Two 113s in Wellington: Different Formats, One Pitch, and the Question at No. 5

The first pull Axar Patel attempted on Wellington's drop-in surface came off the top edge and flew towards deep square leg. The scoreboard read 113. In the same city, on the same tour, India had raced to 100 in five overs of a T20I, and Abhishek Sharma had made 113 off 38 balls — a strike rate near 297, more runs than the rest of the team combined.

Two 113s. One run-fest, one scorecard.

That evening I wrote two lines in my notebook. First: Axar Patel was batting at No. 5. Second: KL Rahul was batting below him. Everything else is arithmetic. After more than fifty years of watching this game I keep one rule — count first, write later. At Eden Gardens in 2026 there were eighty thousand people and nine of us in the press box; since that day I have never separated counting from writing.

The Wellington context

This was the second ODI of a five-match series. Rain shortened the game and left India chasing a revised target of roughly 135. A shortened match removes the middle-overs phase in which India's batting normally rebuilds, which multiplies the price of early wickets and turns risk-taking into a necessity rather than a choice.

New Zealand understood the price. In the powerplay and immediately after it, the short ball came from both ends. This was a drop-in pitch where weather makes bounce variable, and the home attack turned that bounce into a weapon. Shubman Gill went early. Virat Kohli fell to a loose delivery. Rohit Sharma battled and then gave it away with a rash shot. Shreyas Iyer fought fire with fire for a while before another well-directed bouncer finished him. Iyer's vulnerability to the short ball is already on the international record; Wellington repeated the finding rather than discovering it.

The scorecard was the argument. All I had to do was write down what it proved.

The core: the question at No. 5

Axar Patel batting at No. 5 was the decisive selection error of this match, and the evidence comes from two matches, not one. In the series opener he was peppered with short stuff, tried to cut his way out, and perished to a similar shot. The same dismissal mode in two innings is not variance — it is a pattern. Axar's career role is lower-middle-order all-rounder and spinner. Sending him in at No. 5 on a seaming, bouncing surface pushed his weakest technique into the fastest fire.

KL Rahul is the direct counterfactual. On the same pitch, against the same attack, he rode the bounce and controlled his pulls; where others looked clueless, he looked at ease. When a specialist batter can handle the exact threat that removed a promoted all-rounder, the argument is about selection, not conditions — and selection is the one variable a team can change before the next match.

The strongest evidence is that India's own bowlers used the same weapon. Gurnoor Brar and India's seamers ran the identical short-ball plan against New Zealand's batters, who were equally at sea. That makes the vulnerability real and exploitable by any quality attack, not a Wellington quirk. India's bowling plan is ahead of its batting plan, and that gap is about preparation, not talent. The answer existed inside the squad; it simply was not deployed where it was needed.

The T20I half is a different game and should stay separate. Abhishek Sharma's 38-ball innings is the format's finest sample, but it is an outlier — a 297 strike rate arrives once a season, not once a tour. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi opening alongside him signals that India deliberately blooded a new generation in the T20I leg, which is also a workload-management signal. A hundred in five overs is 20 an over; the fielding-restriction phase is the most predictive phase in T20, and this match was settled inside six overs.

One piece of arithmetic deserves recording. A report citing "397 runs in 33.2 overs" cannot describe a single T20 innings — an innings lasts twenty overs. It is most plausibly a combined aggregate across both innings, or a misprint. I counted so that no one could tell me I had imagined it. Until a scorecard confirms it, that number stays out of the argument. The venue name has been garbled in the same reports; Wellington's ground is known as the Cake Tin.

The contrarian angle: "two 113s" is a rhetorical device, not a statistic

A 38-ball T20 hundred and a rain-shortened ODI total of 113 are products of different systems — placing them side by side produces rhetoric, not arithmetic. In T20 only two fielders are outside the ring for six overs; in ODI the powerplay length, the condition of the ball and the shape of the innings all differ. The only legitimate bridge between the two formats is the technical question of playing the short ball, not the run totals.

The second thing the reports are under-weighting is rain and DLS. A revised target does not always reflect the pitch's true scoring value. Kohli and Rohit were dismissed to loose shots rather than unplayable deliveries — that is an approach problem layered on top of a technical one, and approach does not improve through net practice alone.

The third point stings most. The stated rationale for promoting Axar was to break the monotony of right-handers. That logic worked on Dubai's slow, turning pitches during the Champions Trophy. Generalising a success from a favourable environment into a default rule, then applying it on a seaming, bouncing deck, is strategic over-fitting. Pitch profile should be the gate on selection; a batter's handedness should not.

Forward

The next time India play on a seaming, bouncing surface, three things should be counted: how Axar Patel's next three to five dismissals occur, whether Rahul's name appears above his, and whether Kohli and Rohit fall to loose shots or to good balls. On flat pitches this debate will go quiet — and that is precisely the danger. A problem created by a fast pitch is not solved by a slow one; it is only hidden.