India waited until the twilight gleam receded and the lights flickered to life at the Narendra Modi Stadium. Until then, they busied themselves with a boisterous session of rondo, where Tilak Varma unfurled a gorgeous back-heel and Arshdeep Singh wafted the thin air numerous times, where they gambolled around with the football, passing waywardly and jogging playfully, where the coach Gautam Gambhir summoned an impromptu huddle as his charges kept nodding at the instructions.
Whatever transpired in the huddle might have been rousing, because they busily dispersed to form three distinct groups of five players each, spaced out like a triangle. At one end was T Dilip, pulling and slogging the ball to the five-some clustered towards house left, standing in the midwicket region to where the fielding coach was batting. Right opposite to him was Ryan Ten Doeschate, feeding flat low-fliers to those perched in midwicket region; parallel to him was Sitanshu Kotak performing the same routine to sharpen their catching, one of the rough edges that could bruise India in a so-far unbeaten tournament.
Unusually clumsy, India have spilled nine catches so far, most of them unchallenging by their standards. It was the larger theme of the session, two days before the first Super Eight game against South Africa. To tighten the jolting and juddering parts, to ensure that the machine works as smoothly as possible in their title defence march. Dilip has been the most vociferous of the coaches. He would rebuke/implore/plead with some of the serial catching offenders to practice.
India’s Kuldeep Yadav attempts a catch during a practice session before an ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 cricket match between India and South Africa, at the Narendra Modi Stadium, in Ahmedabad. (PTI Photo)
Although the catches have not cost them, such lapses could potentially sting them in the Super Eight, where every game is a poisoned chalice. Bowling coach Morne Morkel was quick to admit and put it on the high-priority redressal list. “It’s a valid question, and catching is definitely going to play a big part now in the business end of the tournament,” he said. He empathised with them: “Unfortunately, no catch is an easy catch, and the boys are putting in the hard yards and catching a lot of balls. One of our key focus points is to really go for even those 50-50 ones, because we know how that can swing and break the momentum of a batting innings.
On Friday evening, under the sombre skies, they did put in the hard yards. In practice, they were near perfect, clinging to most catches, even the deceitful lobbed ones. Bizarrely, most of them are safe catchers, some like Hardik Pandya and Axar Patel can be spectacular, but like a common cold in winter, the contagion has spread fast.
Equally anomalous has been their susceptibility to off-spinners of all hues. Unsurprisingly, everyone who could bowl half-decent off-breaks endured long shifts. Washington Sundar and Rinku Singh bowled unchanged for roughly an hour. A battalion of local off-spinners too were commissioned, although they hardly posed any trouble.
The left-handers mustered most of the strike until Suryakumar Yadav tore into them, blasting sixes down the ground, often gliding out. The 360-degree master crunched his space to the 45-degree arc between mid-wicket and long-off. No sweep, no supla, just his orthodox range. Hardik, though, was in carnage mode, flat-batting sixes over extra-cover.
Left-arm spinners too were summoned, for a bigger threat than the part-time off-spin of Aiden Markram on Sunday would be Keshav Maharaj. Abhishek Sharma too rolled his arm over. He unwrapped a new pair of pads when he entered the ground, but hardly wore it because he spent more time bowling than batting. An all-rounder when he began his junior career, he beat Tilak with an under-cutter and turned a couple of balls sharply away from Suryakumar.
The practice surfaces, adjacent to the centre pitch, were abrasive, resembling second-day black-soil decks with slow turn, where batting requires wariness without diluting aggression and the flexibility to change the shot at the last moment. Morne neatly summed up the requisite virtues to prosper on such strips. “That’s why at training we tell the guys that it’s not all about hitting 65 sixes,” he said, flashing a grin. “There’s going to be a period that the wicket might be a bit tacky or the wicket might be a bit dry. So can we turn boundary hitting into running more twos? Maybe if the wicket is tricky, can we hit the ball on the ground, scoring fours instead of sixes? So all those things go into our planning, into our preparation,” he elaborated.
He stressed on not being one-dimensional, not to bat with a prejudiced mind. In fairness, notwithstanding the occasional struggles and the slump of Abhishek, India have posted above par scores (161, 209, 175 and 193) and defended without ado. “It shows how good we are overall. Maybe we haven’t dominated spin as we would have liked. But that’s around the corner, on a surface where we find our flow,” he said. Finding flow and fixing flaws had been the evening’s motif.
