Once again Indian Cricket is back to its same old situation. Looks like Dhoni’s lady luck has gone for a date with somebody else. He has even stopped winning tosses. India’s early exit from the Champions Trophy is not a miracle. You cannot expect a team to win when its fielders cannot get hold of even an easy sitter. Dhoni has become so ill-lucked captain that even his team wins a match, it requires the help of its arch-rivals. The match between Australia and Pakistan was superbly staged to look like a nail-biting finish. They were trying to fool Indian Cricket fans. There are some instances to justify my gut-feeling that Aus v Pak was deliberately brought down to the wire. First of all, Pakistan played at a very slow pace. Kamran Akmal who is usually a hard hitter was scoring at a rate of 69.84 which is far below his overall strike rate of 84.33. Shoaib malik who was scoring at a rate 101.36 against India was striking at rate of 72.36 against Australia.. If you’ve started thinking that I am reading too much between the lines, please justify this for me. In the West Indies vs. India match when Windies lost 6 wickets they immediately applied the batting powerplay. Whereas the four time World Cup winners did not take the powerplay at all. In fact they lost 7 wickets for 176 in 41.5 overs. The batting powerplay was forcefully applied when they reached 45th over. Moreover there was no intensity at all between the two teams during the final overs as it should be. All we could see was Brett Lee exchanging smiles with ever-smiling terrorist, Younus Khan and Afiridi.
Indian team has been injured very badly. Its high time Indian team rejuvenates themselves and get ready for their Australia Series. By using the word ‘rejuvenate’ I did not mean Kirsten’s idea of rejuvenating!