Life as I find it

Today’s match was everything we had wanted the day before’s to be. Good batting, good fielding, the works. Is it my imagination, or were the Bangladeshis not at full power today? Or was it that Indians were really charging? Can’t say.

All I know is that we did really well. This should ease some cricketing concerns, if we can manage to make this a regular feature of our performance.

I’m not giving all details of the match, as they are easily available all over the net, but Goutam Gambhir was outstanding as the man of the match as well as the fastest century today. He just played and very well. He was hit by cramps too toward his century, but I guess it is a regular thing in this heat and humidity. Some Bangladeshis had trouble as well.

Today was what comes really close to my imagination as a good batting innings. All players did their thing as they could, even though the wickets fell. No gifts of wickets except of course for the mandatory Sehwag wicket.

About Sehwag….. I have begun getting this feeling that it is a kind of formula. He comes, blazes boundaries, and then tosses the ball into a fielder’s hands to return to the sir-conditioned dressing room. Its sad to see Utthappa being wasted in the dressing room. The only blessing I see is that he can’t be accused of hatching overs. But if the team is performing like they did today, I can see the blessing into even a Sehwag up there in the batting order. Sky-rocket the runrate for the price of one wicket.

The key in this I think is that all the other players must play the remaining game. Do their thing, keep the score board nice and high, and be careful. No need to excessively worry about wickets if all of them are keyed in like today. Even Zaheer Khan came in for the last few balls and smashed two boundaries.

Another thing I loved about todays match is the “kid” Piyush Chawla. Heh kid? Well, try to see him hugging Dhoni. He looks so small and innocent, he could be his son. He could be our next Kumble. Leg spinner, and mighty nice with it. Three wickets in an ODI debut is not bad either, but what I loved was the total bewilderment he caused in the batsmen with his bowling. It took them quite some time to figure him out, and I still am not sure they are sorted about him. That’s good for a debut. His first over was kinda flaky, but then he just went ahead and owned the pitch. Got hit around a bit too, but hey, with three wickets, from a newbie, who’s complaining?

But the thing that delighted me the most was that the Indian fielding just came to life out of nowhere today. Our men were all over the field, diving, chasing, fast reflexes…. the works. Really welcome after the endless sloppiness they had been demonstrating. One run out from Chawla and Dhoni was lightning fast. I’m impressed.

Looks like the Indian team has really taken cricket VERY seriously all of a sudden, and I for one ain’t complaining. Nothing like cheering our side to a thumping victory like todays.

After Dhoni’s outstanding performance in the match yesterday, where he was on the field all day, except for the 26 minutes Gambhir and Sehwag batted, until Gambir was out. He faced cramps and battled on for two overs before calling for a runner in the 39th over and went on to play another 7 overs steadily against the pain to bring India home to victory.

Every news on India and cricket is full of praise for him, fans are delighted. There is a lot of talk on the victory, but much as I hunted, there is nothing on Dhoni’s current condition. Nothing about what exactly had hapened to his leg. Was it a simple cramp from dehydration, was it something wrong with his hamstring, how is he now, will he be playing tomorrow….. nothing.

I wish there was. I’d like to know that he’s ok. There’s loads of cricket coming up, and another crucial match tomorrow, and while we are all celebrating this victory, we are also looking forward to this match and his presence in it.

*sigh* if the news is not there, I guess its not there. I only hope it comes on later in the evening and is not left for us to discover tomorrow through his presence or absense. Don’t like the feeling that we are all wanting performance from the poor guy and not concerned about what is happening to him.

Will take a look and see what I find later on.

The first match against Bangladesh certainly was a nail biting one! Their batting was excellent, and 250 runs on the board was no mean task to chase. Of course, India really had no choice.

I groaned when Bangladesh won the toss. The batting team would have an advantage for sure on that pitch. Plus, the sultry heat was killing. A team out in the field for the first half of the day would have spent huge energy reserves and would already have begun their battle with the heat and humidity way before they got to put any runs on the score board. But someone had to bat first, and it turned out to be Bangladesh.

Sehwag was in and Utthapa was out,and that was irritating me too, not because I don’t like Sehwag, because I do, but because he wasn’t in dependable form these days, and this was a match we just couldn’t afford to lose.

As I watched, the Bangladeshis ripped apart our bowling attack steadily. Waiting for wickets to fall was almost an agony. Nothing seemed to be happening much on that front and wickets were really sparse. Our fielding was a little clumsy the way I saw it too. And I just watched helplessly till the Bangladeshis took their score up to a nice 250 runs in 47 overs for 7 wickets, most of which were in the end overs.

Lunch was a distracted affair, looking at “Fourth Umpire” on Door Darshan, to see what kind of hope India had…. and it was all the same….. They have no choice. If they want to protect their name, they HAVE TO win. Cool, but what are their chances? Nothing helpful was coming to reassure me.

Then we came on to bat, and Gambhir and Sehwag ripped apart through their attack like no one’s business. The boundaries were flowing. Things were looking like they were in the mood to wrap up the match in 25 overs. Serious “men on fire” stuff. And then, Gambhir was gone. Rasel, I must say got whacked all over the place by the two of them, but he also got their wickets way early in the match and had brought Bangladesh within an inch of victory. Also their fielding. When I saw them whizzing every which way and stopping runs and keeping things really tight, I had this grudging admiration. I wanted to yell out to our side, “Look guys! This is how its supposed to be.”

Ok, we were still doing good. Dhoni was in, so I was looking forward to plenty more of the same. This guy is gloriously spectacular with his bat.

But before that more of the same could happen, Sehwag was gone, and India was sky high with the runrate, but had lost two wickets way too early in the match. The score was nowhere near where we had to go. Yuvraj Singh came and went. Dravid came in with a hope of stability and he managed some, but couldn’t take it ahead. He went too. Dinesh Mongia was more of the same. And we were at the dead end of our batting at 144 for 5 with over a hundred runs to go for victory. The tailenders couldn’t be counted on for such a performance. They were bowlers, not batsmen. You could see the Bangladeshis partying in their minds. Our run rate was good, but we were out of chances for slipping up anywhere and had a long way to go.

And as we watched, Dhoni made that transition from hard hitting boundary blazing rocket to anchor that makes me fall in love with him all over again. A strike rate of 77 is very good for a batsman, but not Dhoni. Dhoni is 133! But we watched patiently as he stuck to his guns and Dinesh Kartik came to give him company. They just parked themselves there. They were playing and they were going nowhere toward the dressing room. They had come to stay!

It was a nail biting time all through, with Dhoni visibly in pain with cramps and Yuvraj coming in as his runner. Not surprising, as he had been under pressure as the wicket keeper and had come in third to bat and stuck on ever since in that terrible heat. I dare say if the pressure had cramped some of his flashy batting, the cramps did the same too, as he stuck his ground and played for ones and twos. Yuvraj did the running around really well, with some very close calls. The required rate was always just hovering at the range of possible. Never looking comfortable or impossible, so it was nail biting for Bangladeh as well.

Patient singles, doubles and the occasional boundary was the note of the day. And the rest, folks, is history. We won! Not the thumping victory that would bring credit to the Indian team’s status in cricket, but certainly better than the defeat that looked inevitable until Dhoni made that incredible anchoring innings.

Karthik got the fastest 50 and Dhoni was the man of the match! No surprises there. Way to go! From here, tomorrow, and on the 15th, I can only hope we seal this shaky victory with resounding ones that pack matches a couple of hours early, like our collective ego needs to.

This is obviously not happening anymore. As far as I was concerned, we were out when we lost to Sri Lanka without bothering to wait for the results of the Bangladesh – Bermuda one. What a performance by India. I am at a loss for words that describe it adequately. It was a blazing start. Good bowling, good fileding to about two third of the Sri Lankan innings – even a little after that, and then, it suddenly seemed to loosen up. Even then, life was ok. We had a batting side with the seven stars – all of them “match winners” in their own right. But when our innings started, our team simply fell apart. There is no other way to put it. Just fell to bits one by one. Sehwag seemed promosing, Dravid tried to hold on, but no one actually did it. Tendulkar, Yuvraj and Dhoni in particularly were so disgraceful as to make anyone who didn’t know history disbelieve their reputations. They were like the neighbourhood boys playing with a professional team.

The day we need to depend on Bangladesh losing to Bermuda to prove our eligibility in a World Cup, we are already in trouble. We might as well walk out now than later. Oh we all know that this is cricket, and anything can happen, but when the only team we can perform against seems to be Bermuda, perhaps its time to say that the “anything” does not include determined cricket from the Indian team.

Loads of emotions on a riot all over. Advertisers upset. Fans devastated. Sad, sad time.

There is a lot that needs to be reassessed and worked on on our cricket front. Rahul Dravid got it right when he said we don’t deserve the Cup, and it is not about one match or a few more matches, but there is something we really need to look deep into.

Yesterday, I conducted an outbound leadership programme for school students, where they were given tasks to perform, and their results were discussed to identify problem areas. One of the teams got off to a flying start, and then got over confident and messed up their second task. On the third task, they got so nervous about the previous bad performance, that they failed even worse. in the discussion, one of them was very straight in speaking of what happened. he said, “We played like the Indian Cricket team. Everything was good. Then we got overconfident, and then we took so much pressure that it made us fail.” He was bang on target.

On a kids level, this would suffice. But when we are speaking of an international team, it is not as though they don’t know all this. The issues are far deeper. Right now, I wouldn’t mind recommending an outbound management development programme for the Indian Cricket team, to help them see things better and away from a context where their personal reputation being at stake makes them be more defensive than objective when it comes to dealing with feedback.

What feedback could be stronger than our data from our World Cup performances?

We really need to take a pause and figure out what it is that we are trying to do, what it is that we actually end up doing and what it is that is going differently from plan and deal with it very strongly, if we ever hope to bring our performance to a level that matches with out status as the worlds highest earning cricket team. What is it that is being paid for? What is it that is being delivered, and how can there be a congruence that will keep the overall followers from being disappointed?

I see this as a two fold problem. One, of course is the performance itself. The condition of players, their training, and efforts not just on maintaining form and performance, but actually attempting to improve on it. The other side of the coin of failed expectations are the expectations themselves. What are we basing our expectations on? Are advertisements of popular players any indications of their actual performance? Is our love and enthusiasm for the game actually leading us to expect far more from “our side” than is actually on the cards?

I think our advertising and media coverage needs to get more realistic. For a country with hockey as its national game, its tough to find people who would know the name of our captain, while most can reel off the names of the cricket players at the drop of a hat. We are totally focussed on cricket as a sport to the exclusion of most others. We are putting all our passions in one basket, regardless of the condition of the team, and somewhere down the line, this is going from the enjoyment of a sport to keeping fingers crossed not to have our expectations demolished. The media has made Gods out of our players, and the same media unhesitatingly degrades them after a defeat. Does anyone actually stop to think if there is any basis for making then Gods in the first place? We are just fooling ourselves, and if we’d like to avoid heartbreak, we might be wise to look at them in the fancy ads as popular models, and base our cricketing experience on actual current performance and condition data.

On the performance side…… I don’t even see where I can begin. The team needs to get into far better shape than they have been demonstrating. A World Cup is a WORLD CUP – all teams there have come to try and win it, and the very fact that they are entering the fray should be a cue that VERY strong preparations are in order. Have they actually happened? If they have, how is it that their lack of effect goes unnoticed and uncorrected until this disgrace?

Why aren’t players in form, and why aren’t they being brought into form in time, or replaced by players who are in form? Why is our fielding got such a general reputation for being weak? When a line up with Utthapa, Ganguly, Sehwag, Tendulkar, Yuvraj, Dravid and Dhoni fails to make runs, what is it that is going wrong? I get a very distasteful feeling that the World Cup is more of a trial and testing area than an arena for performance, if we give performances like that and are left with analysing them to see what’s not working.

I follow Cricket, but as far as stars go, I’d prefer to see ads endorsed by Australian cricketers or our fine kho kho players. I don’t see these world record holders that get whipped as heroes anymore.

I had read this post a lifetime ago, and it seems to have come true.

So folks, as we see, india won, and won very nicely yesterday. Now what? What happens of those burnt effigies? What happens to the vandalism in Dhoni’s new home? What happens of this pedestal we put our players on? What happens if they win tomorrow’s match against Sri Lanka? What happens if they lose?

Somehow, the fun of the game turning into this mad fervour is not something that appeals to me as a cricket follower. Its a sport. Both sides come there to do their best, and one wins and the other loses most of the time. It is ridiculous if this cannot be understood and the lives and safety of loved ones is on stake when players go out into the field to bat.

India is a country of passions. The stars are indeed loved. We have the shocking case of a teenager dying of a heart attack following the defeat of India at the hands of Bangladesh. Its the nation’s pride at stake and a mighty team like India losing to a comparitively new team like Bangladesh hurts. It hurts real bad.

But we also need to recognise, that when players walk into the field to represent their country for the World Cup, they are not trying to sabotage the game. They are doing their best in any case. What they want is runs, and wickets and records and glory for their country and themselves as its representatives. It is easy to say that our stars have become complacent about the game and content on advertising revenues, but how true is it? We still have a very strong team. Also, is months of a lack of conditioning going to be changed in a miracle, even if it is true? If people really believe that their teams are good for nothing, then the time to express it is in requesting that the team doesn’t play the World Cup at all and risk bringing “shame” on the country – not as a reflex after one loss and certainly not in a way that attacks the well-being of the players.

I think India has terrible fans. Fair weather fans I’d call them. Really sad for our country. We have fans that disrupt the peace of the mind after the very first match of such a big event. What is a player to think of in terms of support from his country, if there are bodyguards required to guard wives and children after one loss? Shame! Shame on the so called fans of India, who can’t even wait to see actual results before jumping to violence.

I feel sad for my team India right now. I hope that all their experience will allow them to wlk into the field and give their full focus on the game, inspite of all the happenings back home.

Yes that match with Bangladesh was terrible. Yes, there were many mistakes made. We seem to have covered some of the damage yesterday and got some World Cup records as well, and if our team continues to play like this, we will be blazing our way into the Super 8 regardless fo that initial hiccup.

Sehwag has taken off finally, and Rahul’s trust in him seems to have paid off with a bang. Yuvraj is going strong, as is Sachin. Dravid is playing well too. Ganguly, our anchor is as reliable as always. Dhoni was not so good, but that is understandable with the pressure on him on his home scenario. But Sehwag! WOW!

The upcoming match is going to be a tense one. We need to beat Sri Lanka, and beat them by a really good margin. We need our players focussed completely on the task at hand, and able to give it their best shot. I think they will be able to do it. The loss shook them hard, and they are now into that all-out mode, which seems to be doing wonders for our score board.

I’d like our team to know that I am rooting for them no matter what, and I am keeping fingers crossed and eyes glued to the screen, waiting for a glorious victory.

Good luck guys, go get them!

Good luck fans of Inida, may our actions support the efforts of our teams through difficult times!