I write this a few hous before the match between Bangladesh & Bermuda is to start. A match that will decide India's fate in the 2007 Cricket world cup. Inspite of the fact that I know that the result is most certainly a Bangladesh victory & an Indian elimination, I am hopeful. I think that this is the problem with Indian Cricket. It has too many cricket fans & too few cricketers with skill & temperament to play at an interntional level & beat the best. Yes, we have cricketers who can showcase themselves at the highest level & pull of the odd surprise, but we do not have cricketers who can consistently beat the best.

Asfans we are blind to this fact & are eternally hopefull that our team will pull it off & are regularly dissapointed.

In the past 30 years or so that I have been following cricket we have never had a team that could be called world champs. Yes, we did win a world cup followed by a world series championship, but that was simply because we happened to perform well in those individual tournaments.

We need to strive to be the best team in the world in text cricket. We need to consistently beat teams in test cricket. Once we get there we will realize that we have probably won a couple of world cups. The West Indies & the Australians never set out witha vision of wanting to be the best team in One Day Cricket.

We have never been a sporting nation. Can we ever be one, its debatable. I would think not, at least not in the near future. We are mostly people that are looking for a secure career & hence try and take up safe jobs, for which the empasis is on education/academics. While this is not bad it curbs a lot of talent. This talent is not just in sport its in every field. We simply do not have as many entrepreneurs as we can have. Having been a colony for so long has hugely impacted our confidence & has destroyed any sense of adventurism that might have been in existance. It will probably take many more years for us to overcome this situation.

Coming back to the topic of the blog & a brief analysis of the debacle. I think we went in without a settled opening pair in both the batting and the bowling. After all the experimentation where we said that we are building the flexibility where anybody can bat anywhere, we had individuals that probaly could not bat anywhere (permit a bit of exagerration).

We had 4 people in Ganguly, Sachin, Uthappa & Shewag all of whom were only comfortable openning. We had 3 seamers in Zaheer, Agarkar & Munaf, who had just come together as a team what with Munaf's long absence due to injury. They were not a settled team either. Irfan never inspierd confidence & hence could not make it to the fianl eleven.

I fail to understand Agarkar's continued presence in the team. He is probably the puniest seamer (or do we call him a fast bowler) in the world. Probably Irfan would not have done any worse.

We cannot end a blog on Indian crictet's staytus without speaking of Sachin Tendulkar. Look at Sachins scores in the last matches India played in the last three world cup & U will only ask "Is he a big match player?". The answer is a big NO. Its always been a NO. Its again our craze for the game that has over hyped him. Compare him with somebody like a Vivian Richards & U know its no comparison, Viv is head & shoulders (literally also) above Sachin. Compare Scahin with aPonting & a Gilchrist & you will realize that its no comparison either. He is a very over hyped cricteker. If somebody could publish an analysis of his performances when we were chasing totals in the 4th innings of a test match or when we were chasing totals in one day cricket you will really know his 'stature'. He is a good cricketer & just that 'good' never 'great'.

If we have to produce world beating teams, we should have a bigger talent pool, a system to tap this talent pool in all departments of the game. Until & unless U can produce a Ponting, a Gilchrist, a McGrath and a Warne all in a single generation U will not have a world beating team. We have been a 6th or 7th ranked team for the last 30 years & that is where we will continue to be. It is just a question of accepting that reality.