Kridaya Cricket Blog

So India won a TwentySeven22 match. The comings and goings of rain made the match a bit ridiculous, but finally India completely a thriller mainly because of Dhoni’s well struck 46 from 34 balls. West Indies may have squeaked a win if it weren’t for that six in the final over.

Shortened matches like these seldom provide good material, but this match was different. First thing is, India’s bowling is still under-performing. They don’t seem to get multiple breakthroughs to really put pressure on the opposition. The economy rate is also very poor. This is a collective problem. Let’s see if they can improve in the next game.

Bigger news is Rohit Sharma being demoted to No. 5. Rohit deserved it because of his poor performances, but whethere that is the only reason is not completely clear because we once again saw Dhoni promoting himself to No. 3. In any case, Rohit failed once again and unless he gets an opportunity to redeem himself in the next match, he will be ending a sorry run after the IPL.

Of course, Rohit Sharma’s entire ODI career has not been an exercise in greatness. He boasts 695 runs from 40 matches with an average of 24.82 and a strike rate of 72.24. That is not exactly great figures for a No. 3 batsman in one-dayers. His last fifty came almost a year ago. Should the question is: Does Rohit Sharma deserve an extended run in the team? (Below is a graph plotting his career ODI scores)

Finally, coming to Dhoni’s promoting himself, it is hard to criticize it based on what happened: Dhoni clicked, India won. But there is a strange pattern where Dhoni always seems to be coming when the openers have made a good start and there is less pressure on the team. jrod pointed this out during the World Twenty20.

Dhoni has more than proved that he is an effective ODI batsman. So why doesn’t he always come in at No. 3? In one-dayers, this would provide Dhoni enough time to build a long innings and contribute to the team’s success. It would also provide stability to the positions of the rest of the team. Also, his early innings notwithstanding, Dhoni is less of a big hitter than someone like Yuvraj or Yusuf Pathan. Coming earlier in the order would mean that either he would be in a good position to launch an assault or he would already have given way to the big hitters.

His floating position is a short-sighted tactic, a remnant of the Greg Chappell days. It could be temporarily beneficial to India allowing them to win a few games. But in the long-term, it could backfire. Dhoni will inevitably hit bad form at some point and then his inability to get moving will put pressure on the rest of the team, who are under-prepared.

So, for both India and Dhoni himself, he has to start picking up a permanent spot (No. 3 or whatever) and stick to it.

Already the Indian team is going into hibernation mode. Apart from Dhoni’s near-century, only Yuvraj, RP Singh and extras crossed into double figures. We saw the bowling missing in the first match, today the batsmen joined them at wherever they were.

I cannot see the Indians being motivated enough to come back to win the remaining two matches. With a long break coming up and the inconsequential nature of this series, it doesn’t seem likely. On the other hand, there are quite a few West Indians who have something to prove.

We knew the batting was weak, so the surprise has been the bowling. After Dhoni and RP Singh gave India a fighting chance, the bowlers failed to put any pressure on the Windies.

Once again, this shows how unnecessary this series was in the first place. Dhoni has been put under tremendous pressure to accommodate the whims of the cricket boards.

I shouldn’t say this too loudly, but I was not rooting for India to win today. The problem with a consolation win is that you start discovering excuses for your poor performance. Like, for example, “We would have reached the semis if we had hit just one more boundary.” Which leads to conclusions like, “We should stop wides going to the boundary line“!

After today’s defeat against the South Africans, India end up at the bottom of the Group with 3 defeats. All they have to show for in this Twenty20 World Cup are non-earth-shattering wins against Bangladesh and Associate Nation Ireland. In addition to zero points in their 2nd round group, they also ended up with the lowest Net Run Rate.

So blaming some small factor for an overall disastrous showing is not going to cut it. The team has to stop any denial and confront deeper issues with its Twenty20 failures. How can India attempt to replicate the consistency of the Sri Lankans and South Africans?

First of all, let me say that while Dhoni shares some of the blame, he has to be the one leading the solution, not someone to be expunged in any post-mortem. And the starting point for the solution has to be that India have a good set of talented players and they have to be blended into a high-performance team.

We have been discussing a lot of tactics that blew up in the team’s face, such as the tinkering with the batting order. But these are symptoms of a more fundamental problem with the team’s outlook. Which is that they still see themselves as outsiders and try to “surprise” their opponents with clever, unexpected tactics.

That is not the way of champions. Leaders have to maximize their strengths. Upstarts use weird tactics because they cannot compete with stronger teams by playing conventionally. Leaders cannot compete at that level because they would compromise their strengths and expose their weaknesses. Instead they have to be prepared for surprises and deal with them using their strengths.

To take a different example, a country cannot fight a guerilla insurgency by making its army into a guerilla outfit. First, the militants will always be better at that game, and second, you will expose your country to conventional attacks from another nations. Instead, you deploy your other strengths (political, administrative) to defeat the insurgency while keeping your army ready for conventional defense.

So advice for India: Play like you were destined to win, not like you were trying to steal the cup from someone’s hands.