Like many Mumbaikars, I dashed off home early from work on the 31st of March – for reasons both obvious and obscure. After all, the Indian national cricket team were due to participate in the second game of the penultimate stage in the sixth World Twenty20 championships. Plus, there wasn’t much to do at the office anyway!
I’m one of those cynical guys who erupt in cheers only when absolutely sure of an Indian victory. The whole nation was in the grip of similar sentiments that Brazil had in 1950, when they entered the finals of the soccer World Cup, and were declared champions by newspapers even before kickoff.
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It is exactly what happened at the Wankhede that evening. An “electric atmosphere”, numerous well-known personalities in attendance, and a belter of a pitch – scene of the hosts’ magnificent triumph in 2011. To top it off, the men in blue put up 192 runs on the board, signifying a much improved batting performance than that seen in the Super 10 stage.
A par score, correct? Perhaps enough to enter the final? The West Indies didn’t think so.
And the usual script was torn up. Everyone witnessed what unfolded. Such an exhibition of power hitting, gay abandon and calculated ruthlessness – I’ve never seen it coming from a side which didn’t have Chris Gayle on the rampage early on.
No, that honour belonged to “hometown” boy Lendl Simmons and Johnson Charles, with the mohawk-wearing Andre Russell providing the finishing touches. The silence was deafening. The dream lay shattered. Maroons celebrated in style, while the Blues just walked off in a daze.
Social media was ablaze with tweets, posts, images, and more needless controversies. The post-game press interaction saw the Indian captain’s rather shoddy attempt at wisecracking over the question of his retirement from the game.
With all the kerfuffle surrounding the aftermath of the game– MS Dhoni not getting the team composition right, the two no-balls, the dew factor, and other aspects – having calmed down a little, it is imperative to take a dispassionate look at India’s road to the semi finals, and what could have been done differently.
India’s boon and bane – Slow and turning tracks on offer
Each of the home team’s games in the Super 10 stage was played on tracks that kept slow and had a fair amount of turn. The Nagpur pitch, much maligned during the India-South Africa Test series, was the 2007 champions’ first hurdle.
Long known to have the art of playing spin encoded in their DNA, the hosts were expected to rule the roost with both bat and ball. Mitchell Santner, Nathan McCullum and Ish Sodhi, however, quickly dispelled that notion with an intricate web that the Indian batsmen, barring their captain and vice captain, never got out of.
Against Pakistan, the slow nature of the Eden Gardens track lulled Rohit Sharma into playing a “glory shot” after taking two sixes off the bowlers in consecutive overs. Shikhar Dhawan, too, never got going. Suresh Raina and Yuvraj Singh didn’t take off either. A near-similar story played out in at Bengaluru and Mohali as well.
Would one still say that Indian batsmen can play spin better than the rest? When you’re struggling on such pitches at home, and that too in the shortest format where dot balls are worth gold dust, it really doesn’t inspire confidence among the viewers. The likes of Ashwin and Jadeja did a fair job in the first four games, so it isn’t prudent to blame them for India's stuttering beginnings.
The warning signs were there. India chose to ignore them. The Wankhede outing just hammered the final nail in the coffin.
A team game, not a one-man show – What business did they have in dumping the rescue act on Virat Kohli every single game?
Nostalgia is sometimes good for the soul. You recall the good with the bad. The focus is on the happier memories for inspiration, and the less joyful ones are for learning.
There was an element of the nineties in this squad. The comparison with the peerless Sachin Tendulkar isn’t appropriate, but the way Virat Kohli has been left to carry the burden of the batting unit certainly draws parallels to that era, and it is not healthy in the long term.
The kid isn’t superhuman, though his achievements and performances bely this. He, too, is just another cricketer striving to get his side over the finish line. Asking him to bat consistently is difficult enough – though, to his credit, he never complained – but expecting him to take wickets or slow down the opposition in a high-stakes match? Too much.
That move by the Indian skipper reeked more of desperation than a rabbit-out-of-the-hat step. Cricket is a team game, and everyone has to perform to the best of their abilities. It’s just one of several incorrect decisions that Dhoni took, and it will haunt him for quite some time.
Gambling with the inexperience of youth – was it necessary in the penultimate stage?
Hardik Pandya is an IPL find, along with Jasprit Bumrah. But while the latter redeemed himself with near-immaculate bowling at the death, the former has let inexperience get the better of him at crucial stages of the tournament.
The Baroda all-rounder is more of a backup seam bowling option than a frontline pacer. But his penchant for bowling short deliveries (at just the right length) to batsmen towards the end of the innings hurt India more often than not.
Against Bangladesh, the hotshot youngster got away with such directionless bowling. But on a pitch favouring batters, against the likes of Simmons and Russell, he was pedestrian, to put it mildly. Attempted yorkers turned into full tosses, length balls were deposited into the stands or dispatched to the fence – you name it, Pandya suffered from it.
This is where India lost the plot. It was a gamble from Dhoni, and it didn’t come off. If anything, it exposed a frailty in the hitherto handy bowling attack that the Caribbeans took full advantage of in the slog overs. The idea is to vary the pace, and pitch it up to the batsmen, while using the short ball sparingly. Pandya would do well to remember that.
Horses for courses – Part timers have a sell by date too
Dhoni’s ploy of using part timers is well known in cricketing circles. What it underlines, however, is the cold, harsh reality that India have almost always lacked a genuine fifth bowler.
Okay, so you have Raina bowling his gentle off-breaks, or Yuvraj sending down his “pie-chuckers”. They do a good job of filling up the seven or eight overs of bowling, perhaps even pick up a couple of wickets here and there.
But they are part-timers, not regular bowlers. You cannot expect them to work miracles every single time. In nine years of his limited-overs leadership, MSD has cleverly utilized them; however, despite having the likes of Harbhajan Singh and Pawan Negi in the ranks, he went with the tried-and-tested model instead.
Yuvraj’s injury may have thrown India's planning off a bit, but there were reserves. If the West Indies could bring back a recently-recovered Simmons, then why not take a leaf out of their book and bring in the aforementioned spinners (even Mohammad Shami could have been a good choice)?
Long-term results are not obtained by short-term strategies. Part timer models have a sell-by date, and unfortunately for India, they became aware of it only after tasting defeat at the second-to-last stage.
Blame Game – Rahane, toss, no-balls and dew
Directly after the semi final loss to the Calypso kings, social media was awash with posts and feeds initiating the blame game and recounting “what-went-wrong” scenarios.
One of the players targeted was Ajinkya Rahane. Brought in to the side in place of the struggling Shikhar Dhawan, the Mumbai batsman scored 40 runs off 35 balls, putting on a brisk partnership with Kohli for the second wicket. Yet, a section of the viewers pinned the blame of the defeat on his slow run making.
Such a reaction evokes nothing but pity for the narrow-minded, short-sighted explanation of this loss. Rahane did what was asked of him. He lent a solidity to the opening partnership that was missing in the first four games. He ran hard and got the boundaries when needed. And yet he is responsible for the eventual debacle? No. Not at all.
India lost the toss and were put into bat first. A score of 192, by Twenty20 standards, is a fairly decent total. Sure, about eight to ten runs more would have helped a bit, but you have to understand that Dwayne Bravo bowled beautifully towards the end of India’s innings.
So how is that Dhoni’s fault, exactly – losing the toss? It's a probability game, and Darren Sammy won it. Done. Move on. India did that, and were treated to a Kohli special. A few extra runs were needed, yes, but there is only so much a batsman can do.
The dew factor did have a role to play, with the bowlers finding it difficult to grip the ball. But it doesn't mean that there is no counter to it, as former India opener Aakash Chopra pointed out five years ago.
It all comes down to the final reason: the no-balls that saved Simmons, and compounded India's woes. If Ashwin was the guilty party in the first instance, Pandya’s error proved to be costlier than his. Overstepping happens by accident, not by design, yet it is a cardinal sin in an already-shortened game.
Right up until the very end, India were playing catch-up. A semi-final finish is creditable, but there is plenty left to do.
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