One-day cricket’s four-year cycle goes from one World Cup to another. Players bow out of the game after cricket’s flagship tournament and teams often start planning a revamp – which doesn’t mean a complete overhaul but at the very least there’s an infusion of fresh blood.
The Champions Trophy comes at an interesting juncture of this cycle: right at its mid-point. Regardless of how you view the tournament, be it as an unnecessary existence or as an escape from bilateral ODIs, it remains an International Cricket Council-backed global event and a major trophy in the sport.
This often serves up a dilemma: should you adhere to your four-year, long-term World Cup plan or simply call upon all the experience and go full tilt at winning the prize?
Finding the right balance is perhaps the key – a mix of using the event as means to assess where you stand in view towards the World Cup while also pursuing the trophy with full seriousness. This, of course, depends on the depth of resources at a team’s disposal and on how well you had planned your previous cycle (a young and successful team, for instance, can go on from one World Cup to the next).
So even before the start of the event, the nature of the 15-man squads makes for interesting reading. And in this regard, India and Pakistan sit bang at the opposite ends of the spectrum.
Before diving into the numbers, a disclaimer: for the sake of uniformity, only the originally announced squads for the three tournaments – Champions Trophy events in 2013 and 2017, and the World Cup in 2015 – have been considered here.
So, an Umar Akmal, who failed a fitness test last month and was eventually replaced, is considered part of Pakistan’s squad but a Dinesh Karthik, who flew in to replace the injured Manish Pandey, is not a part of the Indian squad for the purpose of this analysis. This is reasonable, since the initial squad selection can be deemed as the preferred choice.
Let’s first look at the four-year cycle from 2013-’17.
Of the players who’ve featured in the squads of all three major tournaments, eight of them are Indians. No other team has equal or more – New Zealand and South Africa have seven each, Sri Lanka five and the rest have four or below.
This is a consequence of good planning: the standout aspect of India’s 2013 Champions Trophy-winning squad was that it was the youngest (average age: 27) in the tournament.
This meant that the team could go further with its spine remaining intact. And it duly did: of the top nine nations, only Bangladesh had a younger squad at the World Cup. Furthermore, all the eight players – the likes of skipper Virat Kohli, former captain MS Dhoni and Rohit Sharma – will feature in the first-choice playing XI. In other words, they aren’t water carriers.
Meanwhile, only three Pakistan players, the joint-lowest with Australia (though the Aussies have moved forward swiftly), have stood the test of time over four years. This isn’t surprising for a team which has found little stability and always appears to come into major events with its backs against the wall. The likes of Misbah-ul-Haq, Younis Khan and Shahid Afridi have all retired, whereas others such as the Akmal brothers and Saeed Ajmal have lost their way.
Pakistan again enter the Champions Trophy with a young and inexperienced squad – the second-youngest only to Bangladesh, with an average age (27.5) well over two years lower from the World Cup squad (the steepest dip among all teams).
Sarfraz Ahmed is the least convincing of all captains, a skipper more by default since his predecessor, and Misbah’s successor, Azhar Ali had stepped down. Pacer Faheem Ashraf, aged 23, doesn’t have an international cap across any format – though his cameo with the bat in the warm-up against Bangladesh made headlines. Batsman Fakhar Zaman, 27, is yet to play in a one-day game, while young spinner Shadab Khan is a veteran of three ODIs.
Pakistan’s unpreparedness and lack of continuity gets magnified further if you separately consider the two two-year cycles either side of the World Cup Down Under.
Only six of Pakistan’s players from the 2015 World Cup are part of this year’s Champions Trophy squad. Even if this is acceptable in the post-World Cup years, where teams can look to a new beginning, no team has lesser degree of continuity in the same period. Tournament average is eight players.
England and Sri Lanka have the same number as Pakistan, but England’s was deliberate, as part of a revamp of their approach to ODI cricket, while the Lankans sail in the same boat as their South Asian friends, especially with their long-serving players retiring from the sport.
It’s interesting to note here that England are favourites, but both Pakistan and Sri Lanka have two of the weakest teams in the tournament, which doesn’t speak highly of the subcontinent.
Meanwhile, India, New Zealand and South Africa, three semi-finalists in the World Cup, have 10 players each from 2015 in the current squad. Also, the average squad ages of neither of the three nations exceeds 30, which means most of these players can play on – an ominous sign for rivals at the next World Cup.
Finally, roll back to 2015 and the two years prior to it.
A look at the figures here will also answer a broader question: how far does a Champions Trophy squad go in determining the World Cup squad in two years’ time?
If the 2013-’15 cycle is anything to go by, it goes quite far.
On an average, teams had retained nearly 10 players from their Champions Trophy squad for the flagship event two years later, which means the “mini-World Cup” is true to its name.
New Zealand and Sri Lanka retained 12 players, while India, Australia and England’s figures stood at 10 each. South Africa had nine and even the volatile West Indies managed eight. Pakistan though? A lowly six again.
Pakistan’s stickiness quotient, essentially the number of players retained in a particular big event cycle, is easily the worst in the world in recent years. The team ranks lowest in every permutation from 2013-’17 and the number doesn’t exceed six, which means at least three-fifths of the nation’s squad in each cycle has changed whichever way you look at it.
India is high on stickiness – its quotient doesn’t drop to below eight. It’s probably too high for its own good, especially outside of major tournaments where the team is generally averse to gambling on youth unless absolutely needed.
This also reflects in the current selection. In the ongoing Champions Trophy, India’s squad was seen as a “safe” pick with no surprises – especially after the Indian Premier League. Whether Dhoni or Yuvraj Singh, both 35 now, can last till World Cup 2019 is a question on everyone’s mind. Even Karthik is an underwhelming pick.
Pakistan may or may not – they’ll likely not – find success in this year’s Champions Trophy, but it shouldn’t deflect from the country’s primary need: a more fundamental change in its approach. Sacrifice short-term gains for the greater good.
In terms of foresight, planning and a thriving structure, their arch-rivals India are simply miles ahead of them. And every year, this gap only appears to be widening.
All statistics used in this article are compiled by the writer himself.
Akarsh Sharma is a sports traveller and writer who contributes to various publications. His work is collated on akarshsharma.com. He tweets here.
