Shameful, Shambolic, Shambles, Cowardly !!
It looks like the whole cricketing world has almost turned upside down in a space of 48 hours...Bob Woolmer is dead, Pakistan is the 1st one to crash out of WC, Flintoff stripped off Vice captaincy - thanks to a drunken boat trip and of course India had their rear end kicked by B'desh. Let me stick to the last part for now.
To many an average India follower, the defeat at the hands of B'desh was a shock but to me it was not. I had followed Indian cricket for long and I could see through the holes very easily. Readers of the blog have to simply go through the previous post and you will see Notstradamus like clairvoyant calls.
I had said that Morteza will be too much to deal with and I also predicted that Indian batsmen, esp Sachin will struggle against the left arm spinners Raffique and Razzak and I was spot on. Frankly, I did not want any of my prediction to become true but it happened, as it has often in the past. You could visualize a struggle for India since they have always been slow to start in any 'away' series and also when there is a bit of juice on the track, they struggle against club class outfits. I don't want to go too much into the '2 runs for 5 wicket' act or the umpteenth failure of Viru or the struggles of Sachin and Dravid, enough is to say, that it was a terrible let down.
When India bowled, I still had a fond hope that they will somehow rediscover their magic but at the most opportune moment, Agarkar choose to have an off day and when Tamim started whacking, I could see the shoulders sag. Dravid's field placement, captaincy, fielder placement (what the heck was Munaf doing at Covers ? - he conceded minimum of 15+ runs) was all wrong and the shambolic display in every sphere continued and B'desh coasted to an easy win. The body language of Indian players looked like that of a line of sheep that is waiting to get slaughtered. The kind of performance with extra sharpness that was needed, when defending small totals was missing and Dravid looked as if he had swallowed castor oil and looked to be completely bereft of anything useful in terms of an idea. In hindsight, knowing how Indian batting struggles in such unknown conditions, he should have fielded first but I guess, they could repeated the same shameless display during the chase too.
So, what is ahead - In theory, India can still make it to Super 8 but the odds are not in their favor since Srilanka has a huge run rate difference and India has let things drift to a stage where they can't control destiny anymore. India has to beat Bermuda, black and blue today (best bet - India has to bowl first and dismiss the Bermudans for a paltry score and hit back in as few overs as possible. If India gets to bat first, they must score something like 375+ and hope to crash the Bermudans for something like 75-100 ). Based on my experience, India does not deliver such violent backlashes. They will win but it will be so colorless and listless, as the press conferences of Rahul Dravid.
Rotten eggs, broomsticks, broken compound walls, more burning of effigies await the Indian team and as usual, they will be escorted through the back doors through the middle of the night. They will then lick their wounds, get ready for the next ad shoot before some tamasha matches are staged to fool the average Indian on the street. Public memory is short and the common man , weighed by every day issues of rising prices, poor rupee purchasing power and inefficient, corrupt leaders will move on.
To many an average India follower, the defeat at the hands of B'desh was a shock but to me it was not. I had followed Indian cricket for long and I could see through the holes very easily. Readers of the blog have to simply go through the previous post and you will see Notstradamus like clairvoyant calls.
I had said that Morteza will be too much to deal with and I also predicted that Indian batsmen, esp Sachin will struggle against the left arm spinners Raffique and Razzak and I was spot on. Frankly, I did not want any of my prediction to become true but it happened, as it has often in the past. You could visualize a struggle for India since they have always been slow to start in any 'away' series and also when there is a bit of juice on the track, they struggle against club class outfits. I don't want to go too much into the '2 runs for 5 wicket' act or the umpteenth failure of Viru or the struggles of Sachin and Dravid, enough is to say, that it was a terrible let down.
When India bowled, I still had a fond hope that they will somehow rediscover their magic but at the most opportune moment, Agarkar choose to have an off day and when Tamim started whacking, I could see the shoulders sag. Dravid's field placement, captaincy, fielder placement (what the heck was Munaf doing at Covers ? - he conceded minimum of 15+ runs) was all wrong and the shambolic display in every sphere continued and B'desh coasted to an easy win. The body language of Indian players looked like that of a line of sheep that is waiting to get slaughtered. The kind of performance with extra sharpness that was needed, when defending small totals was missing and Dravid looked as if he had swallowed castor oil and looked to be completely bereft of anything useful in terms of an idea. In hindsight, knowing how Indian batting struggles in such unknown conditions, he should have fielded first but I guess, they could repeated the same shameless display during the chase too.
So, what is ahead - In theory, India can still make it to Super 8 but the odds are not in their favor since Srilanka has a huge run rate difference and India has let things drift to a stage where they can't control destiny anymore. India has to beat Bermuda, black and blue today (best bet - India has to bowl first and dismiss the Bermudans for a paltry score and hit back in as few overs as possible. If India gets to bat first, they must score something like 375+ and hope to crash the Bermudans for something like 75-100 ). Based on my experience, India does not deliver such violent backlashes. They will win but it will be so colorless and listless, as the press conferences of Rahul Dravid.
Rotten eggs, broomsticks, broken compound walls, more burning of effigies await the Indian team and as usual, they will be escorted through the back doors through the middle of the night. They will then lick their wounds, get ready for the next ad shoot before some tamasha matches are staged to fool the average Indian on the street. Public memory is short and the common man , weighed by every day issues of rising prices, poor rupee purchasing power and inefficient, corrupt leaders will move on.
posted by Crick_Love at 12:26 AM
4 Comments:
Well what can I say about this defeat. Frankly I didn't predict it before the match, but was convinced when VS got out the way he got out.
It was surprising to see Indians not comming down to counter Rasel't swing. I guess Rasel hurt us more with his swing than Mortaza. He wasn't leaking any runs from his end so we decided to take on Mortaza and eventually perishing in the process.
Having said that 191 was still defendable, had Ajit Agarkar bowled with some degree of accuracy and Zaheer bowled with some grey matter!
I was also surprised at Rahul's decission of taking Munaf out of the attack when he was bowling well. I thought he should have gone through with the spell and completed his quota of overs.
A word about Rahul's captaincy. During the good old days of SCG, when we wanted to attack the opposition with Bhajji, we had a silly point and a man at 45 on the leg side to counter the sweep.
This was missing in the last encounter. Dravid had a forward short leg and a man at deep fine leg. What was deep fine leg doing while attacking? Was he there to try and catch a top edged sweep? or was he there to save runs?
We had too many sweeps going just past the short fine leg. I was really surprised that no one pointed this out and no one bothered to tell Rahul about this.
The less said about left arm spin and Sachin the better!
A crazy news channel was running star predictions for the Indian Cricket Team. They have predicted India to be in the Semi Finals!.
Now that is one hell of a prediction. Going by the way we played, this prediction is not going to come true!
Now this is one hell of an insult.
http://samachar.com/showurl.php?rurl=http://sify.com/khel/wc_fullstory.php?id=14411611
I don't know whether you followed the post match press conference or not.
A scribe was asking Habibul Bashar whether Indian captain's assesment that an extra 25-30 runs would have had a different result was indeed true or not?
To that Bashar shot back saying that "Having lost people can say want ever they want.".
What is your reaction on that statement? for me, it is the ultimate insult to Indian cricket.
Prabhu : Patriotism aside, I think Bashar is right. Another 30-40 runs would have made the game a bit more tight but the result would have been same. Indian bowling was listless and the field placement was uninspiring and another 30 runs would have easily been hit by B'desh.
well, u predicted right bout B'desh.
Bhajji was horrible , agarkar was average and in my opinion that was wrong on dravid's part. But the captaincy n field placemnt against Bermuda was good.
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