2023 ICC Cricket World Cup (October/November) - India

[icyman]

Honestly, I keep reading that this is the best Indian team ever. Aren't we getting a bit ahead of ourselves?

I think this is the weakest International cricket has ever been. Look at the state of Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Teams you expect to play well in subcontinent conditions but their cricket boards are in disarray.

An England team who've pretty much sidelined ODI cricket and are more focused on other formats.

An SA team who weren't a fancied team before the tournament, same with NZ.

It was just Australia and their winning pedigree in world cups that was the only threat.

Was this the best chance for India to win a WC? Yes but far from the best team India has ever produced. Let's not forget this same group of players have choked in high pressure games for almost a decade now.

Still a far cry from the 2011 team and the competition they were up against.

Well said

 

[wasteyouryouth]

Feel sad for the team but this is what happens when administrators poke their noses in sporting matters. One of the worst pitches in a WC final where it all came down to the toss of a coin. This final should never have been first of all at this ground and after the farce that was the IPL final, this is now the second nail in the coffin.

Rohit wanted to bat first, so I don't think complaints about the toss are that relevant. It was still a poor pitch but India got outplayed.

 

[Sherlock Holmes]

Rohit wanted to bat first, so I don't think complaints about the toss are that relevant. It was still a poor pitch but India got outplayed.

Don't think India actually wanted to bat first, that was sort of a wrong-un given out by Rohit to confuse everyone I guess. However if you look at his reactions and the tone with which he was speaking with Shastri after losing the toss, it was a tad been on the lower side.

 

[wasteyouryouth]

Don't think India actually wanted to bat first, that was sort of a wrong-un given out by Rohit to confuse everyone I guess. However if you look at his reactions and the tone with which he was speaking with Shastri after losing the toss, it was a tad been on the lower side.

I'm sure captains will play mind games all the time when they lose the toss. But at 76/1 after 9.3 overs bowling first looks a questionable decision. The fact that, five balls later, India found themselves in a hole is because they only Jadeja and Surya left in the shed, not because of the pitch.

 

[Bigby Wolf]

It will be interesting to see whether how this inability of win ICC tournaments effects the younger generations.

The likes of Gill, Iyer, Siraj and Kuldeep especially have been a part of this setup for multiple events and haven't performed well either.

With Rohit and Kohli both likely to go down by 2025 the upcoming player filling the gap will always have this in the back of their mind to perform at the final games.

Always feel younger teams have done well in such events with the new players not having that baggage of loss and fearless approach irrespective of the match situation.

 

[Till Valhalla]

I don't know why most people are slanting Siraj(Not asking Icyman). In my opinion he performed nice as a second fiddle to Bumrah in the initial stages and later on was good support to both Shami and Bumrah. For all the 2011 analgist/eulogists he played the role of Munaf Patel, who I remember correctly was praised as the darkhorse/workhorse. I think people want Siraj to fail for some mysterious reasons(Maybe Icyman's Past GF left him after seeing Siraj)

 

[LiveLoveABD]

Rohit wanted to bat first, so I don't think complaints about the toss are that relevant. It was still a poor pitch but India got outplayed.

We were going to lose no matter what. But I don't want to see this kind of track in a WC final. It could have been a NZ vs SA final because whoever bowled first would win. BCCI has been a joke forever. I went to a famous pub in Kolkata and made some Aussie friends and to hear their plight for booking hotels, ticket etc was embarrassing and I felt shameful. A used pitch shouldn't have been used against NZ and neither the final. To make matters worse, they used a heavy roller pre game to make matters worse.

I feel for the team but have 0 sympathy for the board and the political powers who made a sporting event a political rally.

 

[asprin]

From India's perspective:

Positives
(1) Looked the best team of the tournament
(2) Won one of the knockout games thereby ending the SF curse
(3) Refreshing batting upfront by Rohit Sharma
(4) Bowlers hunting in packs

Negatives
(1) Unable to pass the final hurdle


Yes, it was a bad day in the field. Yes, we won 10 games on the trot. Yes, we bullied our way throughout the tournament. While I'm proud of the way India performed, the question remains - does not going the distance matter in the grand scheme of things?

There's no doubt the better team won yesterday. India seemed a little perturbed by the enormity of the occasion while Australia were the opposite. Starc couldn't have found better matches to come back to form (SF and Final). Add to that Cummins too decided to show up on the same day.

In the end, Australia outplayed us in all the departments. Lots of what ifs to ponder about but looking forward to another 4 hard years to pass.....

 

[Bevab]

Fair enough but talking on the point of part-timers, I believe you definitely need to have that surprise element in your team. Bowlers that batters would likely go after which many a times results in a wicket.

Glen Philips for NZ for example. Travis Head for Australia. I would've put Maxwell in this category as well before this WC, where obviously he evolved into more than just a part-time spinner.

You just cannot have a team of batsmen who can bat and bowlers who can bowl. Too much over-reliance on Hardik Pandya as well.

Look at our reserve players as well. Either specialist batsmen or bowlers. This includes those who didn't make the cut.

You pour billions into grassroots cricket and it's pretty embarrassing when a country like ours still have players tuned to focus on one particular skillset.

The very definition of a part-timer by us Indian fans interests me because of what we mean. A lot of us call players who are picked mainly for their batting as part-timers if they can bowl which does a disservice to their skill. Maxwell for example hasn’t bowled in only twenty-eight ODI innings in his entire career. That isn’t a part-timer, that’s an all-rounder right there. Head has bowled in more than fifty percent of ODIs he’s played and Phillips has bowled in close to sixty-five percent of his ODIs. They may not bowl their entire spells or even half of it in each innings but these are batting all-rounders. Head for instance is a genuinely skilled option with the ball who I’d put on par with Maxi for skill despite his lesser workload, I’ve seen him be used as a wicket taking option in tests and open the bowling in a Big Bash final. Phillips was backed in part because he can bowl.

I’d argue that the very nature of our cricket setup is why we have hyper-specialised players. There’s simply too much competition at grassroots, youth and domestic level for a player with ambitions to focus on a secondary skill. It’s why bunnies like Bumrah and Ishant turned into tailenders that can bat a bit after they were well established in the side because they could finally focus on that secondary department. Likewise Jadhav temporary run as a batting all-rounder happened after he was an established ODI player in the team.

You see this effect even now in domestic cricket. Someone like Tilak should be our own version of Maxi and yet five out of his sixteen bowling T20 bowling innings have come after his international debut. Jaiswal was used as a sixth bowler in the U-19 WC and yet he’s bowled in only forty percent of his List A innings since and has four bowling appearances in T20s, one of which was for India. There is a vicious cycle where their domestic teams don’t want to use them as the sixth bowler because they want them primarily as batters with the bowling duties being covered by others and the players themselves don’t want to focus too much on the bowling because then it may end with their primary skill development lagging behind other players which puts them at risk of losing their place if they falter there in performances. This isn’t a problem unique to India, the likes of Head and Root would have been the equal of Viv with the ball in earlier eras and it took Markram being virtually guaranteed a place in the national side despite being in poor form for him to focus strongly on his bowling to get it up to the level it is today.

This is also why such dual role cricketers that are good enough in both departments are products of traditionally weaker teams like Rishi Dhawan for Himachal Pradesh or Riyan Parag for Assam to think of two examples. They’re forced to work on their bowling/batting too because they won’t be dropped and also because their sides actually need their bowling too due to the others being worse. Exceptions to this exist too as shown by the likes of Shahbaz and Sundar for stronger sides but I’ve not seen either of them be used as serious batting options for India or their IPL sides in white ball cricket which brings us back to the core issue that I should probably talk about in the Indian thread.

 

[Bevab]

Also felt Australia cashed in on their post Ponting Era 'golden generation' big time.

2 ODI World Cups, one T20 WC and keeping the Ashes in Australia in between England's 'golden era' lol

Warner, Smith, Maxwell, Starc, probably Marsh and Hazelwood as well won't be there in 4 years time.

Inb4 they win the T20 WC next year too.

I did say before the final that this Aussie side is definitely an ATG team in their own right and are only not viewed as such at first glance due to them directly succeeding the greatest team this sport has ever seen. The likes of Warner, Maxi, Starc are all contenders for an ATG Aussie XI in white ball cricket while the likes of Zampa, Hazlewood, MMarsh and Head (in due time) are all contenders for a tier below that. Extend it to test cricket and they’ve got their greatest pace trio during this period, arguably the best batter since Bradman and one of the better openers in tests in a period of openers struggling globally. The likes of Head, Labuschagne and Green are poised to be well regarded if they continue their current trajectories. I’m probably not giving Lyon enough credit here too.

 

[Bevab]

I don't know why most people are slanting Siraj(Not asking Icyman). In my opinion he performed nice as a second fiddle to Bumrah in the initial stages and later on was good support to both Shami and Bumrah. For all the 2011 analgist/eulogists he played the role of Munaf Patel, who I remember correctly was praised as the darkhorse/workhorse. I think people want Siraj to fail for some mysterious reasons(Maybe Icyman's Past GF left him after seeing Siraj)

He was the worst of the five regulars and the most expensive by a significant margin. Hard not to understand why he gets criticised.

I don't think he was done any favours by the team in the end either. They brought in Prasidh as a replacement for Hardik because they were worried about him continuing to lose form and they completely misused him in the final.

 

[harishankar]

Forget all your analysis, boys, because here is the true reason for India's loss:

 

[SkyBlue]

From India's perspective:

Positives
(1) Looked the best team of the tournament
(2) Won one of the knockout games thereby ending the SF curse
(3) Refreshing batting upfront by Rohit Sharma
(4) Bowlers hunting in packs

Negatives
(1) Unable to pass the final hurdle


Yes, it was a bad day in the field. Yes, we won 10 games on the trot. Yes, we bullied our way throughout the tournament. While I'm proud of the way India performed, the question remains - does not going the distance matter in the grand scheme of things?

There's no doubt the better team won yesterday. India seemed a little perturbed by the enormity of the occasion while Australia were the opposite. Starc couldn't have found better matches to come back to form (SF and Final). Add to that Cummins too decided to show up on the same day.

In the end, Australia outplayed us in all the departments. Lots of what ifs to ponder about but looking forward to another 4 hard years to pass.....

Will ODI World cup even be the flagship event of ICC in another 4 years? I am not so sure tbh

There's already been a discussion on the schedule of some teams for the next 12-18 months where they hardly have any ODI cricket lined up.

I feel the next T20 WC in the US could be a really significant event and 4 years later, Cricket is going to make a comeback in 2028 Olympics in the form of T20 cricket.

Between now and the next 4-5 years, I see more focus on T20 than ODI cricket.

I really won't be surprised to see ICC making a push to position T20 world cup as their flagship world cup event in the coming years and rightfully so as it will bring way more teams into the equation. We could easily have EURO style cricket world cup.

Which would make the CT in 2025 all the more a useless event. It's unnecessary and needs to be scrapped for good.

 

[noducksallowed]

AHHH....WHAT A RUSH!

In a tournament where the Indians were supposed to be crowned champions of all the known universe AND THERE SHOULD BE NO ARGUMENT! In front of a crowd no one really knows how large but supposedly anywhere between 90-130k, in front of the tiny old man who is a mad hatter PM and in front of a sea of blue and Bollywood royalty this was supposed to be a guaranteed win.

The entire tournament, in my eyes the worse since 2007 had been an exercise in incompetence (half finished stadia, non-working scorecards, electrical issues leading to no DRS etc etc etc), corruption (the ICCs own pitch consultant, whose job it was to look after the pitches for an "international" tournament complained) and arrogance (fans on the online echo chamber of forums such as his, lambasting any outcome other than an Indian victory, complaining that if India can't win the WTC its the formats fault not the teams LOL) came crashing down around the ears of jingoistic, at times outright bigoted (remember the Pakistan fan who couldn't shout "Pakistan Zindabad" or the number of Indian ex cricketers being offended by a Rizwan tweet or the Visa issues suffered by all nations to such an extent that even the Barmy Army said this was the lowest demand for tickets they had EVER had) cricket administrators and government officials.

The coronation to be was interrupted by that most important of things...A GOOD EFFIN CRICKET TEAM! Shock horror right?? How could a team other than India actually play well, how could anyone other than Shami or Booooomra take wickets? How could this be anything other than a final bow of glory for greatest ever athlete Kohli? And yet all the things India were hyped up to be, they completely lost out at...batting, bowling, fielding. They forgot that there was a game to be won, against a nation who are no strangers to winning and have won home and away for longer than the host nation has been "supaaastaaars".

A lot of people are going to be mad about this post but A: I don't care because this is absolutely hilarious and just desserts (I'm only scratching the surface of the sh***show this tournament was) and B: I'm actually a fan of a lot of these players, I consider Kohli one of the top ODI batters ever, Bumrah is a good bowler to watch and Shami in full flow is even better imo but the utter arrogance and contempt shown by players and adminitstrators for cricket here, as an actual cricket fan deserved no less of a come down to Earth as what was achieved yesterday.

Heck, the final light show couldn't even be reconfigured for Australia and the trophy ceremony was a shambles that even the BBC couldn't cover up with any pro-India jingoism.

Australia are deserved winners of an undeserved and ugly tournament.

Post automatically merged: Nov 20, 2023

Will ODI World cup even be the flagship event of ICC in another 4 years? I am not so sure tbh

There's already been a discussion on the schedule of some teams for the next 12-18 months where they hardly have any ODI cricket lined up.

I feel the next T20 WC in the US could be a really significant event and 4 years later, Cricket is going to make a comeback in 2028 Olympics in the form of T20 cricket.

Between now and the next 4-5 years, I see more focus on T20 than ODI cricket.

I really won't be surprised to see ICC making a push to position T20 world cup as their flagship world cup event in the coming years and rightfully so as it will bring way more teams into the equation. We could easily have EURO style cricket world cup.

Which would make the CT in 2025 all the more a useless event. It's unnecessary and needs to be scrapped for good.

Typical here...if India can't win it, it's not important

 

[Bevab]

If only that post was smaller (quite ironic coming from me), could have served as a useful copypasta.