India’s T20 defeat

Sripathi has blogged about the analysis of India’s defeat at the T20 World Cup that is bound to follow. I accept his challenge and this post is a response to that call

India’s defeat, in my honest opinion, is mainly due to the following reasons (not in any order though).

• The lack of “skill” by the cheerleaders on the grounds. Their sober dancing was hardly motivating to the Indian cricketers, who are now so used to the energetic gyrations of the IPL beauties. And their sense of dressing is seriously objectionable, if I may add. Such gross overuse of clothing is highly inappropriate for employees of the motivation industry and our players could not recover from the dampened spirit.
• The lack of “star power” in the pavilion. Our cricketers are used to getting pampered and cheered off the field by Bollywood superstars. In England, they had to put up with Kirsten and his team after the matches.
• Our players got very used to the 7.5 mins break after every 10 overs. The continuous stretch of serious cricket for 20 overs was too much for our “young boys” to handle.
• Dhoni’s captaincy was severely affected by the “One Ball Ka Captain” contest introduced by Pepsi. If people can captain India by drinking, and Pepsi at that, what’s the motivation for Dhoni to put in all the effort!
• The prize money for the T20 World Cup needs to be up-ped by at least 100 times. What’s the fun in taking a game seriously, if all it will fetch are a few lakh rupees.
• The commentators need to improve drastically. The very boring, non-technical reporting they are doing during this World Cup is demotivating the Indian players. Yuvraj’s hits are described merely as “a Sixer” when a more appropriate description would have been a “DLFer”. Asking Harbhajan to just perform well and not give a “Citi” moment is unacceptable.
• And can somebody deck the trophy with a few hundred diamonds and emeralds please. Our boys have stopped playing for glass!