India vs West Indies, T20Is: How Shreyas Iyer found his mojo

In sport, an athlete doesn’t have a guarantee card that could assure their existence in top-flight competitions for years together. Elite-level sport demands continuous evolution. Shreyas Iyer, the India skipper in the shortest format, is someone who has looked to constantly upgrade his game. Over a decade or so, he seems to have tinkered with his methods and reaped the rewards in the abridged versions.

Since returning to the T20I set-up, Iyer seemed a tad uncomfortable at the crease while landing the big shots. Incidentally, before he crunched a hundred in the Lucknow T20I against the West Indies, Iyer’s strike rate was hovering in the mid-130s during that phase. However, on the given day, he crunched a 43-ball 102 in conditions where a majority of the batters couldn’t find their top gear.

Just skim through the outer layer of his power-hitting manual, and it could be seen that he had tweaked his bat-lift angle and trigger movement against pace. As it turned out, it was Abhishek Nayar, his mentor, who had helped him iron out the flaws.

Take a journey back to the United Kingdom tour, and you will observe that his back foot seemed to be staying leg-side, while his front foot moved across. Now, his back foot is moving across towards the middle stump. These changes, from the bat-lift angle to the trigger and perhaps even the grip, could be down to Iyer eyeing a clean bat swing and more access to the ball while playing shots through the leg side.

While facing Matthew Forde in the opening T20I, he also executed his shots to near-perfection to crack eye-catching shots through the on-side. A few months ago, the same batter looked cramped while attempting a whip off Jofra Archer at Trent Bridge and was caught behind square on the on-side. Although, in the second instance, the bowler’s name was none other than Jofra Archer, the ball was there to be hit.

Leaving aside the tweaks in his game, the hundred in Lucknow has given Iyer some breathing space after India’s disastrous campaign in the United Kingdom, where they lost all their T20I matches. Granted, India subsequently won the Asian Games gold medal, but for a cricketer, runs or wickets on the board are the only currency.

Before taking over as captain from Suryakumar Yadav, Iyer had also found himself in the wilderness; he was out of the T20I set-up for close to three years. Naturally, eyebrows would have been raised about his sudden elevation to leading the national side. So, the hundred in Lucknow would have soothed the nerves of Iyer and the Indian coaching staff, too.

Iyer seems to have a hidden inner voice that doesn’t give up at any cost. The tweaks he made to his game before the match in Lucknow and his subsequent hundred are a microcosm of that never-give-up mentality.

Also Read: Ranji Trophy Needs Its Stars

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