India's supporting cast turn showstoppers

At one point on Sunday at the Bay Oval, India seemed to have multiple captains on the field: at one end of the ground, Manish Pandey could be spotted running in, ball after ball, from long-off to discuss field plans with Shardul Thakur. At the other end, Jasprit Bumrah was constantly in his bowlers' ears, often being joined in by Shreyas Iyer. There was KL Rahul, of course, centrally located, managing the show from behind the stumps as the official stand-in for the stand-in captain.

And it just seemed right that India should seal their 5-0 whitewash at Mt Maunganui with an ensemble cast leading them to victory - when the two biggest stars were absent from the field; it was both the theme, and the major takeaway from their rather successful start to this New Zealand sojourn.

India landed here on the back of a largely successful home season where they hardly lost much across formats. This was supposed to be their first major challenge in what is a year packed with overseas Tests and a World Cup to boot. The repeated implosions from the Kiwi batsmen, at times, did make the visitors' job much easier than they'd have expected - to the extent that India ended the series not knowing just how good their T20I side is, despite the comprehensive scoreline.

However, as they traversed the length and breadth of the North Island over the first two weeks of this tour, they have also discovered the one significant aspect that most successful entities in sports, entertainment and sports entertainment thrive on - a high-functioning undercard.

You just have to look at the longest-running TV shows in history or the most prolific teams in sport - for it might be the star-cast that might drive the show but it's often the support cast that steals it; just like we've seen here during the T20I series, and on television for years.

For instance, take professional wrestling or the WWE from the 1990s. For the longest time, they'd focused on just developing their main-event acts and not what was to follow. So when their megastars were gone - in that case, lured away by their major rivals - they were suddenly left high and dry with a very limited roster to fall back on.

It was their subsequent decision to completely transform their vision and turn their attention to the characters that make up the middle, that really brought the WWE back to the top. It's defined their incredible success, which continues to break records till date, ever since. It's been all rise. And even if they might not seem the most literally connected, it's the same formula that the great sports teams over the years have built their glory upon. They just call it "building a bench".

Despite Rohit's Super Over heroics, India's T20I series win here isn't one that'll be remembered for its most high-profile names - even though Bumrah did end up as the highest wicket-taker eventually, with a remarkable spell at the Bay Oval. It'll be more about the rise and the rise of Rahul, the emergence of Thakur and Saini, and the re-emergence of Iyer and Pandey.

It's undeniable that India are beginning to build an aura - even if it might seem to be at a nascent stage for now - as a cricket team. You can argue that this as a T20I series against a team low on confidence; but this was also an Indian team that landed here, got on to the field with little sleep while nursing jetlags, and purely on the basis of their results, they overcame the geography of the cricket world itself.

The sustenance of that aura, however, will depend on how India build and foster the acts that follow the lead of the Kohlis, the Jadejas and the Bumrahs. On the evidence of these last 10 days alone, the future does look promising for India.

In the first T20I, it wasn't Kohli, the greatest finisher of our times, that saw the team through;