Yeh Cup Kahan Jayega

I am amazed to see the T20 campaign - "Yeh Cup Kahin Nahi Jayega". Last time there was a world cup in England (I guess the 1999 world cup), India did not make it past the super 8 stage. In 1999, the world cup was being hosted in England for the first time after 1983.

I remember the hysteria that the media had built up. Simply because the world cup was being held in England, and India had won the cup in 1983, India will win it again - was the prevailing logic.

This time around, we were the defending champions of T20 world cup and thats why we were the favorites to win. Many things went wrong in this campaign. Some of them are -

• IPL - by playing too much in IPL, we were tired by the time we got to the world cup.
• IPL - by playing too much in IPL, we have exposed all our strenghts and weakness. Others, who did not play that much role in IPL, were not idiots. They were watching us from the sidelines, and making their plans.
• Too much expectation - India has always performed well when there is absolutely no expectation. Whenever there is an iota of expectation, we fumble. In 1983, nobody expected the team to win the world cup. After the debacle in the last world cup, nobody expected the team to win the T20 world cup.
• Illogical bowling - look at the lengths Umar Gul is bowling, and look at what Ishant Sharma is bowling. It is self explanatory.
• Poor fielding - we gave away 2 boundaries where there was not even a single run. We lost by 3 runs.
• Jadeja - the guy is practically useless. He can only poke around. He cannot hit sixes. Not even 1 shot that he hit was convincing, and he wasted too many balls.
• Raina - when he was being peppered with short balls, why the hell he has to go for a pull. He could have helped the ball on its way above the keeper. In short, lack of committment and lack of brains. One dimensional batting. This is where you need people like Tendulkar.