The Warner-Marsh Duo Gifts Australia Their First Ever T20 World Cup, New Zealand Remains Runners-Up Again!

Australia added to its feathers the first ever T20 World Cup by prevailing over New Zealand by  8 wickets in the final of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup-2021 in Dubai today. The final match has also turned out to be not as absorbing as the two semi-finals with the Australian chase seeming quite easy and the inevitable ‘toss advantage’ seemed to have sealed the match in their favor. As we have seen the team winning the toss invariably chooses to field first, restricts the opposition to less than 180 and wins the match by hauling up the target chasing with the dew or any favoring factor. Of course, in the semi-finals it was Daryl Mitchell’s charge at the death that won it for New Zealand against England and a similar finishing act was carried out by Matthew Wade for Australia upsetting a shocked Pakistan at the death. However, we had said earlier that the chasing team always overhauls the target, somehow, as has been observed throughout this tournament. This important final of a World Cup truly turns out to be another strong cause for tossing away the toss. This is not to deny Australia the credit for its professionalism and aggressiveness  whenever needed in crunch matches.

 

As in the semi-final against Pakistan Australia lost captain Aaron Finch early in the final too, but the team accelerated thanks to some real hitting by David Warner and Mitchell Marsh. Australia hauled up the first fifty runs in the sixth over while New Zealand took as many as nine overs. Thanks to the duo the ‘big brother’ fully dominated the proceedings as no Kiwi ‘kid’ bowler could control the free flow of runs all around the park. Warner raced to his 50 with a towering six off Neesham in 34 balls at the team score of 95/1 in the 11^th over, almost cruising to victory at that stage. As a huge relief for the Kiwis Warner (53, declared the Player of the Tournament) fell soon to Boult in the 13^th over, perhaps a tad too late for a comeback. Mitchell Marsh (77 not out in 50 balls) joined by Glen Maxwell (28 not out in 18 balls) treated the Kiwi bowlers with disdain hauling up the target with 7 balls to spare, Maxwell hitting the winning boundary.

 

Earlier, put into bat and thanks to Williamson’s masterful innings of 85 off 34 balls, the highest individual score by a captain in this World Cup, New Zealand set a target of 173 runs to win for Australia, and it was only a fighting total which their bowlers were miserably unable to defend. Except for Guptill (28) and Phillips (18) no NZ batsmen could contribute much while they had the launching pad for a 190+ total; the hero of the semi-final Daryl Mitchell could only score 11 runs in 8 balls and was the first to go. The last two overs were real dampeners for NZ despite the big-hitting partner of Mitchell in the semi-final, James Neesham, being very much around, finally remaining not out with just 13 runs. For Australia Hazelwood found his touch and captured three wickets for only 16 in 4 overs while all other Aussie bowlers were hit around the park, most surprisingly strike bowler Starc was hit for 60 runs in his 4 overs.

 

The jinx of ‘so close yet so far’ remains for the most deserving and the World Test Champion team of New Zealand still without any of the ICC World Cups in the shorter formats. They came very close to winning the ODI (one-day international) World Cup Finals of 2015 against Australia and of 2019 against England, but finally losing under controversial circumstances in the latter. Today, in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup-2021 final too New Zealand failed to prevail over big brother Australia. They again turned up as the runners-up yet again in an ICC World Cup tournament.

 

Thus, curtains on the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup-2021, a tournament scheduled to be held in Australia in 2020, venues changed twice and finally unfolding in Oman and UAE, after nearly a month of competitive cricket involving national pride, but impacted to some extent by low-scoring slow pitches and the advantage for the toss-winning team. There’d be another T20 World Cup in Australia in 2022, and hopefully, the pandemic permitting, that will be much tougher, competitive and absorbing. For the moment New Zealand is coming to India this month for 3 T20I matches and 2-match Test Series. Rohit Sharma will lead the team, several star players rested including Kohli, in the T20I matches starting from the 17^th of November 2021. It is not yet clear about the captain of the Test series; if Kohli continues to be rested then Ajikya Rahane who led India to a spectacular victory against Australia in Australia is likely to be given the cap.

T20 World Cup Final: Australia Vs New Zealand!

After many twists and turns and tosses the two neighbors down under have come around to meet each other in the Final of the ICC T20 Men’s World Cup-2021 to be held on Sunday, 14^thNovember in Dubai. Australia, the Group-1 second-spot holder today became the first team of the tournament to beat Pakistan by 5 wickets with one over to spare in a thriller of a second semi-final match in  Dubai. Pakistan captain Babar Azam lost the toss to Australia captain Finch this time in this crucial encounter and was naturally put into bat. The Pakistan fans crowding the stadium in huge numbers were in tremendous spirits witnessing their team winning all the matches with ease and brilliance with good consistent batting and having perhaps the best bowling attack of the tournament.  

 

The in-form opener duo Azam and Rizwan made an electrifying start firing all cylinders as Pakistan tried their best to neutralize the loss of the toss and the possible dew factor later in the evening. There were three good knocks: 67 runs by Rizwan, 55 not out by Zaman and 39 by Babar. They put up a challenging 177 target to win for Australia, but perhaps not enough. A target of 190+ looked possible as Pakistan had wickets in hand, but failures of Asif and Malik made the total fall short by at least 15 runs. The Aussie bowlers were delivering too many loose balls, no-balls, wides and mostly not able to maintain tight length helping Pakistan accelerate. The way Hazelwood and Cummins were hit around the park with a lot of ease reflected the determination of the Pak batsmen to set up a challenging target and enter the final where they were to meet New Zealand whom they had beaten already in a Group-2 match.    

 

The Aussies started badly, losing captain Finch in the first over to the fiery Shaheen Afridi and Pakistan prevented them from racing away to a good powerplay score. Only from the 4^th over David Warner and Marsh started playing attacking shots achieving the 50-run mark in the 6^th over. Marsh soon fell for 28 runs to Shadab Khan and the latter (4/26) with his deadly spin went on to capture the quick wickets of Smith (5), Maxwell (7) and Warner (49) reducing Australia to 96/5 in the 13^thover turned the match almost conclusively in Pakistan’s favor. And then, the incredible partnership happened between Stoinis (40 not out in 31 balls) and Matthew Wade (41 not out in just 17 balls) which was rather slow in the beginning, but picked steadily bringing back the momentum. Needing 18 runs from the last two overs Wade finished the match in the 19^th over by hitting three intelligent sixes off the bowling of none other than Shaheen Afridi. However, the initial charge and anchoring of David Warner must be credited.

 

Pakistan who finished the group stage unbeaten lost the semi-final, but not without a great fight and a strong will to reach the final and win the Cup for the second time. India needs to learn from Pakistan as their batsmen focused on attacking the bowlers fearlessly while the Indian batsmen were mostly on the defensive which was made worse by poor team selection. Australia never won the T20 World Cup, and now they have a big chance of winning by prevailing over their kid brother in the Final on 14^thNovember in Dubai. However, New Zealand is no pushover. They were the runners-up in the ICC World Cup-2019 and unfortunately lost to England in that controversial final; but in the first semi-final they avenged it by preventing England reach the final this time.

 

So, Matthew Wade took his team into the final at the death like Daryl Mitchell did for New Zealand against a very good team of England with his incredible late charge of 72 runs off just 47 balls. This has been the advantage of winning the toss, because the chasing team somehow gets to the target after restricting the opposition to less than 180 in most encounters. However, in this match the Aussie tactics were a bit inexplicable: first, their famed fast bowlers kept on bowling wayward, never bowling to their potential and about the spinners the less said the better; second, several Australian batsmen surrendered meekly, never looking like taking efforts; and thirdly and most prominently, Warner did not ask for a review of his caught behind decision as the replays later showed the ball did not touch the bat at all.

Cricket: Should The Toss Be Tossed Away?

Although the practice of tossing the coin before a cricket Test match by the two captains is as ancient as the game, in recent times we have seen a huge lot of cases where the toss winning team puts the losing team at distinct disadvantages, including an evolving negative mindset. In some cricket playing nations like England, Australia, the West Indies and New Zealand where the focus is on grooming fast bowlers pitches with grass are prepared and once the host team wins the toss in a day match they put the opposition into bat, particularly if the morning is cloudy apart from the moisture fresh on the grass, and obviously the visiting team suffers not at all due to their fault or their weaknesses. The reverse of this is true in countries, particularly India or Sri Lanka, where the focus is always on the spinners, grassless slower-flat pitches are prepared and the toss-winning team naturally bats first, because in most cases the pitch begins to turn dangerously from the 3^rd or the 4^th day onward; the grotesquely turning pitches in India are, no doubt, in some decline after the advent of the shortest-format Indian Premiere League (IPL) in 2009 for obvious reasons. Even in that case of the IPL the toss-losing teams are at a disadvantage, because the winning teams always prefer to chase and as seen in India, anything above 300 also can be chased successfully at the flat batting tracks.

 

This explains why India had been losing most of the away series in the past decades and winning most of the home series, of course in recent years only, due to more thought and efforts being given to groom more fast bowlers. In the seventies and the eighties in home Test series we had witnessed the unique spectacle of watching the one or at most two medium fast bowlers in the Indian eleven bowling just one or two overs at the start of the fourth innings with even the living legend Sunil Gavaskar at times coming in to bowl the early overs and always hitting the ball hard on the ground so that the famous spinners could take over as soon as possible. Such a scenario has been getting extinct since the late nineties; however, the toss disadvantage remains as ever, in all formats of the game.

 

The day-night games, introduced for express commercial purposes, the scene of the toss disadvantage gets more serious. As the autumn season starts, the traditional cricket season through to the winter, dew forms later in the evening. All cricketers/commentators/cricket lovers know very well that the dew makes the ball slippery, making it very difficult for the bowlers, both pacers and spinners, to grip the ball well and direct its trajectory as the bowlers would want. Therefore, the toss-winning team always puts in the opposition to bat first, as is most disturbingly witnessed in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup-2021 in Oman and UAE. From the matches of the IPL-2021 shifted to UAE midway we had seen the slow pitches there that makes batting difficult in the first innings and makes bowling difficult in the second innings, invariably favoring the toss-winning-chasing teams, particularly if the match involved two top competitive teams and not the weaker teams or the minnows as opposition, and most of the matches ending as low-scoring and often one-sided ones.

 

Many disappointed fans from India, for that matter for South Africa, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh too, would have loved to watch what their teams could have done had they won the toss and chased in those crucially important matches they lost perhaps due to, to some significant extent, the loss of the toss. Since it involved India, a team from the richest cricket board of the world and its strategic business interests globally, the hue and cry over the ‘toss’ is getting noisier and nastier. However, as we have illustrated earlier the toss does affect the matches and does do harm to the toss-losing teams, more if they are almost equals as per the International Cricket Council (ICC) indices and rankings. Now, we’ll see if the toss can be done away with totally or at least partially.

 

Interestingly, doing away with the toss would be the most easier option in the IPL itself, irrespective of my or your opinion about its utility, because the tournament engages 8-10 teams where each team plays each two times on a double-robin basis; in a 8-franchise IPL each team plays 14 matches in all at the league stage. Therefore, at the league stage one competing team should be allowed to choose fielding or batting in the first match and the same option to the opposing team in the second match and so on. In the elimination round the choice can be given based on the respective net run-rates of the two rivals. We have argued many times earlier that the ICC should adopt a similar format ideally with a double-robin where the Super-12 would be just one group like in IPL and each team would play each at least twice.  The toss can thus be tossed away as we have shown. In fact, this standard should be adopted in all ICC tournaments in all formats.

 

In Test series too that we started this piece with, the elimination of the toss is entirely possible. For example let us take a five-match Test Series between India and say England in any country of the two as a host; either India or England should be allowed to opt for bat or bowl first in the first match, followed by India having the choice in the second and till the fourth match. In the fifth and the last Test, may be the deciding one in some cases, the team with the best ICC ranking should be given the option of the choice. In 2 or 6-match Test series there is no problem at all. This can very well work for all bilateral and international Test and ODI (one-day international) tournaments. And naturally, for both Men’s and Women’s cricket.

 

Tossing away the practice of the toss would pave the way for a more egalitarian encounters in the glorious gentlemen’s (gentlewoman’s too) game of cricket. This would never put any team at a disadvantage about which they can do just nothing. This is to make all teams equals in terms of choice, and definitely not in performances which is the game of cricket on the field based on application, dedication and mental calm demonstrated by the players. Countries have been long trying to end the stark inequalities present in both developed and underdeveloped countries and to eradicate poverty. Therefore, why not try the same in the most popular and expanding game of cricket to end the inequalities generated by the toss of a mere coin?  Why not let the coin do what it’s actually meant for?