Biswajit JhaUnlike the inaugural edition of T20 World Cup, Team India started their campaign as the hot favourites this time around. Ever since Dhoni has taken over the captaincy, India have done well in every format of the game, be it Tests, ODIs and T20s. His captaincy, coupled with his batting skills, has given India an edge over the other cricket playing nations in the recent past.
He achieved some rare feats- winning T20 World Cup in 2007, winning the ODI series in Australia, winning a series in New Zealand after forty odd years and winning in Sri Lanka- all in a time span of a couple of years.
Dhoni was truly on a high as India’s captain. Everything he touched in the last two years or so has turned into gold.
But the success seems to have made Dhoni and some of his team-members over-confident, arrogant and complacent. Moreover, the captain also became too big for his boots, his recent dig at the media testifies to the fact.
Before the start of the tournament, the Indian outfit was bubbling with confidence, or rather over-confidence. The bunch led by Dhoni never anticipated that they would be handed an early exit from the T20 World Cup, an event which made them heroes two years back.
Though some anticipated this was coming as they were playing too much cricket. The rigours of IPL did not do any good to their already exhausted bodies. If the absence of Sehwag made the team weak, the controversy surrounding the whole incident and the Dhoni’s inept handling of it made the team even weaker.
Let us examine some of the reasons that may have been responsible for India’s early ouster from the T20 World Cup 2009:
Too Much Cricket: May be it has been the most important reason for India’s early exit from the T20 World Cup in England. Over the last couple of years, they played almost non-stop cricket which entailed excessive travelling. Then came Lalit Modi’s soap opera, called the Indian Premier League (IPL), which took a severe toll on the Indian players.
These days, international sportspersons are scrutinized by million of fans and critics. So, they have to be on their toes day in and day out. This is not only physically demanding, but also mentally very taxing.
The non-stop IPL that continued for over a month, consisting of 59 matches, seems to have proved to be a disaster just before the all-important World Cup. The way the Indian players played in the last two matches of the Super Eights against West Indies and England, not considered to be the best of teams in the world, clearly showed the amount of physical and mental fatigues they carried with themselves to England.
Lack of Preparation: When every team was chalking out plans for the upcoming World Cup, Dhoni’s men were busy with playing IPL. They came back to India from South Africa barely seven days before the start of the Cup.When they ultimately reached India and took the field, they looked to be a side without any proper planning and did not gel well as a unit. Team games require combining well as a unit more than the individual brilliance. They did not train as a team for a longer time and this prevented them from fielding a team in which players compliment each other.
Dhoni’s obsession with his own bating skills and faulty batting order: There is no denying the fact the Dhoni has batted brilliantly ever since he burst into international cricket way back in 2004. But over the years, his transition from a powerful hitter to a gritty finisher is astonishing. In ODIs, he has single-handedly won several matches for India in pressure matches.
It is fact a that from an explosive batsman in the top-order, who used to give India flying starts, he silently moulded himself as a superb finisher like Australian Michael Bevan. Theses days, his strike-rate hardly crosses hundred.
But in the second edition of T20 World Cup, he promoted himself in the batting order over the tremendous strikers of the cricket ball like Suresh Raina, Yuvraj Singh and Yusuf Pathan. That ultimately proved to be a disaster as India put up totals that are not enough in the T20 format.
In the last two matches that India lost, Dhoni failed to give his team the much-needed fillip in batting when his team badly needed it. But due to the over-dependence on his own batting, he kept on promoting himself up the order.
Pathetic bowling at the death: In the six matches India played, including two practice matches before the start of the tourney, their bowling at deaths was below par. The bowlers, except Zaheer Khan, leaked too many runs that resulted in conceding early initiatives to the oppositions. Ishant Sharma’s poor form at the slog overs hurt India’s chance in crucial games.
Flawed team selection: Considered to be one of the best bowling units in the tournament, Dhoni’s choice of opening the bowling with Irfan Pathan along with Zaheer Kahn defies any logic. Irfan may be a good later-order batsman, but his bowling with the new ball hardly created any flutters in the opposition camp.
It’s surprising that team management benched RP Singh, who bowled superbly in the just concluded IPL, after just one poor practice game. Dhoni should also have tried Praveen Kumar who showed his skills in one of the practice matches before the Cup. Kumar is a wily customer and thrives well at the deaths.
Poor handling of Sehwag incident: Success makes some people arrogant. Dhoni is a typical example of how success has turned him from a well-mannered young lad to a typical egotistic human being. Dhoni deliberately kept distance from the media. He kept Sehwag’s injury a well guarded secret. That led to the media speculations and a possible ‘rift’ in the team.
High profile men and units always remain under the media scanner and some gossip is not uncommon in an age when 24x7 news channels are constantly vying for a juicy scoop. Instead of losing his cool before an important tournament like the World Cup, Dhoni should have tackled it more maturely and should have avoided the ‘ego-clash’ with the journalists. His poor handling of Sehwag’s injury and media has hurt Team India’s on-field performance.
T20, the most volatile format of cricket: Since one bad session can go against you in Twenty20, there are no favourites in this format. The first edition of World Cup and the two seasons of Indian Premier League testify to this fact.
India won the inaugural edition of World Cup from nowhere. The same can be true of Rajasthan Royals’ victory in IPL 2008. On paper they were not the best of teams, but such is the format of T20 cricket that the ‘favourite’ tag can go haywire once two teams come face to face on the cricketing field.
The same theory can be applied to assess India’s shocking ouster from World Championship this time. India, being the best team on paper, succumbed to the whims of the volatility of the T20 format.
