T-20 World Cup: A Look Back Before The Action Starts Again

After a grueling IPL season, Indian Cricket team is now in England for the second T-20 World Cup. The team will play its first match against Bangladesh on June 6th. Going in the tournament as Defending Champions, M.S. Dhoni’s squad looked quite optimistic while boarding the flight to Britain.

Every Indian cricket fan remembers that amazing day in September 2007 when Sreesanth took that last catch and India was the World Champion. It seriously feels like it was yesterday as every ball and every shot of that T-20 match is still fresh in every cricket fan’s memory. What came next was a huge parade on the streets of Mumbai and players being showered with awards and billions of rupees.

A country of a billion suddenly found new cricketing heroes like Yousuf Pathan, Gautam Gambhir, Dinesh Kartik, Joginder Sharma (who bowled that magnificent final over) and Rohit Sharma. The most amazing part was that this squad did not include the three greatest names in Indian cricket in the last 10 years. Dhoni’s army did not include Sachin Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid.  

The team was pretty much written off by experts, even before the tournament started. The absence of star players and the debacle in 50-50 world cup only few months earlier, did not invite much hope from the team. But Dhoni’s army proved everyone wrong. They not only smashed weaker teams out of the competition, but even won their matches again Australia, Sri Lanka and South Africa; the teams which were touted to be the probable winners of the tournament.

Since then, Indian cricket team has seen quite an improvement in their performance. They have won in tests, One-dayers and T-20 matches, convincingly. The best thing about this team is that they don’t choke under pressure. It is something quite visible in many recent matches which were won under serious pressure. The recent victories in Australia, South Africa, Sri Lanka and New Zealand have proved that Team India can win overseas also.

But the flip side of such a good performance is that people of this country and team’s fans all over the world are now expecting nothing less than a smashing victory in the tournament. This might prove to be more pressure than some of the new and relatively inexperienced players can handle.

What will actually happen from June 6th is yet to be seen. And we are sure that this tournament is the perfect follow up after IPL 2. All those cricket maniacs who are missing the action on TV have the reason to rejoice once again (provided our team plays to its full potential). 

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