Worldcup & World Champions

This has been a topic I have been constantly trying to avoid the day India lost all the chances to get into Super 8s. It has not been easy coping up with the fact that India is not in world cup anymore. Over the past 15 years I have been always reading the Sports Column. That used to be the place where I start reading the Newspaper. These days I skip anything to do with cricket.

Many things went wrong in the world cup. It has been the most dismal performance from India in a series in the past decade. The last time I felt this bad for India going out of World Cup was in 1996 when India lost to SriLanka in Semifinals. Those were the days when there were no cell phones or sms. I was in a residential college (+2) and was so much into cricket and following all the cricket updates. I used to run to our college mess, library, wardens, lecturers to find out scores. After every match, I used to go to library to read the sports section in all the newspapers there. It was hard then to believe that India lost as I was hopeful of India getting into finals. I was then constantly thinking that maybe, India would have won had crowd not behaved that way. It was more than a decade ago. And now it is even bitter.

I strongly felt we are not such a bad team that could not even go to super 8s. But then it is the performance on THE day which matters. When I think more about this, I feel that we don't deserve to be World Champions. We have not played like 1996 World Champions SriLanka who played outstanding cricket a few seasons before the world cup and almost an year after the world cup. Australia! Well, they truly are world champions. They have been going from strength to strength from the 1999 world cup. They have been invincible wherever they went. They deserve the world cup. Don't they?

I wonder if a team should be crowned world cup just based on performance in a series? Should that mean that the team is World Champion for the next 4 years? I think there should be other factors as well in addition to performance in just one series. Or maybe we can make the world cup happen every year or every 2 years? Some may argue that it then undermines the importance of World Cup. We might want to look at soccer. Then, is it the same with Wimbledon or French Open or US Open? We should try to become World Champions in true sense. Not just for the sake of the title. Our team should achieve the status of Australian Cricket which is feared by one and all.