Iyer's fire: the point of difference in India's middle order

Those who followed Indian cricket in the 1990s will remember with great pain how Saleem Malik, often without a helmet, used to give up his stumps well before a spinner got in his delivery stride and then manipulate the bowling seemingly effortlessly. It was part mockery, part dare, but fully an attempt to mess with the mind of the spinner.

During this Champions Trophy, Shreyas Iyer has batted with the same chutzpah against spinners on tracks that might not have turned square but have been slow and have generally aided spin. He has moved away from the stumps regularly, even as the spinner is running in, but has hardly ever been done in. An Indian middle-order batter controlling the game against Pakistani spinners is quite the turnaround from the 1990s.

Iyer is marginally behind the leading run-getter against spin in the tournament, and easily the most prolific against spin in Dubai. He has done so despite not getting to start against pace; all his knocks have begun against spin with the field spread-out and the ball old.

This tournament has brought out a new side to Iyer. He has scored his career's slowest fifty during this tournament. This is overall his second-slowest series of all time. On pitches that have produced 1990s-style ODIs, Iyer has adapted to play an old-fashioned game, not unlike Malik. In the game against Pakistan, he and Virat Kohli stabilised the chase before he took the lead to push India ahead of the asking rate. Against New Zealand, he rescued India from 30 for 3 with his slowest half-century.

Iyer might not have scored a century or claimed the Player-of-the-Match award so far, but this display of adaptability has put him among the premium middle-order batters in the world. He had already been among the most impactful since the 2019 World Cup. He is one of the six who have scored 2500 or more runs in this period, but all others bat in the top three and none of them is quicker.

However, since February 2022, Iyer has entered a golden phase. He has frequently made it easier for others in the India line-up to score big by reducing the need for them to take risks. Rohit Sharma does that job in the top order with his ultra-aggressive approach, Iyer in the middle only with more consistency. Shubman Gill, Kohli and KL Rahul dovetail nicely with the responsibility of scoring big around these two impact players.

Of the 43 batters that have batted 30 or more times in this period, Rohit has the best runs-to-non-striker-runs ratio. Iyer has the tenth-best. There are no Indians between them. It means Rohit and Iyer frequently score quicker than their partners, letting them play the accumulators' role with ease. Among these ten high-impact batters, Iyer is the most consistent run-getter as well.

In this period, 69 batters from the Full-Member teams have batted post the powerplay 20 or more times. Only five among them average 50 or more and go at better than a-run-a-ball in non-powerplay overs. Four of them average better and score quicker than non-strikers: Heinrich Klaasen, Aiden Markram, Iyer and Gill. Only Iyer and Klaasen do so even when non-strikers are going at a strike rate of 100 or more.

It's wild that at the start of this ODI season, India were flirting with the idea of dropping Iyer. In fact, had Kohli not injured his knee on the eve of the first ODI against England, Iyer might have lost out on the one format he regularly plays, after a rather unsavoury exit from the Test plans. After playing a match-winning hand in what must have seemed like his only chance at that time, Iyer made it a point to let us know it was he who had replaced the injured Kohli, and not Yashasvi Jaiswal.

It just speaks to the incredible amount of batting talent in the country and the constant need to keep improving. The team management was desperate to introduce a left-hand batter among the five specialist batters to make it an even more formidable unit. Rohit is the captain, Kohli is among the greatest ODI batters of all time, Gill is the most prolific in recent years, and Rahul keeps wicket. That made Iyer the only one dispensable if India wanted to experiment.

That experiment was dropped in a hurry, and seven matches averaging 53.71 later, Iyer is not so dispensable anymore.