Published: Mar 24, 2011, 10:00 AM (IST)
Edited: Sep 04, 2014, 10:46 PM (IST)
By Akash Kaware
We are down to the last six games of the 2011 World Cup. Any side that can string three victories together in the knock-out stage will walk away with the World Cup.
The way this World Cup has gone, predicting a winner is fraught with risk. Each side has its strengths, but at the same time all of them have some glaring weaknesses.
South Africa are a late-order biffer short.
Sri Lanka are too dependent on their middle order stalwarts in the batting department and Lasith Malinga and Muttiah Muralitharan in the bowling one.
The Australian attack could blast any batting line-up into smithereens, but is just as likely to implode as well.
Pakistan could compete with the West Indies in a ‘Who-has-the-more-inept-batting-lineup’ contest and lose, or somehow scrape together three defendable totals for their varied bowling attack to successfully defend.
New Zealand might win one, might win two, but winning three in a row might just be pushing it a bit.
And England may be the only side that is yet unbeaten by any side that is remaining in the tournament, but they somehow contrived to lose to Ireland and Bangladesh!
And that brings us to India. When the tournament kicked off, the optimism of the fans was palpable, even justifiable. Six games have been enough to deflate their enthusiasm and reduce them to hoping for, rather than expecting a glorious triumph. To be fair to the team, the top order has done what was expected of it, the bowlers have exceeded admittedly low expectations and the fielding has been safe without being spectacular.
The biggest concern has been the middle and lower order. Far from turning the platforms laid by the top order into insurmountable mountain of runs, they have failed to play out 50 overs on three occasions. To make matters worse, they haven’t even been able to score a run-a-ball at the death!
The two major culprits for those debacles are Yusuf Pathan and the skipper, Mahendra Singh Dhoni himself. With the way Pathan plays, most fans and even the team is braced for the fact that he will fail more often than he will succeed. But Dhoni’s recent form in the one-day format is worrying, to say the least.
Dhoni’s one-day career so far has been a two-act play. He began as a brash hitter, his disdain and disregard for anything the ball and the bowler might be up to being matched only by the peerless Virender Sehwag. A couple of years into his career, he matured into a well-rounded finisher, who relied more on deft placement and manic running between the wickets, while still being capable of switching into overdrive when required.
While the percentage of runs he scored in boundaries came down in the second phase of his career, it affected neither his average nor strike-rate. And more importantly, he guided the team home in some tense chases.
However, those figures have seen a dramatic downturn of late. Since January 2010, in 12 innings batting first, he has hit just one half-century. His average during this period is 37.5, at a strike rate of 77.47, down from his career figures of 48.57 and 87.39 respectively. The figures while batting second are not too different – an average of 38 at a strike rate of 73.59 and a solitary century coming against Bangladesh, to go with two half centuries.
Figures can never tell the complete story, especially for batsmen batting down the order. His last worthwhile contribution in a successful run-chase was in the Asia Cup game against Pakistan in June 2010, where he scored 56, before Suresh Raina and Harbhajan finished the job. For a similarly significant contribution in the first innings, you would have to go further back to February 2010, to that memorable one-dayer in Gwalior against South Africa, when Sachin Tendulkar created history. Dhoni scored an unbeaten 68 off 35 balls that day.
During this World Cup, his captaincy has attracted criticism from several quarters. His insistence of picking Piyush Chawla ahead of Ravichandran Ashwin, the gamble of giving a stiff Ashish Nehra the final over against South Africa have made him look a far cry from the captain who could do no wrong in the early days of his captaincy. The criticisms have mostly been unfair, since these are the kind of hunches that could be hailed as strokes of genius if they pay off, or derided as mistakes of a moron if they don’t. What he does deserve criticism for is his own batting, but quite surprisingly, it seems to have escaped most critics’ attention.
The format of tournament has so far ensured that these slip-ups haven’t proved fatal. Now is the crunch time, for both the Indian team and its leader. No team has won the World Cup without significant contributions from its captain, and one gets the feeling that if Dhoni is to join that illustrious group of Clive Lloyd, Kapil Dev, Allan Border, Imran Khan, Arjuna Ranatunga, Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting, he would have to match them in more ways than just being the captain of the team.
(Akash Kaware is an Indian IT professional, who would’ve been a successful international cricketer if it hadn’t been for an annoying tendency to run towards square-leg while facing tennis, rubber or leather cricket balls hurled at anything at little more than genuine medium-pace! Watching Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid convinced him that breaking into the Indian team was not going to happen anytime soon and hence he settled to become an engineer and MBA, who occasionally wrote about cricket. A few months ago, sensing his uselessness and constant use of cricket websites at work, his company banished him to Canada. His hopes of playing international cricket have, thus, been renewed!)
