England innings: This was built beautifully on a simple strategy, make the oldies jog.
Two feet to the left or right of Zak, Ganguly, Dravid, and the ones became couples and the couples became a family. Add to that two-left-feet Gambhir, he did not know which part of his anatomy to use to stop the ball. Here's some advice: use your head.
Add slow RP Singh and a mind-is-fine-body-does-not fire Sachin, you have nearly half the team that you have to hide, get the picture?
Cook is the wide-eyed boy, he played a cosy innings though a thinking team would have tried to play on his falling over the leg when he whips it across. Agreed we dont have an express bowler who can generate speed to beat the bat.
The more I see of Matt Prior, the more I dislike him. He seems a pompous Pom. Bell was all whistles, showing a compact technique and a mind to improvise.
Obviously what is missed most times is that we Indians give the freedom to get creative. You are bowling at the death, you have the fine leg up and Aggy bowls a slow yorker on the leg stump.
Coming back to the fielding, look at this: England had only 21
boundaries and one 6 in their innings. Do the math, and you see the picture
of how we grabbed the ball.
Indian Innings: Imagine being run ragged on
the field for 50 overs, it sure gets to you. It gets into your psyche so much
and in the end what happens is what happened to Ganguly/Aggy and Piyush.
I thought Anderson bowled well, he set up Gambhir beautifully, 5 dot balls and one got the feeling that the opener was not going to use his head (reflected in his fielding too) and swiped at the next bowled beautifully a tad wide of off.
They then proceeded to choke up Sachin, on which, it's a favourite pastime of the commentators to say for each of his boundaries, "aah.. that is vintage Sachin". Hey, is he supposed to bat left handed to be a new Sachin?
Yuvi could do nothing much and after that it was a question of how much we would lose by. Dinesh Karthik redeemed himself with a cameo.
I am getting to believe that we need to plan to phase out the big three Sachin, Sourav and Dravid. My thinking is that Dravid should opt out right away and maybe in a year the other two should follow. Ok, Ok i get it, who is the replacement, hey follow ICL, the guys are going to be there.
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