Eight years and nine days ago, the Indian cricket team lifted their second ICC ODI World Cup trophy. The then coach Gary Kirsten has opened up and gave some insights on the team’s performance in the tournament.
The 51-year-old thinks that the team played average cricket and yet won the trophy as there were too many good players in the team.
“We had played average through the tournament, we had a really good quarter-final where we were under pressure. In my head, I just thought we are not playing that well and winning. Imagine, when we play well,” International Cricket Council (ICC) quoted him as saying.
In the World Cup final on 2nd April 2011, Sri Lanka batted first and scored an almost-par total of 274 with their veteran Mahela Jayawardene scoring a hundred and Thisara Perera finished the innings with some big blows to give them the momentum going into the second half of the match. Sri Lankan players entered the ground in the second innings believing that they were just 50 overs away from holding the trophy.
However, as Gary believed, there were too many good players in the Indian team that made the chase look easy and finished it with 10 balls to spare.
Gary said, “It was tight all the way. We bowled OK - (274) is a really competitive score in the final. [I thought] this team was capable of doing that from a batting perspective. That for me was ... ‘OK we can lose a few wickets here, we have got too many good players.’ That’s exactly what happened.”
There is another big talking point of that match. Indian skipper did not have a very good tournament with the bat. Yet, he promoted himself above the man-in-form and the eventual Man of the Series, Yuvraj Singh.
About that, he said, “There was just some thinking around ... having a left-hand-right-hand combination against Muralitharan. That’s why he [Dhoni] was quite keen to go up the order. He just knocked on the window, and said, ‘I want to go in next and I’d be good for that’. I was not going to say no.”
India are scheduled to play their first match of Cricket World Cup 2019 against South Africa on 5 June after playing a couple of practice matches against New Zealand and Bangladesh.
(With ANI inputs)
