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Its not just the batsmen, silly!

Post the inevitable and ignominious exit of the Indian team from the T20 World Cup there has been a lot of talk about how the batting, seam bowling and the IPL let the team down (an examples here, and here). While I agree with those to a degree, a glaring factor was also the lack of effectiveness of the spinners, especially when compared to their counterparts on other teams. The table below compares the spinners of all the teams in the Super Eight.


The Indian spinners bowled the most overs but gave up by far the highest runs per over and per wicket. When spinners from NZ, SA, WI do better than you its time for a re-think. Moreover, if you take out Harbhajan's figures from here things would have been much worse. But then that's what you get when you use part-time spinners to bowl eight overs in almost every game. Ravindra Jadeja and Piyush Chawla should not have even been in the squad, not just in hindsight but because Irfan Pathan would have given the squad better balance and Amit Mishra is the better leg spinner.

The batsmen on the other hand did not do as glaringly badly relative to other teams as the table below shows -


That doesn't mean that there aren't any batting selection issues. Yuvraj Singh appears a prime candidate to be dropped from all forms of the game for at least a year and Yusuf Pathan doesn't warrant being picked outside the sub-continent. The former has an attitude-cum-fitness problem and the latter is just not good enough for international cricket (much like Kieron Pollard which goes to demonstrate the inadequacy of the standards of the IPL). Virat Kohli and Irfan Pathan deserve a run in the side (the latter's exclusion from both the Indian and India A teams is baffling to say the least).

My 20 (to pick 15 from) for the ODI World Cup would be -
Batsmen - Tendulkar, Sehwag, Gambhir, Raina, Rohit, Kohli, Pujara, Badrinath
Wicketkeepers - Dhoni, Karthik
Bowlers - Zaheer, Nehra, Praveen, Vinay, Harbhajan, Mishra, Ojha
All-rounders - Irfan, Yusuf, Nayar

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