After India handed over a 53 run defeat to New Zealand at New Delhi in the first T20, the Kiwis returned the favour at Rajkot. Yesterday India lost to the Black Caps by 40 runs as Indian batting line up stumbled while chasing a big target of 197.
Virat Kohli who is celebrating his 29th birthday today was the leader of the Indian scoreboard. Virat played a great knock of 65 but that wasn’t good enough to see India home.
Is it right to blame Dhoni?
Second in the list of top scorers for India was MS Dhoni. Dhoni played a knock of 49 from 37 balls but initially in his innings he struggled to up the anti. As India lost by a mammoth margin of 40 runs the fingers are once again pointed at Dhoni for being too slow in the first half of his innings But shouldn’t Virat Kohli and Ravi Shastri rather take the blame for sending Hardik Pandaya before MS Dhoni?
It’s a well established fact that Dhoni takes a little time to get into his grove. Hardik on the other hand has the potential to attack the opposition right from the word go. Shouldn’t India have saved Hardik for going full throttle later after Dhoni got his little time to settle down?
Was it a wise decision to waste both, Pandaya and Dhoni’s potentials by swapping their batting orders? Had Dhoni gone one notch up the order that would have given him wider prospects to win it for India and even now you can’t really blame him for the defeat since he ended up with a knock that qualifies as being much more than just decent.
This defeat however can surely be credited to a robust shuffling of the batting order or an aggressive sense of experimentation that confuses the cause and effect relationship.
Anyhow bygones are bygones. Now the stage is set for a perfect series decider. Now both, India and New Zealand are equally poised in the 3 Match series with one win each. As the action moves to Trivandrum on the 7th of November both teams would have things at stake.
But it’s important that India learns from its mistakes quickly before they take on the Kiwis in the decider.
