After his unbeaten 97 against the West Indies on Sunday, Sanju Samson knelt in prayer, thanking the skies. Perhaps a few others should have joined him, for their survival hung on his divine intervention.
Had Samson not flipped the script at the Eden Gardens, India would have been knocked out of the T20 World Cup, and knives would have been out for him, captain Suryakumar Yadav, Abhishek Sharma, Hardik Pandya, and perhaps also Varun Chakravarthy.
India are through to the semi-finals, but don’t let the results fool you. This is a team that has survived on individual brilliance rather than collective excellence. The wins are in the column, but the cracks are very much on the wall for everyone to see. The knives go back in the drawer, for now. But the problems don’t.
Former Pakistani pacer Mohammad Amir has read India right. “If I analyse it purely from a cricketing point of view, India are not playing good cricket overall. I am still telling you – just check their fielding. They dropped three to four catches and fumbled in the field. Apart from Bumrah, every other bowler is getting hit. India are playing on the strength of just one bowler,” he argued on a cricket show.
The Duck Tales
There is a famous story from the 1983-84 West Indies tour of India. Sunil Gavaskar, in a rare deviation from his customary opener’s role, came in at No. 4 in an attempt to neutralise the West Indies pace attack. When he walked to the crease, the scoreboard read 0 for 2. Viv Richards, never one to miss a moment, smiled and said: “Man, it don’t matter where you come in to bat, the score is still zero.”
Sounds familiar? In the first few matches of this World Cup, India experimented with three opening combinations. But four times in a row the scoreboard read 0/1. And the problem persists.
Samson is back among the runs. But Abhishek is woefully out of form, and even Ishan Kishan is struggling. There is a saying in North India which, loosely translated, means: “The old man died but a child was born. And we remained the same.”
For every Samson resurgence, there is an Abhishek collapse. For every Tilak Varma cameo, there is a Suryakumar scratch. For every Shivam Dube rescue act, there is a Hardik Pandya failure. India have been recycling this problem through different jerseys and different matches. The faces change. The scorecard doesn’t.
Against the West Indies, Abhishek, Ishan, Surya and Hardik failed with the bat-scoring low and slow. Between them, they scored 55 runs off 46 balls. Samson scored 97 off 50. The passengers outnumbered the pilot. The pilot still landed the plane.
The next flight is to Mumbai, against England. Jofra Archer, Liam Dawson and Adil Rashid will have watched that West Indies chase very carefully. They know exactly which passengers to target, and they bowl a great deal faster than the Caribbean all-rounders.
The One-Man Problem
The Indian bowling is on a wing called Jasprit Bumrah, and a prayer. The rest? Largely expensive, often wayward, occasionally both.
Varun Chakravarthy is the tournament’s most troubling individual bowling story. Chakravarthy has failed to get his length right and appears to be guilty of experimenting too much. His growing ineffectiveness has hurt India badly against almost every side.
Axar Patel has been India’s steadiest spinner. He is economical, disciplined, capable of bowling to right-handers and left-handers without gifting easy match-ups. But Axar is a containing force, not a wicket-taking one. In knockout cricket, you need both.
Pandya’s bowling has been functional. But he is a fifth-bowler option masquerading as a fourth.
India doesn’t have a bowling attack – they have just Bumrah. And if any of the support bowlers has an off day, India won’t know where to hide.
India’s sixth bowler problem has been cricket’s worst-kept secret for two years, and India have still not solved it. Against England’s heavy hitters, that unsolved equation could be the difference between a final and a flight home.
The Butter Fingers
Against West Indies, with a semi-final place on the line, India dropped three catches. Abhishek dropped an absolute sitter in the fifth over, bowled by Bumrah. Later, he spilled another catch that could have dismissed Rovman Powell. (Abhishek in summary, dropped two catches, scored 10 with the bat, and played 11 balls. It is hard to think of a more complete failure from a single player in a single match.)
Tilak Varma compounded the damage when a shot burst through his hands and trickled over for six because he had settled too far inside the boundary.
This has been a worrying pattern. According to Cricbuzz, India now have 13 dropped catches in T20 World Cup 2026, the most by any team in the Super 8 stage. Their catching efficiency is barely 72 percent, the worst for any team that has progressed to the Super 8 stage.
All Bets Are Off
Add it all up. A top order that cannot be trusted. A bowling attack that begins and ends with one man. A fielding unit that wilts under pressure.
The mind says, all bets are off. But the heart says, O, Darling, this is India. A team that, like the nation, even at its most chaotic and unconvincing, finds a way.
Perhaps the dropped catches have been dropped. Perhaps the batting frailties have been confronted. Perhaps this team has been saving its best for the last. Perhaps India were always going to be saved by Samson. Perhaps Mumbai is just the next chapter of the same story, this time with 11 heroes.
Sandipan Sharma, our guest author, likes to write on cricket, cinema, music and politics. He believes they are interconnected.
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