Asia Cup 2025: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh veer away from ‘star culture’ as T20 cricket’s pragmatism takes over

For a region as consumed by its politicians, movie stars, and cricketers as South Asia, change is seldom constant. But whenever the winds of revolution have blown across the meadows of the Indian Subcontinent, change has been precipitous and regime-toppling.

The upcoming Asia Cup will witness a similar shift, albeit of a cricketing variety, when India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh lock horns in an eight-team continental showdown, beginning on Tuesday in the neutral territory of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

As disjointed from each other as they may be in the geopolitical landscape, the three neighbouring nations find resonance in the compulsive deification of cricketing personalities. The aura of their star cricketers, accentuated by social media fandom, has become synonymous with the identities of their teams. Sri Lanka, in perpetual transition since its 2014 T20 World Cup triumph, is the outlier.

Such an inextricable association between a player and a team is perhaps inevitable given that India hasn’t played a big-ticket tournament in white-ball cricket without either Rohit Sharma or Virat Kohli since 2010. Or that Pakistan’s last tryst with a limited-over multilateral competition sans Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan dates to 2016, when Shahid Afridi was leading the side. Bangladesh, meanwhile, is yet to feature in a T20 World Cup or Asia Cup match without at least one of Shakib Al Hasan, Mushfiqur Rahim, and Mahmudullah.

This ensemble cast shaped the destiny of their teams for a decade or more, and in what appears to be a tectonic shift, a bunch of method actors have stepped into their breach.

With selection veering towards pragmatism and role-specific impact in the era of power-hitting, the next cricketing decade in Asia could mitigate the prevalence of ‘star culture’ as we know it.

Method acting is a refined art that requires its practitioners to stay in character and innately identify with their roles. On the cricket field, that translates to one’s job profile being attuned to the team’s demands, with self-indulgence taking a backseat.

India, Pakistan and Bangladesh’s newfound T20 adventurism is bound by the common thread of an increasingly horses-for-courses selection policy, but the circumstances that prompted the pivot vary.

Natural progression

Rohit and Kohli retired with the T20 World Cup medal around their neck last year. But only after they were apprised of India’s shift towards a higher tempo of T20 batting during their 14-month hiatus from the format ahead of the global showpiece.

After two disappointing T20 World Cup campaigns, in 2021 and 2022, India’s batting approach was in dire need of fresh intent, and blooding in new talent was deemed the remedy. A renewed emphasis on maximising the PowerPlay reaped dividends, with the team racking up seven scores of 200 or more in 21 completed innings. In Rohit and Kohli’s absence, India’s PowerPlay run rate swelled to 8.31, up from a dismal 6.02 during the T20 World Cup in 2022 and 7.87 in 2021.

Away from the international stage, Rohit and Kohli cranked up their tempo during IPL 2023, significantly improving their strike rates from the previous season. In 2024, they reached a crescendo, logging their highest strike rates for a season, 150 and 154.69, respectively, and justifying their return for the T20 World Cup.

The title win was a perfect swansong, but that even in the twilight of their career, they had to embrace modernity or risk losing relevance was a testament to India’s tilt towards a team-centric paradigm. In their wake, the Indian team’s transition has been seamless, thanks to a structured integration that began right after India’s unceremonious semifinal exit from the T20 World Cup in 2022.

Barring skipper Suryakumar Yadav, all-rounder Hardik Pandya, and Arshdeep Singh, there have been few constants in India’s T20I team since. Resource optimisation is the order of the day, and job profiles outweigh consistency and pedigree. For the current framework, the omissions of Shreyas Iyer and Yashasvi Jaiswal from the squad are unavoidable sacrifices at the altar of the efficiency of a well-oiled machine.

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Shubman Gill’s return to the T20I fold, perhaps at the cost of Sanju Samson’s place in the eleven, appears as a relic of ‘star culture’, but it comes with the rider of grooming a future all-format captain.

Rohit and Kohli’s ‘star player’ status largely stems from their proficiency in all formats, an epithet that could elude the likes of Abhishek Sharma, Tilak Varma, Shivam Dube, or Rinku Singh. Jasprit Bumrah dominates all shapes and forms of the game, but his intermittent absences could prevent him from attaining a similarly exalted status.

As things stand, the current Indian T20I set-up bears the imprint of a chillingly efficient and successful franchise team that thinks little of the past and has identified the personnel attuned to the fearless brand of cricket it has committed to.

Going in circles

If some prepare for change, some have change thrust upon them. Pakistan belongs to the latter category. Babar and Rizwan scripted arguably the most epochal moment for Pakistan cricket in this decade by handing India a 10-wicket defeat in Dubai at the T20 World Cup 2021 but have caught a tartar since.

Pakistan, admittedly, reached the final of the World Cup the following year, but that was largely to the credit of its bowlers. The batters struck a lowly 7.91 runs an over in 2022 – the seventh lowest among the 12 ICC Full Members. The rut continued in 2023 and 2024, with the average run of scoring at 8.08 and 8.22, seventh and fifth lowest, respectively, among the same band of teams.

An unedifying group-stage exit at the T20 World Cup in 2024, which included a defeat to the U.S.A. in the Super Over, should have sounded alarm bells. Pakistan had hit a roadblock and so had Babar and Rizwan’s adaptability. Babar struck at 136.8 and Rizwan at a lowly 98.05 over successive series defeats in Australia and South Africa towards the end of that year. After 23 defeats in 38 T20Is across 2023 and 2024, Pakistan had to bite the bullet.

Its experiment with ultra-modernism began with a five-match T20I tour of New Zealand in the first half of this year. Babar and Rizwan were dropped and replaced at the top of the batting order by debutant Hasan Nawaz and Mohammad Haris, back in the national side after almost two years.

They had scored runs at a modest average in the newly minted Champions T20 Cup, but their six-hitting ability stood out. Nawaz had 17 sixes in nine matches (second-most), while Haris was cranking it at almost 152 per 100 balls during the tournament.

Their selection was homage to the ‘boom or bust’ T20 school of thought, as were their subsequent scores. Nawaz’s initiation included two consecutive ducks, while Haris scored all of 11 runs in the first two games against the Kiwis. But they got the bit between their teeth in the third, ransacking 74 runs inside the Powerplay; Nawaz scored the fastest hundred by a Pakistani in the format, and his 55-ball 105 munched a 205-run target with four overs to spare. The new opening pair failed in the two games that followed, but their introduction had laid down an important marker—revolutions don’t always start with pragmatism.

The white-ball tour of New Zealand also marked the beginning of Salman Ali Agha’s reign as full-time T20I captain. He was first handed the reins when he was all of two T20Is old, and was appointed full-time skipper in just his seventh international game in the format, bringing an end to the musical chairs between Babar, Rizwan and Shaheen Afridi for the leadership role.

In the series against Bangladesh at home that followed in May, the first under head coach Mike Hesson, Pakistan perhaps thought Nawaz and Haris’ spin-hitting prowess was better employed in the middle-order, and sent Sahibzada Farhan up the order with Saim Ayub, who had been earmarked as someone who could disrupt the Babar-Rizwan pairing.

Farhan was picked in the immediacy of the recently concluded Pakistan Super League (PSL), where he was the top run-getter with 449 runs at a strike rate in excess of 150.

The team began shaping up and whitewashed Bangladesh 3-0 at home before the Tigers returned the favour in their den with a 2-1 win a few weeks later. Thirteen wins in 23 matches under Agha’s leadership suggest Pakistan’s attempt at a resurgence has been a mixed bag, but it has got the brief right.

Irony, though, has been ever-present. Less than a year ago, former Pakistan cricketer and PCB chief Ramiz Raja had bemoaned Babar’s axing from the Test team in the middle of the home series against England because ‘he sells cricket for Pakistan’. Just three weeks ahead of the Asia Cup, the PCB hasn’t contracted any player in the ‘A’ category, which had seemed Babar and Rizwan’s preserve.

In transition

For Bangladesh, a whole generation of players that hauled the team up from cricketing backwaters has called time on white-ball cricket. Rahim remains active in Tests only, while Shakib, Mahmudullah and Tamim Iqbal have drawn the curtains on internationals in the last two years.

Bangladesh has been a T20I laggard, but successive series wins against Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and the Netherlands ahead of the Asia Cup promise a turnaround. Its sluggish pitches at home have not always allowed Bangladesh’s batters to find a higher gear, but openers Parvez Hossain Emon and Tanzid Hasan are finally setting the tone.

The opening duo, along with middle-order batter Towhid Hridoy and all-rounder Mahedi Hasan are among those filling the big shoes of Bangladesh’s all-format golden generation, and none have had a shot at Test cricket yet.

As the Asian cricket experience shows, perhaps the inexorable march of time is most charitable to those who don’t resist it. Politics, movie plots, and cricketing ethos have a shelf life, beyond which they fail to serve their purpose.

The want of a subplot involving narrative arcs and a personal edge at the upcoming Asia Cup may need getting used to, but a budding breed of T20 specialists thrown into the jeopardy that a multi-team tournament entails should keep things interesting.

Published on Sep 09, 2025