The World Cup Defeat

Losses in the World Cup are difficult to forget. When you win, you get swept up by the emotion of it all; the players become legends, and the plays become history, and it’s all very kinetic, like first love. Defeats are different; they settle in like a bad flu, a long Covid of regret, and you tend to remember even more, like unrequited love, the way I still remember the 2003 World Cup final as a PhD student in Stony Brook, crying after the game, out in the cold outside the graduate students commons, or Eden Gardens 1996, when it took me so much time to even process what had happened. Maybe, in a way, I still do not know.

In 2023, older, wiser, and more cynical, sporting defeats do not cut that hard, or so I tell myself, and by this age, the world has revealed itself as a cruel place of hard betrayals, and so sport seems merely a sidelight to the three-ring shit-circus that is life. So when India loses, as it did to Australia today, I tell myself: None of this matters; they play for IPL millions anyway, and soon BCCI will move us to the next shiny object, and this will be just another lousy night spent awake, and none of this is worth ruminating on, discussing, and definitely not worth fighting random strangers on Twitter on.

And yet here I am.

Why did we lose? There are many reasons, and I will be going over them. Some of them could have been avoided, and some of them could not. But perhaps the most galling reason for our defeat was the pitch we played on. Because of the current political dispensation, every marquee game, be it against Pakistan or the World Cup final, has to be played in Ahmedabad. This means what constitutes “home advantage” has to be subsumed within this political context. And if the Ahmedabad pitch is a tired, broken pitch used for the India-Pakistan game and then left out, like worn jeans, so be it.

Of course, they will tell you this pitch was as it was so that India would win. No. When you are the best team in the tournament, as India definitely was, and ten successive wins prove this, what you really want is a fair, sporting pitch where the conditions do not change too much between innings, a batting pitch where runs can be scored with some room for bowlers of all sorts to thrive, or what the British called a sporting wicket. Given a pitch like this, nine out of ten, the better team wins. As in Jo’Burg in 2003, when Australia, the far better team, decimated India on a featherbed of a track.

We would have won this time, most likely, given India was the better team, if we had a track like the Wankede or Chinnaswamy or even a consistently turning track like Chepauk.

Instead, what we got was a half-baked pitch of varying bounce, underprepared deliberately, capricious, and changing every hour with overhead conditions, precisely the kind of strip that levels differences between teams. Win the toss, have a good session, and even Bangladesh can beat us on tracks like this, and we chose to face Australia here.

Which brings us to the toss. Anyone still recovering from the ’96 World Cup semi-finals knows what the thermonuclear phrase “the toss” is.

Why are we talking about the toss? Rohit Sharma would have batted himself had we won the toss; the man said that, and I am sure he said that. Right?

Yes, he did. And it is evident to anyone who has followed the game for decades that he lied. He said what he said at the toss so as not to give the Australians the psychological advantage of knowing that they took the right call and that the Indians were starting on the back foot. How do I know? Because on the same pitch, when it was much better, India chose to chase against Pakistan, and also because later on, after the game was over, Rohit Sharma himself said that he knew that the pitch was going to get better for batting.

But if India was indeed the superior team, like the Windies of the 80s or the Aussies of the 90s, they would have won even from this, right?

Maybe. But that still does not excuse throwing away our most significant advantage, our superiority, almost before a ball was bowled.

There was nothing wrong in the pitch; it was the Indian batsmen, I am told on Twitter. Kohli is selfish, and Rahul is greedy. They should have increased their strike rates and taken more risks, and look at Head and Labuschagne, and so on and so forth.

Sigh. This is where one has to understand again the nature of the strip at Ahmedabad.

Head and Labuschagne batted when the strip was at its best, under lights with a wet ball where the ball comes onto the bat, and Kohli and Rahul batted when it was at its worst when the pitch was baking under the sun, two-paced and holding up. If Kohli and Rahul had tried to bat like Head and Labuschagne, India would have folded up before 200.

What I found particularly amusing were “cricket experts” on Twitter using Kohli’s strike rate as a reference to how Rahul should have batted. “Kohli was going at nearly a run-a-ball, and Rahul was at a strike rate that was half, so Rahul lost us the game.”

The amusing part is that a game before, they were using Rahul and Iyer’s strike rate as a reference as to how Kohli should have batted!

Batting in an ODI is like building an investment portfolio. You need balance.

Kohli is the part of the portfolio that is in bonds and government securities, with a steady and predictable rate of return; Gill is an investment in an index, Iyer individual stocks; Rohit is a pre-IPO startup as in high-risk and high-gain; Sky is Crypto, as in did well in the 2020 and now garbage. Rahul, who had an excellent World Cup, had the most complex role of all: to be a self-balancing target retirement fund depending on the match situation, and in that, he did as well as he could have done on the pitch he was given.

He had to become a savings account today, and he did.

Kohli also played an excellent innings, given the state of the pitch. He was fortunate enough to bat when the pitch was at its best, and he got off to a flier with one four after another, cutting through the field like Aravinda in his prime, and that is why he had the better strike rate of the two batsmen, he got a good start.

Rahul came in once the pitch was on the descendant, and with Iyer gone and basically, one specialist batsman and a bowling all-rounder left, he batted in a way that was the only way he could, given the match circumstances.

Now, coming back to the comparisons with Head and Labuschagne. Besides the fact that the two Australian batsmen got to use a much better state of the pitch, what I found absolutely lacking from expert commentary on Twitter was any recognition of the fact that the lengths they were being bowled to were very different from what the Australian bowlers gave Kohli and Rahul. The Indian bowlers were bowling attacking lengths, the seamers pitching the ball up, hoping for swing (of which there was none after the tenth over or so), or flighting it up hoping for bite (the dew moisture binding together the pitch and reducing its abrasiveness compared to late afternoon). So, of course, Head and Labuschagne scored more freely, and even here, you will notice that while Head went at a run-a-ball till the very end when he exploded, Labuschagne played much more circumspect, and that is precisely how ODI cricket works.

But then, who can we blame for India’s defeat if we are not allowed the cliches of “India should have scored more runs” or “India should have accelerated earlier but not lost wickets”?

Wait, I am coming to it.

There were four distinct phases of the pitch. One was when the game started, India’s first ten overs. This was when the pitch was THE best to bat on, with no swing, the ball coming onto the bat because of the roller. The big letdown here was Shubman Gill. He had no excuse; it was a nothing shot off a nothing delivery, and yes, maybe the short ball came to a tad slower because of the pitch, but nothing someone of his caliber should not be able to handle. Over the tournament, he was the biggest disappointment from the Indian side, maybe because so much was expected from him, and given that Ahmedabad was his home ground in IPL, one would have hoped that he would have shown more intent. Of course, people get out. It’s just that he got out in the most inglorious way possible at a time when runs were the easiest to come by, putting more pressure on Rohit Sharma.

So far, and it is churlish of me, not to mention, I agree, the Australians. When the pitch was the best to bat on, India’s first ten overs, they played error-free cricket. They saved close to 20/25 runs in the first ten overs itself, diamond dust in the light of how the pitch would behave in a few minutes, and the worth of that fielding isn’t just in the number of runs saved but in the opportunity cost of what India lost in terms of flow and rhythm. The catch that Head took was game-turning, like Kapil catching Richards, running the wrong way, and without their absolute error-free cricket, great lengths, excellent fielding, and perfect field placement, India could have been 100/0 at 10 overs.

No matter how the pitch behaved after that, India would have had a solid base.

But if only.

The second phase of the pitch was when it was the worst, by far, to bat on. Given their lousy start of losing three wickets, Kohli and Rahul did as well as one can do under the circumstances, and yes, once again, Australia took their time (they bowled two overs after the formal end of innings) and played brilliant, error-free, cricket. Maxwell bowled one half-tracker, but Rahul put that away for a boundary. The reason I remember this one half-tracker was because of how perfect Australia’s bowling and fielding were, so one blemish stood out. They were not trying too hard; they were just doing the right things consistently, taking their time, and adjusting. What one commentator called “the holding game.”

I emphasize this as I segue to the third phase of the pitch—the first ten overs of Australia’s batting, which was going to be the worst time for the team batting second. Here is where, in my opinion, India actually lost the plot. (This phase is not to be confused with the two-and-a-half phase of the pitch when Pritam performed, which was the worst time for all humanity, an embarrassing spectacle of epic proportions).

While Australia focused on cutting out errors and just putting the ball in the right place when India batted in their first ten overs, India rushed in, full-tilt, to make things happen. In contrast to Australia, India made three unforced errors in the very first over itself. True, Warner went a bit later, but again, cricket is a game of rhythm and flow; a diving catch off the first ball would have made Australia one down for zero, prevented the four that Warner got in a low-scorer, who knows what could have come to pass?

When the ball swings that much, bowlers have to just put the ball in the right place, but neither Bumrah nor Shami seemed to be able to do that. The ball swung excessively, and this gave Travis Head and Mitchell Marsh space to free their arms when what was needed was the kind of mild swing that got Iyer edging back earlier in the day. Runs bled at a rate much higher than a low score could accommodate, and if we are going to blame K L Rahul rather than his batting, it was his keeping I would call out.

He is not a natural keeper, and it is harsh to bring this up, given how well he has adopted a role that was not natural to him throughout the tournament. Still, today was a reminder of why, in low-scoring pressure games, you need a specialist keeper.

It might also be cruel to pin the blame on Shami, given what a phenomenal tournament he has had and how we were in the final in the first place because of him, but on the big day, when the nation was looking up to him, he was a big letdown in terms of his release and his lack of control of the swing. India got a big slice of luck when Steven Smith made a huge DRS call error, but the way I saw it, the game was gone in the first ten overs, when we had only three wickets down of Australia.

As the Afghanis can attest to, even seven wickets is too few to beat the Australians, given how deep they bat. Still, going into the fourth phase of the pitch, when the conditions would markedly help the team batting second, India was at least two wickets behind. Of course, there was no swing or spin later on, under lights and on the wet outfield, and the only way for India to come back would have been for Australia to make some substantial unforced errors, but they did not.

Full marks to Travis Head for soaking up the pressure and error-free batting, and I hope Indians reward him with a juicy IPL contract with Punjab Kings (he was let go by RCB), after which we shall never hear of him again.

Overall, India played a great tournament. Today, they were let down by the powers-that-be that gave them the worst pitch possible on which to win, but as Rohit Sharma said, no excuses; India, in the final analysis, was also not able to rise above the circumstances, as true champions are supposed to, and Australia, despite being nowhere close to the Australia they once were, did the right things when it mattered. If anything my life has taught me, it’s that this is what true champions are made of, in sports and in the world outside.

And so we live with another defeat, a pang of regret that will flair up from time to time as we reminisce about that day in November, but one that will be buried under the avalanche of other disappointments and failures where we will not be able to have the comfort of pointing at someone else as being the one responsible.