Blogs From being tired to poor decisions, every theory is gaining ground but some questions remain unanswered
June 17th, 2009 by kapoorThis had to happen at some point in time — there was absolutely no way in which the Indian supporters and the over-demanding media could have swallowed India’s early exit from the T20 World Cup. The fact is that there are two main theories being floated for the team’s defeat. The first one pertains to the toll that the IPL had taken on the players. In a way, it does make some degree of sense. If you look closely, it is only the Indian team that had literally every player participate in the IPL whereas the international teams had just two or three at the maximum. Secondly, it is now being said that Dhoni’s decision-making suffered as a result of his IPL semi-final frustrations and his spoiled equation with Sehewag.
All I can say is that if sending Jadeja in front of Yuvraj was appearing to be a wrong move, couldn’t the team management, sitting in the dug-out, gesture to Jadeja that he needed to step-on the run-rate or get out. Was it prudent to let such a young guy evaluate about the whole scenario in a must-win match on his own? I would hold the entire team ‘brains’ responsible for it, including Kirsten, Dhoni, Venkatesh Prasad and even Yuvraj to a certain extent. If Jadeja’s batting looked like stagnating the game, why didn’t Yuvi and Kirsten approach Dhoni and quickly make a decision to send in a bigger hitter?
Why did they wait for things to happen? It is not Jadeja’s batting that was responsible for the loss against England but the entire team management’s inability to judge the situation and not being instinctive enough to take a pro-active decision. I can understand Dhoni’s ability to think on-the-spot to have slowed down for once but it is not unusual for a captain to have one or two bad games. However, what about his experienced counterparts in the squad and the team of experts they carry along? Wasn’t there a single soul to who could impress upon Dhoni that the game was getting out of their grasp? And talking about tiredness, how is the team going to cope-up with the upcoming tour of the West Indies that is just a few days away? Is the BCCI even listening to what the players are complaining about?
