Image credit: AFP

As a T20 captain, you’re constantly making decisions. A field change every ball, a bowling change every over, expected to give input on lines and lengths for all of your bowlers as they stand at the top of their mark.

The most basic of these choices is whether, in the current situation against the batsman who’s stood at the strikers’ end, you want to be bowling spin or pace. There is plenty else going on, at every point of an innings, but this is the most fundamental choice a skipper will be considering.

So it would have been for Ravichandran Ashwin, captain of Kings XI Punjab, as he stood in the field at Eden Gardens on Wednesday. Kolkata Knight Riders’ opening batsmen Chris Lynn and Sunil Narine were stood in the middle, their first over against Mohammed Shami having gone for one run, meaning that Lynn maintained strike for the second.

Fundamentally, the way KKR use Narine and Lynn is an elegant solution to two different problems, cancelling out the respective weaknesses of two dangerous but flawed cricketers. Other sports wouldn’t think twice about such tactical choices, but cricket is behind most others in this regard. T20, with its strain on resources through money and time constraints, encourages efficiency and ingenuity. This is one of the earliest, and most successful examples, of what this climate can produce – without a doubt, it will not be the last.