Group E - England, India, South Africa, West Indies

[honestbharani]

wow.. I slept off after we restricted them to 130..


So much for the same team theory..



Ian Chappell hit the nail on the head that the Indian team (the captain, coach etc. included) were just too overconfident coming in here... Some of the batting has been exposed and these guys better learn to combat quick, short pitched bowling into the body... Losing is not bad as long as you can learn from it and hopefully, Dhoni will understand that stuff like having a struggling batsman at 3 will never win you games, even if he is the captain and perhaps the best LOI batsman of recent times...


I suppose the lessons for INdia from this campaign would be:

1. You need to take back up openers and back up batsmen. Packing your squad with bowlers makes no sense and gets found out when you have niggles all around.

2. Proper fitness tests are required before selection. Trusting just word of physios who haven't even met the players doesn't seem enough. Also, if you are taking injured guys on tour in the hopes that they will get fit soon, it makes sense to have backups around.. Couldn't the BCCI just take care of expenses and have two more guys with the team as "backups" for Sehwag and Zaheer?


3. A lot of our bowlers need to get better at T20 bowling, mainly Zak and Ishant. Might make sense to rest these two from all T20s too and preserve them for the longer formats where they are so much more useful.


4. Irfan should not bat at 7, Yousuf should not bat at 6... Both seem to be one position too high in international matches...


5. The parttime spin options could be used more often... We didn't seem to have a plan B once batsmen went after Ojha... More worryingly, Ojha himself doesn't seem to have a plan B.


6. Taking one or two batsmen with decent to good techniques will always help on pitches which are not roads...


I don't mind picking the same side, perhaps Dhoni genuinely believes this is the best 11 out of the players available. Unfortunately, I don't think Ravindra Jadeja should be anywhere near a T20 side for India.. his batting just does no cut it and his bowling is not better than Ojha's... And I guess even if we did replace Raina with some other youngster, they may get found out too. You just don't come across 140Ks+ fast bowling with balls directed to your ribcage in India at all...


Hopefully, Dhoni and the whole team, including staff, can get better through this experience.


One thing that did worry me is that Dhoni seemed to be thinking that all criticism in India is unwarranted.. He said like "hoepfully we will win a few and they will be back praising us again"... That is worrying. While most of the criticism is indeed unjust, there are quite a few that are valid.


He didn't need to put himself at 3 unnecessarily when Raina had done well there.. It was a bad move regardless of the fact that most probably Raina would have been found out at 3..

And Ravindra Jadeja is a misfit for T20s unless he is actually considered to be better than Ojha as a left arm spinner... And one would think Murali Kartik was better than either anyways.


hopefully, he can at least understand that SOME criticism is still quite fair.

[biased indian]

ha ha finally its over had we won the last game every one would have forgotten the fact that we failed to reach the SF...so this is good and now we are of to WI to play 4 ODI's..with all the matches thay have been playing so far why would you have short series like that rather than give the players some rest and may be we can bring laxman and dravid into the ODI team along with sachin and leave some people out so that they get good rest

[0RI0N]

Originally Posted by Right Arm-Fast

I don't have any legs. TBH just go away, your agument is beyond stupid and trying to tell me that Pakistan is better then SA is just stupid.

Interwebz is serious bizniss

[longtom]

Congrats to SA. Wasn't a great game - but it was enough. Having said that, there is no hiding now anymore. Weak opposition has been dealt with and now we go for the real stuff.
I didn't agree the way Smith handled the bowling. The pitch was sub-standard and Steyn certainly shouldn't have been bowling a 2nd spell on it. I also don't understand why Dumminy only bowled one over. In the middle of the game it looked like: "get 2 overs from somebody and fiddle those in quietly and let the spinners do the rest". Well - Smith thought different, and against class opposition it might have backfired. But maybe he just wanted to test the seamers in tough situations - and the pitch certainly was tough for any seamer....

India...what can i say? They certainly didn't look in the game at all. Maybe the knowledge of being out of the tournament did that. It also looked as if the team is not a team at all. The way they communicate and gesticulate at each other didn't exactly look like a unit with a common method to achieve the goal. Tbh - it looked like the wheels well and truly came off in big way - and that is a shame. It not only takes skill to achieve something, a bit - sorry - a lot of character is required. I missed that with the Indian team.

To the mod team:
I don't know were your cut off point is when you don't allow obviously immature board members to derail a thread but I wonder if one couldn't be a bit more stringent. I am sure there is a better therapie for growing up but to put everybody on this board through this stuff.

It was also intersting to see how many pages are devoted to any game played by England and how little to anybody else playing. That is nobody's fault of course, but gives interesting insight in the demographie of the board as well as the time on hand by those members.

Now onto the semis. Am I putting my head out to far to suggest that SL and SA will be in the final? I can't see Pak winning really (also cricket is a funny game - to state the obvious) but WI, if they have a firing front 4, can destroy even Mendis, Muraly, Malinga and co....but only then.
In the meantime I just keep chewing my nails down to the flesh....

regards

longtom

[Uppercut]

I think there's a bit of a fallacy with Chris Gayle that if he fires he wins the match. The bowler is the man with the ball in his hand. If Gayle is batting well the bowler can still bowl even better- Sidebottom showed that with his stunning yorker the other night. That's what i expect will happen if he gets going against Sri Lanka.