India's armour exposed?

Imagine watching your favorite team, the reigning champions play against a team which they can beat 9 out of 10 times in the T20 format at Lords. Won't it be a treat to watch?

It was not a treat for Nadesh, who had flown all the way from Singapore. I know how furious Nadesh will be when India loses a match they ought to have won. Luckily his stay with his Sister and her kids must have been refreshing for him.

I was a bit disappointed(too much of cricket has reduced the enthusiasm) after watching the T20 match between India and England, a match which we lost by a meagre margin of 3 runs, a loss which I would term was rather tame.

Everybody was arguing that India lost the match and the previous one just because of their inability to play short pitched bowling. Though I would accept that India are not adept at playing the short pitched stuff, I can't accept that they lost because of the short pitched bowling. I would rather blame the loss against Dhoni, not for his captaincy but his inability to play quality bowling.

As we all know Shewag's injury had resulted in the reshuffling of our batting order, with Rohit moving to the top. But it exposed our fragility of our middle order which revolved around Yuvaraj. If Yuvaraj is gone, then we have practically no middle order, as we all know that Dhoni has been sorted out by almost all teams.

In order to rein in Dhoni you need not strain overself and bowl short pitched stuff or try yorkers (he can dispatch yorkers with disdain), just run in and bowl a neat disciplined off stump line at a bit short of length and see the results. You can see Dhoni slicing and cutting the air, hitting the ball 1 in 5 times. In this match though Dhoni's strike rate seemed pretty impressive at 150.00, (30 runs of 20 balls, 3 fours) you should not forget the fact it had 2 fours which were edged towards the 3rd man region.

These apart, I do agree that Dhoni is an innovative captain who can think out of the box. Though his move to promote Jadeja backfired, I believe we cannot fault him too much as it might have gone the other way also. Only thing which frustrated me was that, Jadeja should have realized that he is costing his side the game and must have started slogging earlier. We would have got some boundaries or he would have been out. His knock put pressure on Yuvi and Gambhir, both of them eventually getting out to improve the run rate.

I cannot understand why Dhoni promoted himself during the dead league games and devoid Raina of the much needed practice for a guy touring England for the first time. Going forward, Dhoni must be more thoughtful with the batting order, if not that would be the spell of his doom.

One more thing which irritated me was Bhaaji's 8 wides in the 18th and 20th overs. I believe that's one thing which cost us the match,

My Verdict - India needs to improve batting against short pitched stuff, but that alone was not the cause of our exit. Tactical errors and batting by Dhoni were important points.