Defending champions of the world T20 Cup, Team India has been pushed out of the tournament. Despite having the tag as being the favourites to lift the Cup once again, they couldn’t even make up to the semi-final stage. Moreover, entering the Super-8 stage was not at all a big deal as they were grouped with minnows, Bangladesh and Ireland.
If Coach Gary Kirsten’s words are followed, IPL has been the major reason of India’s poor run in the World Cup. According to him, the players were quite tired, both physically and mentally due to the glamorous IPL and thus, didn’t look as the team on the front foot.
Although BCCI cleared Gary’s words by saying that the board couldn’t be blamed as the players knew the schedule beforehand and the team management should have rested the players accordingly.
While in the tournament, the players seemed to be under the pressure of retaining the Cup, Suresh Raina didn’t seem to be in his real touch and the biggest blunder was Sehwag’s injury. The slight stint of the brawl between captain Dhoni and the media, must have affected the dressing room environment too.
MS Dhoni never looked to be following the team as he is known to be and his strike rate in the series has been just around 72, not a healthy rate even in a 50-over game. Also his ability of grabbing the weakness of his opponents and capitalising on them was missing. On the contrary, West Indian and English bowlers exposed Indian batsman’s weakness against the short balls.
In the do-or-die situation against England too, Dhoni took a few decisions which were totally unreasonable. India is a good batting side. Their way of playing is to bat first, post a huge score and then apply pressure on the chasing team by bowling in the right areas. But still, after winning the toss, Dhoni elected to bowl first in the match against England, while the fact remains, India is not really a chasing team.
Secondly, 154 runs were never an unachievable target to chase at the Lords’. That could clearly signify India’s batting collapse because this is something never expected from a team whose names include Gautam Gambhir, Rohit Sharma, Yuvraj Singh, Suresh Raina, MS Dhoni, Yusuf Pathan and the budding Ravindra Jadeja.
Promoting Jadeja up the order ahead of the in-form Yuvraj is something that can never be answered. Where is the hitting talent that Raina had in the IPL been missing now? Gambhir never seemed to be the batsman who was the maximum run-getter in the previous World Cup. Only player who looked to be in a bit of form was the new vice captain Yuvraj Singh.
Praveen Kumar, whose only strength is swinging the ball in both directions was un-utilised by Dhoni as he was benched in all the matches. Ishant Sharma, who has an eco-rate of above 8, was preferred over Praveen Kumar, while the former is a bowler of fast and bouncy wickets and latter being of swinging conditions prevalent in England.
The team management also didn’t looked as if it had any plans of cracking down the World Cup maze. Nobody took the responsibility of the World Cup debacle, although Dhoni came up with a few apologies to the Indian fans.
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