The men in blue with red faces

Hype over our Indian cricket team claims one more victim--the team itself. With an embarrassing defeat from Bangladesh and a knock-out punch from Sri Lanka, the men in blue are looking towards an early exit from the ICC World Cup. The fortune of the mighty men in blue rests with the "minnows" they got defeated by.

I can virtually hear the millions of "match fixing" cries from Indian fans, although I do not believe our matches were actually fixed. Match fixing is just the favourite excuse that fans hide behind every time some little thing in cricket does not happen as expected. Just before the India-Sri Lanka decider I had heard aplenty about how the match was going to be fixed for India to win, since the World cup officials cannot afford the team of a country from where the majority of sponsorships came from, to get kicked out before the Super 8s. So much for conspiracy theories and confidence over match-fixing. Neither is the elitist blame of players playing for advertisement contracts than their country--just because it may happen does not mean we should assume it always does.

However this team seems like a shadow of the team we saw four years ago in SA. It was quite inspiring to see the team come back in the last WC after a dismal start, the way they re-thought their strategy, shuffled the team a bit, delegated decision making to able team players and showed renewed unity and resolve against their opponents, both in the World cup and their critics back home. This team simply does not show any signs of resurrection.

Our batsmen can hardly be termed the greats judging from this performance. They surrendered to a less-than-best bowling side, in a way undeserving to them and the bowlers they faced. With so much collective experience and talent I refuse to believe they could not figure out their opponents. The only explanation is that they probably did not study their opponents enough, for reasons best known to them. In front of Bangladesh they appeared as tentative as somebody facing a fast bowler for the first time. I distinctly got the impression that they were looking at their possible opponents in the Super 8s so much that they forgot to think about the match at hand. Wickets fell early, and incoming batsmen showed no signs of adapting to the crisis. The power-plays resembled the mundane 3rd afternoon of a Test match.

Indian bowling was never great, and they were probably as good as they could be. Even then they lacked the simple discipline of consistency. It looked like they tried too much. Preferring Harbhajan over Kumble still remains a mystery to me. Ditto for preferring Agarkar over Pathan. At the very least Pathan bats.

This was exacerbated by Dravid's reactive captaincy. Only against Sri Lanka did he employ the service of Sachin and Saurav over Sehwag for bowling. Field placing was either orthodox or reactive or both. But most of all lacked the agression and jump in the team's body language on the field that Ganguly had managed to instill over the years. Ganguly's captaincy had its banes, but let's not forget what good he did.

This team, along with its captain and coach, need to think long and hard over what went wrong--too much experimentation, obsession with sweeping changes post-Ganguly, or obsession with the World cup? When this team goes back to India, I do not think facing the fans' wrath should be their biggest concern. Not facing it due to the fans' indifference, apathy and disgust is. And if Bangladesh loses to Bermuda catapulting India to the Super 8's, they need to think long and hard over whether they deserve to be there...