If it hadn't actually happened, you would struggle to imagine the kind of dominance India have displayed in T20Is. It is a fickle, high-variance format. The shorter the duration of the game, the smaller the gap in quality between opponents. India have won 43 of their 53 completed T20Is since the start of 2023. This includes an unbeaten T20 World Cup campaign during which they went from the seam-bowling paradise of New York to the flatties in the Caribbean Islands to spin-friendly Guyana and back to high-scoring Barbados, getting the better of eight different teams.
Take out the first half of this unimaginable run, and we are talking of stuff beyond fantasies. Since the start of 2024, India have won 28 and lost three. Surely there should be some mean reversion around the corner? Surely India have enjoyed too much luck? Surely this run should be unsustainable?
And they are missing at least two of their first XI players. Two players who are the kind of point-of-difference bowlers franchises break the bank for. It is scary to think how good India can get if you add Jasprit Bumrah and Kuldeep Yadav to the line-up that just beat a full-strength England 4-1. We finally have in front of our eyes a team worthy of representing a country that runs the best non-international T20 tournament. A country with hitting talent that was just waiting to be unleashed on the world should their national team dare to shed muscle-memory conservatism.
It has taken painstaking effort from the team management and the changing landscape around them in the IPL for batters to get rid of the fear of getting out. It simply took India batters too long to realise they don't need to score all the runs individually. This is an elegant table that shows that as India have attempted more boundaries, their efficiency on such attempts has come down. In other words, they have become less selective with their risks. That has reduced the output-per-boundary attempt and has resulted in loss of more wickets.
The clincher, though, is in the last two columns. Their runs when attempting boundaries have increased with the frequency of their boundary attempts, and in doing so they have realised 20 overs are not long enough to damage them with loss of wickets. Losing two to three wickets to attacking shots in a T20 innings is clearly suboptimal.
It took some of the batters too long to recalibrate their definitions of failure in the T20 format. To realise that if you stay committed to attacking cricket and don't panic at the occasional early loss of wickets, you can still end up with fighting totals. Even when they did embrace that attitude, when faced with a choice in the big final, India again fell back to conservatism, which nearly cost them their first World Cup in 13 years but for a timely and fortunate ball change and some genius bowling.
Since that World Cup, the newer crop of hitters and the new team management have taken the commitment to attacking to the next level. India have played 20 matches since then, and have been attempting a boundary every 2.16 balls, scoring on an average 147.39 runs off attacking shots every innings and losing 4.92 wickets trying to do so. It is no surprise that three of India's fastest T20I hundreds have come during this brief period.
This commitment to hitting boundaries has never been more evident than during the fourth T20I of the recent series against England. They lost three wickets trying to hit boundaries in just the second over of the innings, but kept going for it. Neither 12 for 3 nor 79 for 5 fazed them. On their worst day, they still ended with 181 for 9. It was still not going to be enough, but India caught a lucky break with a concussion substitution, and England imploded against spin to give them a 15-run win.
In doing so, people will have the kind of series Sanju Samson just had: five early dismissals and a total of 51 runs. Coach Gautam Gambhir, who said India were happy to live with the occasional 130 all out trying to go for 260 every time, will not be too unhappy, though. All five of the dismissals came while going for boundaries. This is the attitude despite four failures that needs backing.
The other upgrade on the World Cup-winning side is that they have two batters who are regularly being used to bowl a little every match. Abhishek Sharma and Shivam Dube are being prepared should a match-up, conditions, or failure of one of the five or six bowlers call for them to be utilised.
Not that India should need too much bowling back-up because they now have in their squad three point-of-difference bowlers in Bumrah, Kuldeep and Varun Chakravarthy. In a format where accuracy is not always a virtue, an action or style that makes it difficult to pick the ball early is priceless. To have three such available for big tournaments is a dream. If Hardik Pandya can keep up his bowling form and fitness, India can play all three of them when they mount their title defence in home conditions in 2026.
However, in these three - and other strike bowlers India have - lay their only weakness. Bumrah, Kuldeep, Varun, Arshdeep Singh, Mohammed Shami, Mohammed Siraj, Ravi Bishnoi - none of them can be relied upon to hit a six. The way Jofra Archer or Adil Rashid or Mark Wood can. Or Mitchell Starc or Pat Cummins. Or Kagiso Rabada or Marco Jansen or even Anrich Nortje.
This weakness forced Tilak Varma to tamper with his game in the Chennai chase, which he did successfully. However, you can't go in with fewer than three strike bowlers. Especially when they are as good as Bumrah, Kuldeep, Varun and Arshdeep. It is a weakness India will have to live with unless one or two of them can do the unthinkable and build six-hitting prowess the way R Ashwin has at the fag end of his career. However, none of them has the inherent batting ability of Ashwin, so this might be too tall an ask.
Yet, all things being equal, add Bumrah, Kuldeep, Shubman Gill and Yashasvi Jaiswal to the current squad, and India should start as strong favourites in the 2026 T20 World Cup. There can still be a crucial toss lost or horrible dew or that 130 all out on a big night, but should India become the first team to successfully defend their title in men's T20 World Cups, they will seal their status as the greatest T20 team ever assembled. To many, they already might be.