India's disastrous world cup?

As I write this, India have officially crashed out of the cricket World Cup 2007. There is bound to be anger and indignation across the nation and the world among all the Indian cricket "fans". There are several issues that I think need to be addressed.

Is the exit as serious as we make it out to be?
In a word - NO. Yes we crashed out when we should not have. But I believe that it was just one game where we did not play to our potential, the game against Bangladesh. We underestimated them and were made to pay for this mistake. In any sport I guess the first rule is not to underestimate opponents.

The format of the world cup was highly appreciated before the "black saturday". Most experts agreed that the format was the best of everything - it gave the "minnows" an opportunity and then had a round robin where every team plays every other team. I still believe that this is an excellent format for the world cup. However one thing that it lacks is opportunity for a team to come back from a bad start. With only four teams playing each other just once, the probability of unexpected results increases. One solution would be to play each other twice in the group. However it would mean a lot more matches and may not be a suitable format.

One of the articles that has affected me is The Desi Fan by Mukul Kesavan. One of the observations is that a vast majority of the "fans" do not play cricket or any other competetive sport. This leads to the fans believing that it is a right of our team to win irrespective of the opponent. As a tennis player who has now played with the same partner for the past one year, I can tell you that it is still not a certainity that I will win each time. I realize that the argument may be a bit lacking in that the cricketers have all the time to improve, but so do the other teams.

The other thing we as fans should understand is that there are two teams and the other team also wants to win equally badly and may have superior talent or a perfect day or we may have a bad day. Such things happen. To bring in another tennis comparision, anyone who saw the Australian open semi finals between Roddick and Federer would understand how when an opponent is having a perfect match you just cannot do anything. Watch it to see what I mean.

Was the vision right in the first place?
Greg Chappel's much publicised vision when he was interviewed, Vision 2007, aimed solely at the world cup. This is in stark contrast to his predecessor's vision which was to make India a very good test team. I believe that the vision of John Wright was a much better one. As anyone will tell you making the transition from test matches to one day matches is much easier. If we had aimed to build a good test team, we would naturally have become a good one day team. At most points in history, with the exception of the current England team, a team with a good test team is equally good in one day matches. Also many true cricket lovers from India including me would rather India win a test series in Australia, South Africa or England rather than the world cup. In this regard, to give Chappel credit, we did win a test series in West Indies and won a test match for the first time in South Africa. I sincerely hope and pray that the next coach's aim would be to make India the best test team. I am not very confident that this would happen as Mr Pawar has already started talking about the 2011 world cup.

Is India going out a good thing?
One or two things were running through my mind after India lost to Bangladesh. Since there is so much at stake for corporates, TV channels and the ICC, I was worried that if India won against Sri Lanka or if Bangladesh lost to Bermuda, there would be talk about the officials fixing the results. So in a sense it was good that either of those did not happen.

India going out would hopefully make a lot of people, businesses and tv channels realize that the world cup is not worth hyping so much and hopefully for the next world cup it would be a bit more low key. Maybe that is asking for too much. At least the hype would die down and people can get back to work and start being productive again. I was reading about the conflict between Sony TV and the advertisers and how Sony has stated that India's fortunes are not included in the contract. I think though legally this is right, it would come back to bite them. It would make the advertisers apprehensive about them the next time round and Sony could loose in the long run. Hopefully the advertisers would also learn a lesson from this and not fuel the hype.

Captain and Coach.
I thought that as soon as we were knocked out, we would atleast see the captain, if not both the captain and coach step down. However this has not yet happened and I am not sure of the reasons. India needs Dravid the batsman rather than Dravid the captain. One of the main reasons that India did well under Ganguly was because Dravid the batsman was in prime form. A perfect number three in test cricket and one of the best finishers in one day cricket, Dravid the batsman lended the solidity to the flashy personnel of the team to flourish and thus take the team forward. Whereas as captain, Dravid the batsman has not been in the same kind of form.

There don't seem to be any alternatives to Dravid as captain. If not Dravid then who would be the next captain - some names Sehwag, Yuvraj, Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dhoni, etc just don't feel right. This is a tough one and I don't seem to like anyone else as captain. However maybe as suggested on an article I saw on Cricinfo, we should have a split captaincy with VVS Laxman as captain of the test team and Yuvraj as captain of the one day team. However, I don't see the selectors being as imaginative as that.

All in all, the whole of India must be slowly getting to terms with us not being there. Hopefully, they would appreciate and enjoy a lot of good cricket that would be played over the next month and with India not being there, there need not be any anxiety. As I write this, Sri Lanka showed why they are considered certain semi finalists by their fighting qualities against South Africa. Though they lost, the way they fought showed what our team really lacked.

Hope everyone enjoys the world cup for what it is without bitterness and resentment about India's exit.