Author's note: Most of my cricket articles on Substack are polished and curated. Some are churned out within thirty minutes of the conclusion of a cricket match I enjoyed. This is of the latter variety.
T20 is the crucible of tactical advancement in modern-day cricket. It's where the best and the brightest ideas take shape. Think of the strategies that have come to define cricket in the past five years - fast spin, arm balls, flat trajectories, shuffling about the crease, reverse sweeps, pace variation, flat trajectories - could they have been conceived in any laboratory but T20 cricket?
This is because the shortest format of the game is also its youngest. Test cricket, though it has thrown up surprise after surprise at us in the last year and half, is a format we have largely worked out. It's been around for 148 years, whereas ODI is a format nobody really cares about anymore. But T20 leagues are the Galapagos Islands of cricket's ongoing tactical evolution; arguably the sport's biggest marketplace of ideas where good tactics survive and bad ones are weeded out.
India's approach to Test selection in the past few years has often been derided as influenced by IPL success. The argument, which has found backers in those like Sunil Gavaskar, usually takes one of two forms. First there is the deontological variety, which claims that basing Test selection off of a different format undervalues the first-class system and disrespects players who have chosen the longer format to find meaning. The second argument is utilitarian, that by selecting those who shine at the IPL the Indian selectors are rewarding the wrong skills and as a result ending up with suboptimal picks at the top level.
The strongest counterargument I have seen offered against this line of thinking points out that there is a growing gulf between the quality of cricket at the first-class and international levels, a problem exacerbated by the demise of the A-tour system in the post-Covid world, so it is rational to select players who display pedigree against superior opponents in the best league of the world. Here I would like to provide another argument in favour of "IPL selection".
Consider a team like Pakistan, whose selectors seem to deploy a lot more weight on domestic performances when it comes to national selection. (As evidence of this claim, consider the fact that their three most recent international debutants - Kashif Ali, Muhammad Hurraira and Sufiyan Muqeem - have a total of three PSL appearances under their belt.) Pakistan are famously backward on the tactical front, an inadequacy that is often put down to an inherent conservatism.
For example, their batters Mohammad Rizwan and Saud Shakeel refused to move around the crease or run down the pitch against spin between overs 20 and 30 of their recent Champions Trophy encounter against India, even though they were only two wickets down and in need of quick runs. Further, their spinners Abrar Ahmed and Khushdil Shah seldom engaged in "big" pace variation - defined as a jump by more than 10 kph from one ball to the next - against India's batters. These are T20 skills, and they are at the forefront of contemporary tactical consciousness because T20 gives birth to many of these tactics, and Pakistan appeared dreadfully lacking in these departments.
This cannot be said of India. On a slow wicket, they understood the importance of targeting the straight boundaries in the powerplay. They recognized the significance of using "forceful" strike-rotation options when the ball wasn't coming onto the bat. They came down the pitch to impart momentum to their lofted strokes. When the going got tough, Virat Kohli swept and Shreyas Iyer employed the switch-hit. Their pacers readily turned to the slower balls. Their fingerspinners consistently operated in the 90s kph, while their left-arm wristspinner saw the benefit in overbowling his googlies and going around the wicket against the opposition’s tail.
Similar things could have been said about their Test series in Australia, where too several of their solutions to the various problems they encountered were T20-coded, starting from the very selection of Harshit Rana and Nitish Kumar Reddy to Yashasvi Jaiswal walking down the pitch against Mitchell Starc and Rishabh Pant going hammer and tongs in Sydney.
So, that's my argument. Having a greater number of IPL graduates in their side helps the Indian side by keeping them tactically up-to-date in a stoplessly evolving landscape. It doesn't make their players any smarter than others’, but it makes the ideas that are at the forefront of cricket's tactical evolution more salient in their heads. This, in turn, ensures that the Indians have more options in their kitty than the opposition at most stages of a cricket match.
It must be acknowledged here that India can probably do this because of their elephantine cricket infrastructure and their boundless cricket-obsessed population - together it likely implies that any player who makes it to this level without being swept away by superior prospects has a solid technical grounding - but like many of my other data-free pieces the point of this article is to argue that this choice, which has frequently been derided as irrational by some observers, can be situated within a rational framework. Ultimately, IPL selection works because the IPL is the leading T20 league of the world.