Main reason for the Indian Cricket team's downfall.........

2-0 down , 2 more to go. I am not pessimistic but ask anybody who knows a bit about cricket and they will say to you that this series is going to be a 4-0 whitewash.........again. The disappointing thing about it all is that in england when we lost 4-0 we had an unstable squad with players injured and all that. Also, we stayed No. 1 in the rankings for close to 2 years. We had also played brilliant cricket for the last 2-3 years under Gary Kirsten and Dhoni, won the World Cup, so a bad tour was due and it didn't hurt that much. But whats going on in Australia currently is a bit too much. Serious questions need to be asked . Even more worrisome is the performance of "THE FUTURE TORCH BEARERS".....Gosh, its painful now to think what will happen once Sachin, Dravid and Laxman retire. I had high expectations from Gautam Gambhir for this tour but the way he has been getting dismissed is clearly down to faulty technique. Yes, he scored 83 today but by then the writing was already on the wall and the pitch was super flat. I couldn't find much difference in the way Gambhir is getting out and in the way Raina kept getting out in South Africa and England. Whats even more worrisome is that Gambhir is our opener and he is expected to have a decent technique, even more so when at the other end we have Virender Sehwag who has no technique and relies mostly on his raw talent (no disrespect to veeru) . As for Kohli, I had been crying out even before the 1st test that Rohit Sharma should be the one who should start. Of course, its all hindsight now and there is no guarantee that Rohit Sharma would have been a success.


An important point i would like make as to the main reason for this current predicament is that the wounds which were inflicted during the England tour has opened up. Those wounds , we knew in august itself would take a long long time to heal . In that context i would like to bring to your notice that the Indian side is an old one filled with pensioners. They all have proven quality no doubt. But when you become old, wounds take a longer time to heal then it normally does when you are young. And by wounds i am not just talking about physical wounds . We have to remember that these cricketers are not just old physically, they have grown old mentally too. These guys have been playing cricket since their childhood and haven't done much else during those childhood days. Most of them have lost out on the joys of being a teenager as they were busy practicing in the nets from dawn till dusk. As such, they have grown mentally mature much earlier then normal and thus are mentally a lot older then normal people of their age are. Since they have grown mentally quite old what happens is that when the spirit of the mind takes a hit , it takes a much longer time to recover then it normally should. Just like physical wounds which take a long time to heal when one grows old , similarly mental wounds too take a long time to heal. And this is what i think is a prime reason for our current failures in Australia. Also, if for instance India had played the england tour with all the youngsters, i.e. without dravid, sachin etc those youngsters wouldn't take too long to forget about their mental scars. Their mental scars will heal quicker then the mental scars of the senior players because these guys are still young in every sense of the word, i.e. physically or mentally.



Winning the MCG test was very important, we were sure then we are even surer now. We competed quite well for the first 3 days but when the aussie tailenders swung their bats and took what should have been a target of 250 to a target of 290 , these mental wounds reopened. The human spirit is a fragile thing, it hangs on a thread . And when you have slightly recovered from the england tour by winning the home series' comfortably it doesn't take much to sow the seeds of doubt again. And once these doubts come back its all one way traffic.