The Twenty 20 world cricket cup tournament 2016 is history now. On paper, New Zealand and India seemed to be better sides, therefore, consensus opinion of the cricket analysts was that either of them would lift the cup but that , however, didn’t happen thus once again proving the age old adage that cricket is by chance. The end of any sports competition is a proper time to have a critical look as to what went wrong, where and why?
This tournament didn’t prove good for cricket teams of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa as they were also major contenders for winning it. A lot has been written on the performance of our players, individually as well as collectively so one would be risking repetition if one dilated on the matter. Suffice it to say that unless we got rid of politics, our cricket won’t improve. Waqar Younas has rightly said there is more politics in our cricket than in our parliament. Many Sri Lankan cricket stalwarts have retired one after the other recently or they are in the autumn of their career. Their substitutes are yet to find feet and this was, probably, the main reason for their weak show in this tournament. South Africa has always been a very good side but the tragedy with it is that, for one reason or the other, it always fails to make it to the final round of any major tournament. Has it been jinxed?
Afghanistan was, perhaps, the only team which fared well in this tournament considering the fact that hitherto it was considered as a babe of international cricket. It seems that it has come of age.
India which had started as a hot favourite to win this tournament must be licking its wounds. It is without good and genuine pacemen, otherwise there would have been different story to tell today. It has to discover the likes of Kapil Dev, Zaheer Khan, Yousaf Pathan, to mention a few , if it wants to bounce back. For Dhoni it is an opportune time to hang his gloves and call it a day like Tendulkar, Ganguli and Dravid, who called it quits at the prime of their career, otherwise, his fate might not be different from that of Shahid Afridi.
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