The Debacle of Indian Cricket
Indian Team's Tragic World Cup Exit
The reasons for Indian cricketing team's exit out of the 2007 World Cup are discussed.
As a run-up to the World Cup in April 2007, the Indian cricketers were offered plenty of opportunities in the form of Greg Chappell as coach, Sunil Gavaskar as a batting consultant and a number of extra support staff like a fitness specialist, trainer, and an enormous goodwill of billion people.
In short, they were treated as well-fed Roman Warriors going for a fight with a lion in a ring.
So what went wrong with Indian cricket?
Over the hill
There was little fresh talent to boast of in our country as the chairman of selectors himself pointed out. The selectors could not find a fast bowler like Shaun Tait and had to persist with the glaringly monotonous Ajit Agarkar. Similarly they did not have cricketers like Mathew Hayden, Ricky Ponting or Jacques Kallis, who could singlehandedly alter the course of the match and had to rely on an unexpectedly inept and over the hill Tendulkar, an ageing Ganguly, a horribly out of form Sehwag, an inconsistent Yuvaraj singh and an under- performing Dhoni, who appeared more suited to Indian pitches.
Besides all these, from what can be gathered from the reports in the newspapers, the coach, Greg Chappell, played with the confidence levels of some players like Ganguly, Harbhajan and Nehra and obviously destroyed a team built over the years. Also, his ploy of favouring youngsters like Suresh Raina, Venugopala Rao and Mohammad Kaif failed him miserably as these cricketers failed to grab the myriad opportunities offered.
Instead of performing as a well-oiled and seasoned machine, the team started working like an overworked and jaded one. The repeated experiments in the name of finding the right combination as late as up to the Sri Lanka series cost the team very dearly in the end.
Consequently the team lost Irfan Pathan, that energetic fast bowler, who bowled at speeds of 140kmph and swung the ball prodigiously on his debut in Australia in 2003-04, as he was shunted up and down the batting order to make him look like an all rounder. Talented cricketers like J.P.Yadav, Dinesh Kartick were left on the fringes forever.
Need for speed
Moreover, the fast bowlers who reportedly bowled in excess of 145 kmph in the domestic tournaments, looked military-medium as the big guns showed not more than 130kmph most of the time in tests and one-dayers. Either they were hyped or were deliberately asked to slow down in the name of bowling good line and length .So Munaf Patel, V.R.V.Singh and Ajit Agarkar became easily playable because these bowlers did not follow the dictum that "a fast bowler’s job" is to bowl fast and terrorize the batsmen on all the six balls, when he is young and over a period of time as age starts taking toll over him, he can start concentrating on swing-and-cut.
In the end, the shocking defeat at the hands of Bangladesh and later to Sri Lanka benefited the student community in India, allowing them to concentrate on their spring exams and not bother about the scores.
