India Vs. West Indies, 3rd ODI, Chennai

We don't know what to make of this game. One could say that the Indian experiment failed or one could also say that the West Indian team showed gumption. Maybe the truth was somewhere in between.

The Indian team experiment did not make any sense. They rested Saurav Ganguly who has been out of the team for over a year. One would have thought that he needed more match practise. Rahul Dravid played this match, which made no sense since he has been playing a lot of cricket these days and was in reasonably good form in the last two ODI's.

If the Indian team were serious about their experiment, their ODI team would look like this:
1. Robin Uthappa (what a show he put on!) because he deserved a shot
2. Saurav Ganguly (He just got back into the team for crying out loud! He needs more game time)
3. Gautam Gambhir
4. Sachin Tendulkar (He needs to find his form and we think he did just that this game. His batting looked pretty good)
5 Yuvraj Singh
6. Dinesh Karthik
7. Suresh Raina
8 Anil Kumble
9. Sreesanth
10.Munaf Patel (We are aware that he was not in the squad, but he should have been)
11. Ramesh Powar (despite his atrocious fashion sense, we like him)

Yes, we would not have played Ajit Agarkar. We don't like him. His good game came in the 2nd ODI and it will be another 20 or 30 games before he has another good game. We need to be rid of this "All-rounder".

Now, the above team would have qualified for the moniker "Experiment". What India did instead made no sense.

We feel that the West Indies came to India with a plan in mind. For some reason, they have decided that they need to get better at chasing scores and that's just what they have been doing.
Looking at the line-up above, we notice that most of them are batsmen. That depresses us. The problem with playing on dead pitches where tons of runs are scored is that every kid watching these matches wants to be a batsman. No one wants to be the idiot being carted all around the field.

More matches should be played on pitches which offer bowlers help. In fact, we feel so strongly about this that we will repeat the sentence: More matches should be played on pitches which offer bowlers help.

Something to chew on:

Why does a batting line-up which boasts of Sachin, Dravid, Ganguly, and Sehwag need 7 batsmen in their line-up?