People across the globe were quite sure that it would be India vs Pakistan in the final soon after Pakistan beat New Zealand by their outstanding performance so far. But who knew that England would thrash team India in the semi-final keeping in view their performance so far in the tournament? Team India is the only team in the tournament which has secured 8 points and is the lone team in group 2 which has lost just one match out of five played till now. Amid such a promising performance, team India losing to England, failing to secure its position for the final, has come as a huge disappointment to the nation in general and the fans of the Indian cricket team in particular. The defeat should invite major changes in team India with focused attention to various areas where the team, particularly a few players, need to improve.
Even though India did good with its batting, putting up an at-par score on the board, the bowling side turned out to be off the track and that too in the game which was important and held the key for India to move further in the tournament fight it out with Pakistan and bring the cup home, but that did not happen. It was, as Harsha Bhogle termed it, the competition between boxers of two different weight categories and what Ravi Shastri said was more precise, pictured it all as he termed the game as one-way traffic and sure it was.
The attention of the players all through the tournament wasn’t really where it should have been. Almost the entire team was busy with modelling shoots while the captain, Rohit Sharma himself was quite busy with the promotion of online betting games. It is also known that the entire team used to go for outings after every match, no matter what the result was. We are not here to say that the players were not sincere about the game, they were and even performed exceptionally in several games, but what is for sure is that they were focused on other things, too, apart from the tournament—there is no denying that. Now that team India is heading home, there is a need for overhauling the team as well as the structure of coaching because the T20 format needs specialised coaches and that needs to be taken care of immediately.
