Life as I find it

Yesterday’s match was an easy one - or so I’d thought, until it actually happened. And when it happened, not only was it tough, we actually lost. What do I say? Shame and anger doesn’t begin to describe it.

It isn’t the losing that stings so much as the way they played. Cricket is cricket. One team has to lose most of the time. But when we lose like we lost yesterday, it hurts.

It was humiliating to just sit and watch the match. Our glorious heroes gone in the first match against a team that wasn’t even perceived as threatening until now. To give due credit, the Bangladeshis played well. If only I could say the same for our team. Alas!

Tendulkar was disappointing. High hopes were on Dhoni, who scored a zero. Sehwag….. what do I say more that Rahul Dravid’s belief in him seems very strange. I don’t remember him playing to well these days, and he’s an opener. Sehwag actually bowled better than he opens, but even that came too late to be of any use. Sehwag needs to come out in the field and justify the unshaking belief the captain has bestowed in him.

I like Ganguly these days. He’s playing well, but cricket is a team game, and I just couldn’t see a team blazing their way on the field.

I don’t even want to go into the details of what went wrong. The list is too depressing, and we have a World Cup ahead.

I feel that after the very satisfying win against the West Indians as a warm up, we were overconfident when it really counted. I’ll keep my criticism with me for now. I’m sure yesterday shook up our whole team far more than any words people like us can write.

Some of our salvation might be that we aren’t at least on the road home like the Pakistan team yet, and can I only hope that it doesn’t come to that.

We need to win the next two matches. Our team needs to get their act together, and Rahul Dravid needs to be far more demanding from his team. We have a good team on paper, but in cricket, it is a team on the field that counts.

If nothing, the team needs to pull their socks up and go for it before the advertising people decide to begin looking for kho-kho heroes instead of them.