How can cricket be defined? To answer that, one would have to pitch a counter question — which cricket are you talking about?

If you are referring to the OG version of it, it would simply be a laidback sport, usually meant for sunny afternoons, in which the batting team and the bowling team tried to outwit each other with skills and strategies. Even in the brutality of the Bodyline, the game and its beloved could afford romanticism.

But modern-day cricket is a beast. More so after the invasion of T20s. It’s no longer a simple game. Romanticism has made way for machismo, while strategically, it has slipped so much into the technological domain that captains and coaches are slaves to data-driven match-ups.

There’s no denying that data is science, and science commands a following. But no amount of technological inputs can replace the human skills that cricket demands even to this day. And that is where the current Indian team is failing time and time again. Despite being an assortment of unmatched talents, Team India is fumbling when challenged. They are not thinking on their feet. It seems they do not have a Plan B either.

Whom would you blame for that? Coach Gautam Gambhir? Captain Suryakumar Yadav? Both to a large extent, but the others in the team cannot escape the allegations either.

Gambhir first. You do not need sources to tell you that his influence on the team’s decisions is the biggest. But despite many a fall, some of them utterly embarrassing, it seems Gambhir hasn’t been able to coach his players about the right way of dealing with a crisis.

After India’s Test series loss to South Africa at home last November, a frustrated Gambhir had blasted his team.

“Accountability and the game situation can never be taught. You can talk about skills, you can work on skills, you can keep talking about the mental aspect of the game, but ultimately when you go in, if you keep putting the team ahead of your own self, not thinking, ‘this is how I play, and this is how I will get the results, I don’t have plan B,’ so sometimes you will get these kind of collapses as well,” the former India opener had said reflecting on the defeat. His words tell you that he found the ailing nerve, but,
given how his team has responded to tough challenges, it appears that they are yet to mend their ways.

In the Super Eight match against South Africa, India were six down with not even 90 on the board, six-odd overs were left chasing an almost 190-run target. Rinku Singh comes out to bat and tries to aim for the stars off the very second ball he faces and gets caught at long-on. With a win looking draped in impossibility, and he being the last recognised batter in the line-up, wasn’t adding precious runs to the total to arrest the free-fall of the net-run rate a better idea? Was it not common sense? Shouldn’t it have been Plan B for India once they realised the mountain was too steep to climb?

Or, take the case of picking Washington Sundar ahead of Axar Patel for the sake of match-ups. Okay, let’s say it made sense, given the presence of two left-handers in South Africa’s top three. But when those two — Quinton de Kock and Ryan Rickelton — were removed by Jasprit Bumrah, Washington was almost rendered jobless. It was as if the captain didn’t know what to do with the off-spinner and so gave him just two overs to bowl, even when he had the third-best economy in the team on the day after Bumrah and Arshdeep Singh. Didn’t Surya have a Plan B to better utilise a bowler whom he chose over the most reliable Axar?

And the less said about the team’s disregard for opposition plans is better. Even after knowing that rival teams would pitch off-spinners to unsettle the Ishan Kishan-Abhishek Sharma duo, the thinktank didn’t bother to tell them ‘listen, let’s not fall into the trap, let’s move on to a Plan B’. The two batters felt it was their divine duty to unleash hell on the opposition right from the word go and as a result, one of the two openers has been out for a duck in four of the five games India have played so far.

It’s okay to lose a game. But when the driver doesn’t alter his path or slow down when there’s a pothole in front of him, it’s not an accident, it’s suicide.

Fact is, the Indian team reeks of overconfidence. The theory of “we will play the way we have been playing in the last couple of years” comes across as a lazy response
to challenges.

It’s just another way of saying that, ‘sorry, we don’t have a Plan B’.