ICC World Twenty20: India's Stupor 10!

Indian batters fall like ninepins, lose first Super 10 match to NZ despite modest scoreline of 126

NAGPUR: India, the tournament's No 1 ranked team, lost their first Super 10 match to New Zealand and so miserably that cricket journalists had a writing paralysis!

This was the night Indian batters gave nine pins a complex, so fast they fell. In the biggest anti-climax of this year, India's much lionised willow wielders got axed for 79 while in some kind of self-induced stupor which no amount of post-mortem examinations will explain.

Dhoni put up a brave face later in the night, saying "This is a wake-up call" from where the fallen will rise. Being packed off to their second lowest score — 79 in 18.1 overs — the lowest being in 2008 — 74 against the Australians — India now stare an uphill task against Pakistan in Eden Garden where their record is not great either.

In Nagpur, meanwhile, a completely silenced 45,000-strong crowd mourned collectively as their favourite batters got out with every blink of the eyelash, or as a stone-faced Dhoni said, "In every alternate over."

At one point, the match looked in the danger of being won by the Kiwis in just 10 overs as Daniel Vettori lookalike Mitchell Santner showed up a 4-11-0-4 spin bowling figure, to be given Man of the Match.

After the tight cordon Dhoni's bowlers and fielders put around the Kiwis, restricting them to a very doable 126 run score in an intense duel "on a 140 wicket", a strange nether world paralysis gripped the batsmen who had a tough time standing up even for 10 overs. They fell at almost every breath as the Kiwi spinners emerged as the biggest turners of the game.

Individual Indian scores in this match are too dismal to go into with just three of 11 batsmen reaching slim double figures - Kohli 23, Dhoni 30 and Ashwin 10. Rest of them all, including the two openers Rohit (5) and Shikhar (1) both of whom walked in the very first over, fell in ones and twos and there were ducks lead by Ravindra Jadeja.

In the entire innings, the hosts hit just three boundaries and a six as opposed to Kiwis 8 and three sixes.

Dhoni's valiant fight soon gave way to frustration and by the time 17th over was bowled, he recklessly swung his bat in disgust at his team-mates' ungracious plummet and walked back head down, shoulders drooping into the Indian dressing room, wondering how he would rebuild from here on.

The growing vulnerability of the Indians in tackling turning tracks is baffling and something that Dhoni says, needs to be tackled urgently.

Like the rest of the stadium, he too, talked of the soft dismissals and the total lack of partnerships as the reasons for defeat. He admitted, the bowling was good but it was the poor performance of his batsmen that lost him the night and the match.

New Zealand, meanwhile, played beyond potential not just by fielding three spinners and resting the likes of Tim Southee but also because they read the pitch well, kept their wits with them and branded a new weapon in Santner who has well and truly taken over from their silent assassin Vettori.

From here on, India have put themselves in an unenviable situation, in the same do-or-die situation that they've often done to death in several big tournaments. One more loss and they are out. How Dhoni and Co. will tide over this mountain is as unfathomable as the way they lost their way in the middle.

Brief Scores 

New Zealand: 126/7 (Corey Anderson 34, Mitchell Santner 18; Jasprit Bumrah 1/15, Suresh raina 1/16) beat India: 79 (Mahendra Singh Dhoni 30, Virat Kohli 23; Mitchell Santner 4/11, Ish Sodhi 3/18) by 47 runs.

Source: The Pioneer 16 March, 2016