England's battering still hurts, but for Team India, cricket caravan moves on

It’s coming up to nearly a week since the second semifinal of the T20 World Cup, and India’s crushing defeat at the hands of England. The world has moved on since and the cricket world definitively so, England storming to their second title at the MCG last Sunday.

India themselves are embarking on another assignment, a white-ball tour of New Zealand which starts with the first of three Twenty20 Internationals on Friday in Wellington. In the world of professional sport, as they say, there is no time for yesterday, for moping and brooding or exulting and celebrating beyond moderation. What’s done is done, what needs to be done becomes more pressing.

Coping with defeat

It might be hard to process how sportspersons can quickly put a bitter defeat – more than a glorious victory – behind them, but that’s the very nature of their job, isn’t it. For those more invested in sport, any sport, from an outsider standpoint, emotions and mood swings are more prolonged; for the players themselves, as much as they love the sport they are practising, it’s their job, their profession, their vocation.

If we are allowed bad days in office, so should they be, right? Just because they are highly paid and madly followed individuals almost deified and eulogised beyond reason, do they not have the right to fail? Okay, not so much the right to fail, but at least the license to be at below their best from time to time?

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The battering by England was a reality check, an instant reminder of how much work remains ahead of India if they are to be a consistent threat in global tournaments. Their bilateral record is better than anyone else’s and is largely responsible for their No. 1 ranking in the format because the rankings system rewards consistency and sustained excellence rather than pockets of isolated brilliance. India’s grip on the top-dog status is testament to their successes over an extended period of time, but you wouldn’t need to be a soothsayer to figure out whether Rohit Sharma would not swap that for a world title.

In the immediacy of the 10-wicket loss to England at the Adelaide Oval last Thursday, the team gathered in the dressing room, shell-shocked and in a daze at how quickly its dream had unravelled. In 16 brutal overs, Jos Buttler and Alex Hales hunted down 169 without being separated. As far as routs go, this was emphatic, unchallenged, unquestioned.

Team’s poise

Head coach Rahul Dravid conceded after the game that India had been outplayed, and outclassed. Could he have said anything else to reason away that pounding?

Dravid was among those that made a beeline for Adelaide airport the morning after. He had landed with his wards in Perth five weeks previously, daring to dream and believing that at his and Rohit’s disposal were the resources required to end India’s nine-year drought at ICC events.

India’s glorious run in country vs country battle, the fact that they had landed in Australia a fortnight before the first match, and the luxury of easing into the tournament well-rested and well prepared combined to catapult a billion hopes into the stratosphere, but in an hour and a quarter, those well-crafted hopes went up in smoke, the ruins of a dream all too visible once the dust of the Buttler-Hales onslaught settled.

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Dravid didn’t look unduly perturbed by the events that had transpired 12 hours earlier, but then again, he isn’t a man who wears his heart on his sleeve. Just because he showcased a stony if pleasant exterior didn’t mean he wasn’t hurting inside. Just because Mohammed Shami obliged requests for selfies didn’t mean he had reconciled to the hammering. Just because Axar Patel walked the length of the airport seemingly without a care in the world didn’t mean he wasn’t disturbed by the result. Just because Dinesh Karthik and his squash-champion wife Dipika Pallikal shared a laugh didn’t mean ‘DK’ wasn’t disappointed.

The tears and the sadness had flowed in the dressing room the previous night, where catharsis wended towards a logical denouement. But life must go on, right? One defeat, no matter how debilitating it might be or how significant the stage and occasion were, was not the end of the world. To paraphrase Boris Becker after his shock 1987 Wimbledon loss to Aussie Peter Doohan, India had just lost a cricket match, no one died.

Timid batting, opening

If you pare the angst and the anguish, the despair and the distress, you will agree that India’s semifinal exit was pretty much what they deserved. For all the lip service to fearlessness and aggression, India’s brand of cricket at the World Cup was a throwback to the previous edition, conservative and a little timid with the bat.

The tempo set by Rohit and his vice-captain-cum-opening-partner KL Rahul was disappointing, and if anything, India hit it lucky that Virat Kohli and Suryakumar Yadav were in such spectacular form that they effectively masked the early losses of at least one, if not both openers. India were let down by the skipper and his deputy, who between them boast six T20 international hundreds. Everything else that followed was a domino effect of misfiring opening stands that peaked at 27 in six innings. Where is that acceptable? How can that be absolved, or even defended?

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Ageing India need a reset, desperately so. Changes must be made, not as a knee-jerk reaction to the past – who knows what tale we might have lived to tell, for instance, had England batted first in tacky conditions in the semis – but in preparation for a future that must use the past as an exemplar, a template of the pitfalls to avoid more than the strengths to accumulate.

As he studiously ignored the noise around him that Friday morning at the Adelaide airport, Dravid was engaged in a long chat with Chetan Sharma, the chairman of selectors. Surely, they were not discussing what they had had for breakfast?

Dravid’s lack of ‘expertise’ in T20 cricket has now come in handy for a few who believe he isn’t the right man for the T20 job, at least. Matthew Mott, the England coach, never threatened international selection, and he has won World Cups with both the Australian women’s team and now the English men. That being said, Dravid’s learnt the hard way a year into his stint as India head coach that there is no substitute for results, and no matter who you are, that’s how you will rightly be judged. There will be pressure on him tomorrow, though for now, he is back in Bengaluru, putting his feet up and taking a break – why, many are asking – from the sport.