Congratulations, Australia! Better luck next time, India
November 19, 2023
-Karthik Gurumurthy
Congratulations Team India on this incredible journey of winning 10 games in a row, creating unforgettable moments and made us proud. The final result may not have been in our favor, but you created unforgettable moments and made us proud!
Anybody who's a true cricket aficionado will know that yesterday we were done in by the conditions! Well and truly done in!
Please don't blame even a single player. That's quite unfair.
I'm definitely speculating here, but I would have bet if Aussies batted first, they would have lost.
It's what all of us thought were quintessential Indian conditions. Low and slow wicket. Dry wicket taking spin early and one needing hard attritional cricket. Something that the Indian team does very well. Was it our own doing? Meaning, did the BCCI curators play a part in it, as it requires ICC to agree too? Or was it just ill-fated timing as by the end of a large tournament there mostly used pitches and not much can be done to freshen them up anyway?
From what I could see, when batting, the Indians didn't put a foot wrong. We had a good start- 80 for 2 in 10. The moment Shreyas Iyer's wicket fell early, KL and Kohli had to buckle down and play with caution till at least the 30th over. Say, in the name of playing bold cricket we would have been 90 for 5, then the game would have been lost right there! We would have had Shami coming into bat with 30 overs left!!!
So we did it just right. And the slow pitch wasn't helping us even get the ball off the square. so much that Marsh & Head, their part-time bowlers, bowled 4 overs between them for 10 runs! That we got to 240 was a pretty good effort given the conditions. And then when the Aussies started batting, they had to face a huge challenge too in the 1st 15 overs and that's why the match was evenly poised till then. And then the ball started coming on nicely, completely negating our bowling! By the 30th over the match was gone.
In the very 1st world cup match between England and NZ at the same venue, the latter had chased down England's target with ridiculous ease!! We had even seen it in the IPL. At the Wankhede and Ahmedabad, it gets much easier to chase under the lights.
One can't help but feel sorry for the players. As a team we are better than the current Australian team. The toss and the conditions favored Australia yesterday and the champions that they are made full use of it & won!
Just absolutely stunned at how Rahul Dravid can turn up an hour after a soul-crushing final defeat after two years of hard work, and still answer all sorts of questions with honesty, dignity, and even a smile.
A message for every one of us, lets uplift each other!! I feel for my team, I hope they find comfort around their family and for fans, let us uplift each other instead of bringing each other down!!
Comments