The blame game
India’s ouster from the third World Twenty20 has brought the daggers out. It’s time for the cricket administration to take stock of the situation before it all gets out of hand.
Sometimes, it is best to wait a while, take a backward step and look at a situation dispassionately. Some of the reporting on India’s exit from the ICC World T20 has been worse than the cricket they were meant to watch. It’s very easy to blame the coach, the IPL, the BCCI, anything that is a convenient hanger to put the blame on.
The fault lies within. The players played 14 games over 45 days. Each game was 3 hours long. I know there was packing and travelling and from experience, I know that can be stressful. But these are young men who should know what is right for them and what isn’t. It is part of the job, it comes with the territory. And so, at the risk of sounding soft, I am going to say it wasn’t the IPL, it wasn’t the coach, it wasn’t the captain, it wasn’t the selectors, it wasn’t anything as convenient as that. It was, quite simply, the fact that India weren’t good enough.
I have heard it said that Ojha and Uthappa and Irfan Pathan should have been in the side. Yes, that is a fair debating point but neither of those is a Bradman or a Sobers. I think the time has come to look seriously rather than emotionally, or with an eye on controversy, at Indian cricket.
If there is one thing you can blame the IPL for, it is that the standard of bowling isn’t good enough at all times. You can actually play off a bowler and try and get runs somewhere else but in international cricket that may not be possible. Yes, the IPL pays a lot and the entertainment distracts a bit but if the players are not putting cricket first, we are picking the wrong players. You cannot give a young executive a company car and then complain that sales are down because of the car.
India needs a tougher system, not an excuse filled system.
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Harsha, partially agree with you that we need a tougher system. I don’t think India has matured for that, as we see cricket more emotionally. I would say IPL was 90% entertainment and 10% cricket/ You wont agree on that, as you are also part of the drama. Dhoni has rightly confessed to this saying that the late night parties of IPL did the harm. Everyone knows this, but doesn’t want to agree to it, as these late night parties are driven by the Bollywood menace.
For tournaments like WC, lot of preparations are needed, and India did not do a bit there. After IPL, they just packed and left, thinking that IPL itself was preparation, but it was not. We could see how poorly our batsmen did against short pitched balls. Also as you rightly said, bowling was not up to the mark.