MANCHESTER: At a stone’s throw away from the place they call the Theatre of Dreams, the great Indian dream died a premature death. Old Trafford the cricket ground is near the Manchester United football stadium. This is the place where Kapil Dev’s Indian team had beaten England in the 1983 World Cup semifinal before scripting the story which made Indians dream big when it comes to cricket.
Ironically enough, the same venue saw the end of another Indian campaign at the same stage of the competition. This time, there were genuine expectations, not faint hopes. Indian cricketers and their legion of fans believed they could wrest back what they had won for a second time in Mumbai on an April night in 2011. They had the riches, the resources and most importantly, the desire. Not without reason were they among the strongest contenders.
However, there was a fallacy within. And that was brutally exposed by New Zealand in a space of 19 deliveries. Dependent on the top three like no other team, India lost their key batsmen in that period for 1, 1, 1, which reduced the rest of the contest to a matter of hoping against hope. Ravindra Jadeja was the lone man responsible of reviving those hopes. But when a team depends on its No 8 to pull things back from the brink, it shows that something is not right with those batting above him.
In a tournament where title contenders play around 10 matches, this was more or less bound to happen one day. Blame it on bad luck or bad planning in terms of not developing reliable back-ups, for India that bad day came in a knockout game. The alarming signs were seen against Afghanistan, although the newcomers to this stage could not take advantage of it. Against a quality attack like New Zealand’s, which kept tightening the screws, it turned out to be a different deal altogether.
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Virat Kohli didn’t admit that the failure of the middle-order was the reason of the heartbreak, but he did say that he expected those occupying these positions to fare better. “It was 45 minutes of bad cricket that cost us. Everyone goes out there to win the game for the team and if it doesn't happen, one feels you could have done things differently. I wouldn’t like to break things down immediately, but in time we'll have to sit down and analyse where we went wrong,” the skipper didn’t give a direct reply when asked how demoralising was it to see the middle-order not contribute.
It’s not about holding the middle-order batsmen responsible. It’s evident they were not up to the task. The question is, were they given enough time to get accustomed to these roles? Was anybody tried out at No 4 for five successive matches in the last four years? Why did Mahendra Singh Dhoni bat there even this year if he was not to be risked when it came to the crunch? These positions were in a state of continuous flux as the team kept banking on stop-gap arrangements. Success of the top three did the team more bad than good in that sense, since it created an illusion that all’s well.
It’s not possible that the top will stick around till the 30th over every match and score most of the runs. Those below them have to take responsibility. The only team not to get a fifty from No 4 in this competition, the only team clueless about who should bat where after No 3, the only team to have constantly tried out new players in those slots in almost every match --- there was a bomb waiting to explode. When it did, there was hushed silence at Old Trafford.