Thursday, March 24, 2011

Bangladesh would have been a better opposition

Bringing all my frustrations in, I totally reject the West Indies team that not only fared so badly but also made the competition so boring. If not the Pakistani players, there would be no 2nd player who would be happy with the way the West Indies team played in the 1st quarter finals of the world cup yesterday. Had I been the person in charge, I would have stripped the West Indies team of its test status. Not even the Bangladesh team made me go mad with their bad performance. This I fear is the worst defeat for any team in the world cup knock out stage.

It has to be some bloody miracle that bought the West Indies team into the 2nd round of the competition with Bangladesh standing an equal chance of making it there. If one can go through the points table, it would be evident that both Bangladesh and West Indies had three wins against them. West Indies had wins against Bangladesh, Holland and Ireland while Bangladesh had a win against Ireland in addition to wins against Netherlands and Ireland. But, it was the net run rate that all made the difference for both the teams. At least Bangladesh had a win against England.

But, the West Indies didn't manage even one victory against a major opposition. They could have won their games against India and England after the former lost all their ten wickets and the latter piling up only 243 on the board. Any team that can better this record can be only a non test playing nation like Kenya, Zimbabwe, Ireland etc in case by chance they manage to do so. With such a daring start against England if the West Indians could not win, a thorough scrutiny of their test status is necessary I suppose. Despite India losing 7 wickets for 41 runs, a target of 270 proved too much for the West Indies.

I can't just recall when last West Indies put up a decent performance in world cups. In 2007, the only match worth mentioning for West Indies was against Pakistan which was the 1st match of the tournament. That was followed by losses against Australia, Sri Lanka, England, New Zealand and South Africa. In 2003, they won against South Africa by 3 runs with the South African innings reduced to 49 overs owing to slow over rate. That was followed by losses to Sri Lanka and New Zealand but was somewhat bearable compared to their present post-Lara era. Had Bangladesh qualified, there would have been 4 sub-continent teams in the quarter-finals.

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