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More than a billion pairs of eyes will be trained on Team India when the twelfth edition of cricket’s ultimate quadrennial event gets underway on 5 October. Will Rohit Sharma’s side continue the tradition that was initiated by Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s champion team on 2 April 2011? A host nation has won the title ever since India beat Sri Lanka in the final of the ninth World Cup at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai.
Four years later, Michael Clarke’s Australians beat co-hosts New Zealand in the final of the tenth World Cup on home turf, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, to take the title. And four years after that, Eoin Morgan’s England prevailed in a humdinger of a final against New Zealand at the Lord’s Cricket Ground in London.
This will be the fourth time that the World Cup has been hosted on Indian soil, after 1987, 1996, and 2011. However, it will be the first instance of the tournament being played only in India. We shared hosting duties with Pakistan in 1987. Sri Lanka joined the traditional rivals as co-hosts of the 1996 edition. The 2011 edition was originally scheduled to be played in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, but Pakistan’s hosting rights were withdrawn due to security concerns.
A lot has changed since 2011, of course. An entire generation of cricketers has quit and a new batch has taken over. Two members of the victorious Indian team of 2011 who are still going strong are Virat Kohli and Ravichandran Ashwin. While Kohli is a certainty in the squad, Ashwin might miss out if the selectors decide to go in with spinners who they believe will be more effective in ODIs. That might not be the wisest thing to do, as Ashwin is an experienced hand and a legend of the sport. He is Kohli’s counterpart in a way, considering that the bigger the stage and the greater the pressure, the better he tends to perform.
While the selectors and team management ought to take Ashwin’s extraordinary record into account when they meet to pick the final squad, they will do well to look ahead and not backwards, when it comes to another player. The left-handed Yashasvi Jaiswal is a cricketer of the future and assurance personified, thanks to a succession of high scores in the IPL, as well as a century on his Test debut.
He has missed out on a place in the squad for the Asia Cup, but he should not miss out on the World Cup, which will be played on the same wickets and arenas on which he did so well in the IPL. For him to be selected, a player who is his senior but hardly consistent, will have to be sacrificed, but then, so be it. You need to take bold and proactive calls to win World Cups.
This is where the selectors and team management of 2023 need to take a cue from their predecessors of 2003 and 2011. That India reached the final of the 2003 World Cup and won the 2011 World Cup was not a coincidence. India’s performance in both tournaments was the outcome of meticulous planning and perseverance, not to mention some bold decisions.
The preparations for the 2003 World Cup, which was played in Africa, began nearly a year in advance. A senior player like Rahul Dravid donned the wicketkeeping gauntlets and leg-guards in ODIs, to lend the team balance. It would not be wrong to say that the preparations for 2011 began as many as three years in advance, with the decision to overlook some senior players who were doing well with the bat but were rather slow in the field. Players who could bat decently and were panthers in the field were brought in. There was an outcry, but the people in charge did not budge and focused on the job on hand. They were ultimately proved right.
As followers of Indian cricket, we can only hope that the Indian team stays positive, plans well, and executes its strategies to perfection. If this is done, then it will be very difficult for any of the other nine teams in the fray to prevent Rohit Sharma from lifting the World Cup on the evening of 19 November 2023.
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