest weakness is the number eight spot. It’s a bit like knowing they’re the cure to cancer on Jupiter, but there’s no way to get there. Because all you need to do to beat India is dismiss five guys with near 50 averages. 

Oh, you think that is hyperbole, or for clicks, well you are wrong. I noticed this when looking up Rassie van der Dussen’s record. That is when I noticed that India has five of the top five of the top 15 batting averages in ODI cricket.

South Africa for a few years had AB de Villiers and Hashim Amla together. Well, other than India, when they had Dhoni, Kohli, and Rahul and Sharma together. And at that point they would not have all been in the top 15. KL definitely wasn’t. 

Now maybe this happened in an earlier era, and I did go looking. The Australian team of 2007 had Mike Hussey, Michael Clarke, Matt Hayden and Ricky Ponting in the top 15.

But even then Hayden and Ponting were at the back end of that list.  

Batters with a 50+ avearge

This is unprecedented. And you could make it more so if you wanted by saying that only 11 players average over 50 in ODIs, and four of them are playing for India now. T

There’s no doubt that in the last six years, the best players have started averaging much more.

Until 2004, Michael Bevan was the only player to average more than 50 in ODIs, so ten more have been added.

But it gets more fun, Rohit Sharma is not one of the four players to average 50 in this team. Somehow he manages to keep his average just a tick under the magic number. But it would be hard to argue that Rohit is easily top 15 ODI batters of all time. But also that he has ever been better than he is now. Even those fantastical 200 score days were good, but this is the Rohit that had Viv Richards raving almost 16 years back. Just dumping bodies by the side of the road. 

You could put him in the company of Matt Hayden, who is on this but actually shouldn’t be, as in 2007 he wasn’t dismissed at all. And also Brendon McCullum. Who scored at two runs a ball and made the second most runs ever in power plays in 2015. Rohit is in between them. And Rohit sits between them.

Scoring at the second-highest rate ever, with the third highest average and the most runs. This has allowed India to blow teams' new ball bowlers away, meaning that the rest of the batting only has to work on autopilot. 

But he hasn’t done it alone, because look at Shubman Gill too. This is a man who had dengue fever at the start of the World Cup. Now the only ones with a fever, with throbbing joints, severe headaches, pain behind the eyes, swollen glands and vomiting is the bowlers. 

As it currently stands, the only man in the history of ODIs with an average over 60 is Shubman Gill. Will it come down, probably?  But he’s kept this mark here for 2000 runs while scoring at better than a run a ball. 

He is not the only younger player doing well. I made an entire video about Indians batting at number four, why? Because I knew how good Shreyas Iyer was. Could his batting use more rounding? Absolutely. But he is fantastic in this team, because of how well he plays spin. 

It’s not like the others are struggling, but they also aren’t averaging 94 against spin since he walked into ODI cricket in December of 2017. Yeah, drink that in. 

900 runs vs spin since dec 2017

Want me to add some spice to that basic number. That average is great, but he is doing it at better than a run a ball. Along with Glenn Maxwell, his numbers do mot make sense.

I also checked him against the entire database of the last 20 years. He is the only player averaging more than 55 at better than run a ball.

This aint ever happened before. We can talk about him and the short ball, but not without also mentioning him. All well and good focusing on the negative, but not looking at the positive is stupid. 

On that note, shall we talk about the best whipping boy in professional sports, KL Rahul. When I wrote a piece about how KL’s record against good teams completely stands up. One outraged person emailed, commented, and all but hunted me down on the street to tell me that KL was inconsistent. He currently averages 50 in ODIs from more than 2000 runs; not sure how you do that without being consistent. 

Essentially KL is the worst of the Indian top five, which basically makes him Ringo Starr. Everyone wants to be John or Paul, but only Ringo got to voice Thomas the Tank Engine. 

KL is not better than anyone in the top four, but he can backup everyone. He is the world’s most overpaid understudy.

But he can also bat at five, meaning he can fill more roles in this team than anyone. If they lose three early wickets he can be the opener, like against the Australians. If they make a ton of runs he can come in and score quickly as well. To have a player like this and not appreciate it is when you know as a fanbase you are spoiled. 

The first weakness in their batting is SKY at number six. However, by the time he comes in, he’s no longer playing an ODI, but a T20, and he loves those. His ability to be a microwave scorer is perfect with three more anchor-led men ahead of him. 

Then you have number seven, who was in a form slump. But is still one of the best number sevens in the history of ODI cricket.

Yes he can’t always hit spin, yes he could bat faster at times. But being he is a frontline bowler, and a top five at least number seven, it’s like complaining that you only won a million dollars in the lotto. 

So it is true that Mohammed Shami is one of the worst number eights in this World Cup, actually probably just the worst.

Yes. But the question is, how do you get to him. 

Oh, and I forgot someone. Yeah, at number two is Virat Kohli, with more than 10,000 runs at nearly an average of 60.  There is another fun stat on him. 

Yeah, you might have heard that Virat Kohli has the most hundreds in ODI cricket. That is pretty good. He is a good player. Good. 

So to get through to Mohammed Shami’s shitty batting, you only need to go through an opener who makes a lot of double hundreds, the other with the best average ever, a guy who just set the record for most hundreds, a kid who smears spin, India’s Ringo Starr, a T20 enforcer and one of the greatest number sevens ever. Simple.

This is all the career batting averages of the Indian players.

Clearly the runs drop off around the six and seven mark and then disappear entirely at the number eight position. But I thought it was worth looking at how many runs the top seven would make if they all just made their averages. 

The answer to that is if their top seven alone made their career marks, India would make 330. 

This site looks at the history of cricket, tries to put some into context, dig deep and hurdle recency bias. But think about it this way, India has the bowling lineup with the best strike rate ever, and a batting card that yawns out 330. 

How the hell do you beat India?