Tri-Series Cricket: Team India Demolished!

Team India has gone down to the last position from the top of the table in the Commonwealth Bank Tri-Series one-day cricket being played in Australia. In today’s match at the Gabba, Brisbane Sri Lanka thoroughly demolished Team India though not being able to earn the bonus point thanks to some resistance displayed by the ‘youngsters’. And breaking news! Rohit Sharma was finally dropped or rotated or rested. Scorecard

The buzz is that the ‘senior’ players have let the team down. Yes, they did let down the team in the Test series earlier and you did not consider rotating or resting or dropping them then. Now in the one-day tournament you have hardly allowed them to play! They never know when they are going to figure in the team and when not. Sehwag came in as the skipper in today’s match and captained the team where he does not even find a place most of the time. The rotation policy had been consistently followed, but even then Gambhir or Tendulkar played when they were not due to be in as per the same policy. Zaheer Khan just does not know what he is doing—helping the team win or helping the policy become unwritten law. There was no method in the madness.

Hailed as the most positive Indian captain ever, Mahendra Singh Dhoni has been busy dividing the team and putting in a lot of negative spirit. Like the tactics adopted by an Indian politician along caste lines Dhoni had divided team India into ‘seniors’ and ‘youngsters’ clearly favoring the latter. He did not allow the ‘seniors’ to settle down with the justification that these seniors tend to cost the team 20 extra runs due to poor fielding in Aus outfield. To our cricketing experience Tendulkar had always been praised as a committed batsman, bowler and fielder on the field. The other two—Sehwag and Gambhir—had never been termed slow or slothful either. All three figured and contributed positively in the best World Cup-2011 Team India that won the cup.  Dhoni must blame himself for giving away at least fifty runs extra in most of the matches and his ’20 run justification’ stands nowhere. If you are not fielding the best team possible you have no business to talk about winning. Dhoni’s negativity has been so overfilling that he took resort to slow overrate in the last match for which he penalized and could not play today’s match.

When seniors fail to deliver consistently they do need to be dropped or they should indeed seriously consider retiring. Rickey Ponting was dropped from the Aussie team and he retired from one-day cricket today. But he was not harassed by some weird policy and was given lots of opportunities before the inevitable decision. In fact, he captained in his last match coasting his team to a huge victory over India. All is not at all well in Team India.

From hereon Team India’s journey looks  set to go further downhill Down Under!