Men In Blue disappoint once again

"Ye Cup kahin nahin jaayega, Aane De"

Well you won't be hearing these lines the next time you switch on the TV. The defending Champions have been knocked out. India's campaign in the ICC T20 WC England'09 has ended without even a whimper.

Every Indian expected that by the time the tournament would be over we would see a familiar picture like the one below ..

....But just midway into the super 8's and we could see gloomy, tensed faces

There is no need to say a word .....the picture says it all.

And before we, the supporters, could wipe tears of grief from our eyes, the blame game has already begun.

Indian coach Gary Kirsten put the entire blame on player fatigue due to IPL. Dhoni disagreed. And what did the BCCI do??? No prizes for guessing!! It did what it does best ....asking everyone to just shut up!

Well I'm no cricket expert but I'm a great Indian supporter (just like everyone else) and my analysis leads to the following points :-

• I could sense the bad omens even before the tournament. Dhoni wasn't Dhoni before the start of the tournament and it was quite evident from his speeches in the press conferences. The person who believed in team performance and playing as a unit now had different opinions. Prior to the start of the tournament in one of the press conferences, he said that T20 is all about individual performances. Yeah there's nothing wrong in it but when you play as a team nothing is impossible. When you are in a team, everyone has to do his job and not depend on any particular player to do it for you. And this is precisely what happened in this WC. In 2007, whenever the team was in trouble there was someone who raised his hand and said Relax guys I'll handle it (Remember Yuvi's 70 off 30 balls against the Aussies in 2007) but in 2009 whenever India was in trouble, everyone looked at each others faces and no one set out to do the job.


• To some extent I agree with coach Gary Kirsten that players were tired after IPL. Most of the players played for their respective franchises and they never got to play as a team. The coach needs some time to be with the players and even in the little time they got, many players used to skip practice sessions. As a result, Gary failed to analyse the team's strength and weaknesses. Also IPL lead to player injuries, Sehwag had to be ruled out of the WC with a shoulder injury. Even Zaheer picked up a shoulder injury while playing for Mumbai Indians in the IPL but finally recovered from it, yet lack of match practice took a toll on his efficiency.

• Another reason for their defeat is that the players could not handle the pressure of expectations. In 2007, the situation was quite different. The team was quite new with no Sachin, Sourav or Dravid, and India had played only 1 T20 match before the WC. So going into the tournament, Indians were underdogs. Certainly, no one even expected them to enter into the finals. Probably this is precisely what motivated them to rise to the occasion. The departure of senior players gave the younger guys the opportunity to showcase their talent. But in 2009, Indians were pre-tournament favourites. All the cricket experts and news channels were discussing as to who would prove to be a threat to India. Maybe team India was over-confident going into the tournament...

• Apart from the spinners, the bowlers were pretty miserable. However, bowling was not as bad as our batting. Ishant Sharma carried his poor form from the IPL to the WC (Probably he brought the KKR effect into team India, that's why we lost almost all the super 8 matches in the last over just as KKR did in IPL). Zaheer was struggling to find form. Wonder why Praveen Kumar wasn't in the playing 11. He lead RCB from the front in the IPL and had performed much better than Ishant. Even RP Singh (highest wicket taker in the IPL) was not part of the team in the match against West Indies and even in the match against England he was not allowed to complete his quota of 4 overs. Furthermore, Pragyan Ojha did not play in the last two matches of the super 8's. Bhajji was more into conatining the batsmen but Ojha was the wicket taking bowler.

• Team India's batting was horrible. Gambhir was pretty 'gambhir' and never looked at ease. With no Sehwag, the onus was on Rohit Sharma to lead the Indian batting brigade. Rohit played well against the minnows but against the slightly tougher teams , he failed miserably. Experiments with batting order did not work. Raina and Dhoni --both of them flopped. Only Yuvi and Yusuf managed to score some runs.

• Lastly, Dhoni lost his Midas touch. In 2007, every decision that he took paid off. Asking Joginder Sharma to bowl the last over, ahead of Harbhajan in the final against Pakistan, was a brilliant move. On the contrary, in 2009 his decision to promote Jadeja up the order backfired. He failed to rotate the bowlers well and set the proper field. His batting was awful. He scored nothing but kept on consuming balls and when the situation demanded that he should play his shots, he got out!

In the end, I would like to say that we were not the perfect team even in 2007, but that team had the hunger to break barriers, the will to perform and the team was highly committed. They played fearless cricket, they played their natural cricket without caring about their reputation and that paid off. But this time, it was something different. Hopefully, team India would bounce back with even more vigour, passion and energy. So what if we did not get to lift the trophy in 2009. Let 2010 come and we'll show the world who's the boss!