Fingers-crossed for India after Bangla shock, run rate not wins may hold key

Well, the chariot had lost its way, the bow had slipped, and one of the three horses, the one in the middle, had stumbled badly. Today, Team India is tottering on the edge, a few digits away from a humiliating exit — they have to beat Bermuda tomorrow, they have to beat Sri Lanka on Friday, and may still end up crossing their fingers and praying that they will get through on net runrate.

The only consolation, if you could call it that, came much later when the younger bunch gathered in their hotel lobby for a quiet dinner — news trickled in that Pakistan had crashed out of the tournament, losing to Ireland.

The Bangladeshis? “Well, it will be hard to keep our feet (on the ground) today. The boys have not stopped jumping in the dressing room,” said Bashar.

The celebrations, later, were a bit subdued though, with their bowling spearhead Mashrafe Mortaza winning the man-of-the-match award, and then dedicating it to “my friend Manjirul Islam Rana”, the 22-year-old cricketer who died in an accident three days ago.

Even if skipper Bashar said, “We will just go out together for dinner. But if someone wants to do something, he’s free to do so.”

They are already calling this the greatest win for Bangladesh cricket, coming as it did in the biggest arena of them all. Even bigger than the win over Pakistan, because Bashar would be the first to admit that 1999 was more of a fluke, while this was what the team had been working towards over the last year.

In fact, so assured was the gentle Bangla skipper that he even had a poke at Dravid. Asked to react to Dravid’s assessment that India fell 30-40 runs short, Bashar retorted with a cheeky smile: “When you lose, you always think 20-30 more runs would be handy. That’s how it goes.”

There were a few, special words for the audacious 17-year-old Tamim Iqbal, too, the left-handed prodigy who took apart the Indian attack, and stubbed out millions of hopes, in just 53 balls. Seven fours and two sixes later, Bashar was grinning: “This is the way he bats. We actually try to calm him down sometimes. But that’s his natural game, that’s what he does back home.”

What of India then? “If we can pull ourselves out of this hole, and get to the next round, we can forget this as a bad dream,” said Dravid. But that will take some doing though, because even if everything goes according to plan for India, it will still boil down to the net runrate — and that final match on March 25 between Bangladesh and Bermuda.

So what happened? Was India overconfident? Did India lose the match at the toss itself, when Dravid chose to ignore the early life in the pitch? The questions will keep popping up, but if you take a deep breath and look back on that bizarre Saturday, India were simply outplayed by a better team.

Really, if you remove the name Bangladesh from the scorecard, and replace it with, say, Australia or South Africa, you will find that India lost to a side that batted better, bowled better, and fielded like champions. There is really no other explanation, nothing sinister — no middle overs theory, no master gameplan. India just flopped.

Their batting, except for a burst from Yuvraj Singh and a great anchor effort from Sourav Ganguly, lacked focus. And with 191, the bowlers didn’t have much to bowl at anyway, though Ajit Agarkar was a huge letdown in his first spell. The fielding? What can you say, when a handful of “half chances” went whistling by and two regular ones were simply dropped: Dhoni let off anchorman Mushfiqur Rahim after pouching the ball, Harbhajan let Iqbal go with a smile.

But yes, if only Dravid had chosen to field first. He claimed later that there weren’t “too many guys who said anything differently when we looked at the square and the wicket”. But by late evening, it had become clear that some of the seniors may not have been too convinced about that.

Anyway, the match was locked in the first over, and sealed in the afternoon when, after Iqbal’s assault, 18-year-old keeper Rahim, with a mature 56 off 107 balls, shepherded the team through the tense middle overs, and pushed them across the finish line. All that was left for India now is a few wisps of hope and some notes on the wall:

• India actually held up in the middle overs, especially between 20-40, giving up just one wicket and scoring 76 runs. The collapse happened on either side.

• Mortaza, who has survived four operations on his knee, may have delivered the early blows but the Indian batting fell apart against the three accurate left-arm spinners, Abdur Razzak, Shakib Hassan and Mohammad Rafique. Razzak and Rafique took three wickets each, and Hassan just kept the other end dry, giving away just 44 runs in his 10 overs. As Bashar admitted: “Actually, when I saw how Rasel (left-arm medium pacer) bowled, I was thinking ‘Oh, we should have played another seamer’. I thought I had made a mistake. But when their part came, they did a wonderful job.”

• Now the frightening big picture: In their last 13 games abroad, starting with last May’s West Indies tour, India have batted for 50 overs only thrice, the exception being the West Indies game in Malaysia where India needed barely 40 overs to win.

PS: In the end, if this makes you happy, you could look at this way too: little Mirzapore Tea, sponsors of Bangladesh, had just got the better of Nike.