Monday, June 15, 2009

My one wish for T20 World Cup and India's loss

There have been many reasons given and the opinions continue to flow on why India lost to England. While I am no authority on cricket, I follow the game with a lot of passion and I feel like I have the right comment what I feel – does not matter if it is right or wrong.
Here is a link to the article on Cricinfo and the comments from various people
Cricinfo
Here is the article from BBC which has the comments from the rival captains
Dhoni’s Comments
Collingwood View’s
Before I express my views on this issue, a disclaimer – it is always easy to comment on these issues as an outsider but one really has to be part of the team and experience it firsthand.
There are 3 main reasons why India lost the 2 matches
1) We were very defensive – the tag of defending champions probably put additional pressure on us and we were trying to be cautious in our approach. Several examples to depict the same 1) Dhoni did not want to send Yuvraj out in a pressure situation and sent RA Jadeja to bat 2) we should have batted first and setup a big target to chase for England. However, we opted to bat second. As such this was a pressure game. To bat second and try to achieve a target in a pressure game is never easy. We strengthened our batting line up by adding Jadeja but we still opted to bat second?
2) Dhoni the “uber cool” captain? - I guess he is now a very conscious captain and wants to live up to the expectations. For ex again take the match against India and WI. When Pragyan Ohja was bowling. Suresh Raina threw the ball to Ohja in an attempt to effect a run out of Simmons. Ohja missed it and Raina yelled at Ohja. Right at the end of the over, Dhoni called Raina and had a word with him. Roll back 2 years in 2007 and Dhoni would have probably let it go and let Raina and Ohja sort it out themselves. A simple example but goes a long way to show how small details show the mood of the side, the captain and everyone else in the team.
3) Fans of Indian cricket – To some extent all of us (millions of fans of Indian cricket) are also responsible for the defeat. We have high expectations of the team, if the team loses we analyze the situation to death, we play the scenes of last ball 100 times in our channels. We take Yusuf Pathan’s sit down before the last over out of context and portray that as if he was brooding over the loss. We even ask if Dhoni is the right captain just based on loss in one tournament. Last but not the least people like me also start blogging about this.
Having said all this, there is only one desire left for me. I do not want Pakistan to win the T20 world cup. If Pakistan happen to win the T20 cup – that will be the saddest day in my life so far…

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