:: Editorial

A dissection of champions

Oct.02 : India’s early exit from the 2009 Champions Trophy was the second such at International Cricket Council-run tournaments this year. Defending champions at the T20 world championships that they had won back in 2007, Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s team were eliminated in the preliminary stage of the 2009 edition in England. Whether or not this is a pattern is hard to judge from two performances, but there is no doubting that it has been a deeply disappointing show at the Champions Trophy in South Africa. The tournament itself saw fancied teams fall by the wayside early — India joining hosts and pre-tournament favourites South Africa and Sri Lanka on the sidelines — but there is no getting away from the fact that overall, the Indians performed well below par. Of course it has to be remembered that three key members were not in the squad, hampering Dhoni’s hopes considerably. Few teams can afford to lose a batsman of Virender Sehwag’s calibre or an important member of the pace attack like Zaheer Khan, both not included because of injuries, and hope to put up a strong challenge. Worse was to follow when powerful middle-order batsman Yuvraj Singh broke a finger at practice and pulled out of the tournament. Still, a team boasting the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Gautam Gambhir and Dhoni himself was expected to give a better account than it eventually managed.

Adding to the Indians’ woes was the weather, and having lost the first match to arch-rivals Pakistan, a great deal depended on the game against Australia. That match never got a chance to finish with heavy rain washing out proceedings. It was a setback the Indians could not recover from, and though the closing league game did produce a win, it was too little and too late. Looking back, it was the defeat at Pakistan’s hands that really undid Indian hopes and broke a billion hearts. That defeat was a direct outcome of India’s biggest problem here — desperately bad bowling. Ishant Sharma was not two years ago the spearhead, the fast young tearaway who had the Australians hopping on their pitches. Today he looks a shadow of that man. Harbhajan Singh, another key member of India’s attack, was completely off his game in the first two matches. Ahead of them, only Ashish Nehra was able to deliver, not just line and length, but also wickets. Till leg-spinner Amit Mishra was drafted, Nehra was virtually carrying the burden of the attack by his own, and no international team hoping to beat top-quality opposition can afford to have so many bowlers go off the boil at the same time. Finally, the extremely compact format of the Champions Trophy this time with just the top eight teams in contention meant that every match would be a vital one. So it turned out to be with India crashing out of contention on the basis of just the loss to Pakistan. With Australia arriving for a seven-match ODI series at the end of the month, there is very little time to work on the obvious loopholes the team here was hampered by, but given the nonstop nature of modern international cricket, Team India’s think tank has no choice but to dissect this failure — it cannot be finally called anything but that — find solutions, and implement them quickly.