Sunday, April 3, 2016

Champion! Champion!

What an incredible world cup we’ve had. Great sportsmanship by some teams while others(our neighbors in the east) went south. One of the coolest captains loses calm in the post-match media conference and makes fun of a reporter when asked about retirement. The aggressive vice captain of the home team becomes emotional after the win against Australia and slams people for making fun of this past relationship. The middle order Jamaican publicly criticizing one of the legendary leg spinners of all time. And there was more, but at the end, it was the Caribbean nation rolling their chests after the amazing last 4 balls of the tournament.

It is absolutely stunning to see several islanders coming together as a unit and perform in a world’s stage and making their nation proud. We are not talking about a one man stealing the show who opens the batting for Royal Challengers Bangalore but everyone contributing to the success of the team when cricket is being played at this level. Am sure Afghanistan is going to be happy for having defeated the crowned champions but they need to realize that they had missed the boat in the first few weeks itself - no offence to the team.

This year has been great for the West Indies with women, men and the boys winning the title - this is what the legendary pace bowler Curtly Ambrose was hinting when he was showing his three fingers. What was interesting to see was Darren Sammy getting emotional and openly criticizing WICB during the presentation. Feel very sad for team of such a caliber where the manager needs to run around in a foreign country to get their jerseys and make sure that everybody is together in this crisis situation. And we are talking about that team which has won three world cups in the longer and two in the shorter version of the limited format. The whole team was dancing for the champion song but need to watch and see for the kind of music the captain is going to face from their board for that emotional speech.


Being an Indian fan, I was very disappointed with the way Dhoni’s team were knocked out in the tournament but that’s the best the team could do on that day. I strongly disagree with people when they say we were short by 20-30 runs in the semi-final because 192 is a solid score no matter how big players you’ve got in the opposition. Virat Kohli has been brilliant with the bat throughout the series and thoroughly deserves the player of the series title. With no disrespect to the Caribbean team, they are not those smart players who would take ones and twos, they love it huge including their physical personalities, period!

Overall, there were wonderful games throughout the tournament and the most deserving team has won. WICB must go back to the drawing board and get things corrected and give their hero's the respect they deserve.