Did You Seriously Expect Anything Else ??

A sound thrashing suffered by India in the third ODI at Jamshedpur. This is the way I envisaged this series would progress. The first 2 games were extremely fortutitous aberrations if you ask me. Either that or you should limit limited overs games in India to 5 minutes rather than 8 hours - the 5 minutes that it takes to go out and toss.

I would like to believe that that is not the case. Although the evidence overwhelmingly supports the win-the-toss-win-the match theory. For now I will avoid this disheartening view and take the more optimistic one. I will optimistically say that India played well in the first 2 games. Although I know that had it not been for Sehwag and Dravid it would have been 3-0 to Pakistan by now. I will state that this pitch in Jamshedpur was not as bad as the 2 earlier ones, because it treated bowlers as second-class citizens and not third-class ones.

Coming back to the performance, India have once again vividly demonstrated why they are #8 in the World. This is the team that has won "one" I repeat ONE match batting second in the entire 2004-05 season and that one match came against Bangladesh in the Asia Cup. Note that normally I would have happily discounted matches against Bangladesh to strengthen my arguement that we have won 0 matches batting second. Unfortunately I cannot afford that luxury - because we DID in fact quite emphatically fail to chase against the same team on Tsunami Day. A team ranked #8 does not have legitimate rights to "discard" records against a team ranked #10 and hence from now on, we should not disregard performances against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe and Kenya at all.

Stretching your memory a bit longer, the only time India have chased successfully (against "non-minnow" oppostion) since the World Cup 2003 (2 years folks !! 2 YEARS !!!) was against Pakistan at Lahore in April last year - the heroes, Mohammad Kaif and a certain "good but not great" ODI player whom I will not mention here to avoid repetition. Yeah before that we did chase 208 and 134 against Zimbabwe successfully in the VB Series - not little acheivements by any stretch of imagination. Btw had it ever occured to you that even in that glorious World Cup Campaign the only chase of any note was the one against Pakistan in Centurion ??? I mean yeah NZ also - but 166 is hardly something to be cocky about - then again maybe not.

So there you have it folks - an extremely poor ODI side by any standards. Absolutely abysmal when chasing any target whatsoever. And of course none of it has got anything to do with the fact that players like Laxman and Kumble are sitting out while Ganguly and Tendulkar are making merry incrementing their run-tallies in massive chunks of single digit figures.