Time and again we praise our captain for nothing and he failed to live up to his reputation in recent times as home matches are played less and we have to go overseas to meet our International commitments as per the ICC schedule.  After winning the 2011 World Cup too much praise was showered on our skipper as a great finisher and all.  And now in the semi-final match against South Africa we observed that when he played a defensive shot to hand over strike to Virat Kohli to get the winning runs, the press did praise him for his action and considered as very sportive.  However, in the final he was at the crease for the last 11 balls and he could not penetrate the outfield or get a boundary to boost our moderate total.  Just praising the skipper for nothing is not in good taste as he could not deliver when it really matters at the highest level and when we go out of India.  He has not scored a single hundred outside India but simply showering praise will not boost skipper's image and losing trend in International cricketing arena.

Today at 6:38 PM

Election politics saved Indian Cricket

Team India's final exit did not get much needed criticism as the election politics got the better prominence in the last couple of months.  Cricket is a religion in our country and we feel let down when our team come up to the final by winning easier matches and when the crunch game like the final of the T-20 World cup played we fail pathetically even without semblance of fight to the opposition.  However, the captain and his brigade of players receive less criticism despite defeats, debacles and dismal show that saw the team going down meekly time and again.  Fortunately for Team India we find that press gave pride of place to politics because of the ongoing elections and thus the team escape from the wrath of the media as they concentrate mostly on the choicest subject rather than doing a postmortem.  Again, the number of reader's letters are also reduced to the minimum to cover up the dismal performance of our team overseas over a period of time.  The saying Tigers at Home and Paper Tiger abroad proved right time and again. Politics played spoilsport but it saved the team from the poor show all over the world and praised odd wins at length. Winning is a habit and we should learn that. Now we will forget everything as we feel that IPL cricket is our only endeavor for ever. 

When a cricket captain perform well at the highest level ex cricketers shower praise on the skipper and hype his captaincy skill too much.  But when he fail to achieve the desired result especially on a foreign tour then the brickbats are coming out in open. Indian Captain Dhoni suffers the same fate after the successive defeats in England, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.  Out of the four tours Team India could not achieve a series win in South Africa or in Australia after playing test cricket for more than 80 years shows where the weakness lies. We are Tigers at home and lambs abroad is proved beyond doubt and there is no excuse for the debacles.  For our satisfaction we can say that Team India was up at some moment and lost the initiative in the end.  As a matter of fact other teams have a measure of Team India and work on the weakness of Team India to produce a favourable result for them. England Team toured India with high preparation and did wonderfully well even after losing the first test at Ahemedabad.  They played to a plan and achieved enviable win and no body can deny with lame excuses. It all started from Windsor Park in Roseau in Dominica, when second innings target was 180 from 45 overs against a weak West Indies side.  Instead of going for an outright win we played out a draw and from there on the going was not good and we could not achieve an overseas win. Now we could not win outside India even a test match for over 1000 days still we say Dhoni is great.