From that surreal night of MS Dhoni’s decisive six on April 2, 2011 at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, to the upcoming defining moment of 2015 at the Adelaide Oval where India starts its title defence against its fiercest rival Pakistan on Sunday, much has changed. For, one, India is not the top favourite; the legend has gone out of its fabled batting line-up; its youth and inexperience is flashy and brittle; its arm is hurting and its skipper is in an undeclared outgoing mode.
Add to that the surface under its feet and conditions overhead, and the “we will get it back” chant on TV by our Men in Blue starts looking like an undisciplined child’s pig-headed self-indulgence. But there’s one thing about all this negativity. It is as gloriously uncertain as the game on which it has made its perch. Shane Warne sees it when he says judging India on its Tests and tri-series performance would be more than foolish. Gary Kirsten sees it when he points out that India has learnt to win World Cups and Misbah-ul-Haq sees it when he says there’s no underestimating the power of the young Indian bat.
Dhoni, who had taken time out to clear his mind of the Tests and tri-series mess, is now back in the World Cup mode – no media, long confabulations with experts, intense training sessions and very little contact with the outside world and its intense scepticism of his boy band – that’s how he lifted the trophy in 2011, that’s how he plans to do it here too.
A big plus is the “sure-to-quarters” format that the ICC has given to this tournament, perhaps learning from its Caribbean experience how disastrous it can be for top teams check out for just one bad early showing. It loses business, it loses sheen and it loses raison d etre if a contender gets locked out by a minnow. It’s like Roger Federer being downed by an unseeded rookie in the second round and that rookie going out in the very next.
So Group B, in which India plays against Pakistan, South Africa, UAE, West Indies, Ireland and Zimbabwe for a bid to a quarterfinal berth, is a fairly easy one, as in Group A. India needs to win just three matches, at best four, to go through and looking at the group’s composition, this does not look difficult, not till India decides to kill India.
Though Pakistan will be competitive, West Indies unpredictable and South Africa toughest of the lot, the other three are easily surmountable. Dhoni is known for fishing out rabbits from his hat to make a silly point of hurdles and there is no reason why he would not have stored some new ones to keep the momentum going for this edition.
The pitfalls, however, are there in the form of the long breaks between group stage matches and the fact that two of its important matches are being in Perth where no two-bench tactic works, so high the ball flies. If it’s India, it should have been Sydney by all standards, a staring fact ICC ignored while allotting two matches and 12 days to India in the south western outback of Perth. This is a place which is not even in Australian Tourism’s promotional list of cities for India.
India plays UAE and West Indies at this venue where the temperature has already touched 40 degrees Celsius and the pitch, despite being made “batsman friendly” has innate qualities that only rise like its temperature. The Group stage will last three days plus an entire gruelling month. That bodes ill not just for India who has already been in Australia for the last three-and-half months before the World Cup (and done nothing but lose through two series), but for all other teams who will have to work hard for the momentum to stay (already the Pakistani players have found time to get penalised for staying out late).
Think about it. It will be 33 long days, which is more than a month, before the World Cup will even get into its first knockout match. That’s long even by football World Cup standards!