T20 World Cup: Bleak for the blues!

India players wait for a review decision during their T20 World Cup opening match v Pakistan at Dubai recently. Pic/Getty Images

The Men in Blue have been battered black and blue in their previous two matches in Dubai. Will a change in venue bring Team India better luck?

As India play their only match at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi against a resurgent Afghanistan today, they will be striving to get into the wins column and revive their fortunes.
Clichés like when the going gets tough, the tough get going are fine, but as of now, the Indian thinking and planning is so muddled and the form of the players so suspect, that it will require some great resilience and loads of luck for them to be in contention for a semi-final berth.

It's very difficult to digest the fact that after only two matches, India's fate at this T20 World Cup is no longer in their hands. The only thing they can do now is win their remaining three games and that too by huge margins. They need to try to improve their net run-rate and hope that some of the other results in the group work to their advantage, the most crucial being Afghanistan possibly upsetting New Zealand. However, even that is no guarantee that India will make it to the last four So, how are the Men in Blue going to approach their games now?

A lot more at stake

Words that come to mind readily are playing for pride, but there is a lot more at stake for them than just pride, and the sooner they recover from the double setback the better it will be for them.

So, it all boils down to the top four batsmen - KL Rahul, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Ishan Kishan in that order - to revive the team's fortunes. Batting coach Vikram Rathod in a pre-match virtual media interaction rightly mentioned that "the Indian batsmen have struggled to rotate strike as well as play big shots due to pitch variations and they need to find a way to get around this issue."

After the eight-wicket defeat to New Zealand recently, captain Virat Kohli had called for collective responsibility. "When you cope together as a team, you overcome it and we haven't done that in these two games. Just because you are the Indian team and there are expectations, it doesn't mean you start playing differently," he had said. India definitely need to get their act together. Firstly, they have to get their playing XI right. And this includes their batting order as well as the bowling combination. Spinners Varun Charkravarty and Ravindra Jadeja have been least impressive of all the spinners on view so far.

Will Ashwin, Chahar play?

Will India bring in either Ravichandran Ashwin and Rahul Chahar or possibly both?

Additionally, the pace attack has lacked incisiveness, but the only option they have is a lackluster Bhuvneshwar Kumar.

On batting front an unfit Suryakumar Yadav is the only option outside the XI. Considering the situation Team India are in right now, one hopes that the prayers of millions of fans pay off however bleak the prospects may be for the Men in Blue at the moment.

2012
The year India last played a T20I against Afghanistan

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