It was April Fool’s Day in 2011. Pulling a fast one on someone was too tempting, too obvious. The team was capable of doing it all the time even on a non-April Fool’s day.
Twelve years ago, the ambient noise around the final had reached the corridors of The Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai but we were insulated by the sanity and bonhomie of our group. We were having a very easy evening. Munaf stuck to his tandoori chicken and biryani and I trusted my usual dal makhni, methi aloo and chilled boondi raita as we settled for our dinner that night. We were plain excited. We cracked jokes, saw a bit of news on TV, and treated ourselves to a nice sleep.
When we stepped onto the Wankhede Stadium on April 2, it was a carnival outside and a cave of meditation inside the dressing room. It was just another game for us: that was the reigning mindset.
Thanks to coach Gary Kirsten and skipper M.S. Dhoni, the team was breezing, riding the crest of pressure with fun, frolic and enthusiasm. We were on a high after beating Australia in the quarterfinals and that feeling I allowed myself to breed from Day 1 — that if we can beat Australia then we can beat any team.
I am not at all underestimating the Pakistan and Sri Lanka of 2011; I am only underlining the fact that when you beat teams like Australia there is a feeling of invincibility. And we felt that in Ahmedabad back then after beating the reigning champions of the time.
Ahmedabad awaits an entirely different Indian team now. This one is like a bloodhound, unconquered and restless. They seem to be on auto mode by doing simple things. The chilled-out, guy-next-door leadership of Rohit Sharma is the foremost factor for me.
Still, one can only write off Australia at the cost of one's own peril: they have got their winning mojo back. Their biggest strength is their very tall fast bowlers, capable of extracting bounce out of a bed of ashes. The hunch is that it's going to be a slow wicket in Ahmedabad, yet their bowling unit is capable of bowling a length that can be disturbing, laden with that extra bounce.
Australia’s turnaround, I feel, was pivoted on Adam Zampa’s bowling. It took a bit of time for Zampa to get a grip on these kinds of wickets; he realised that on these pitches your speed is crucial. So, he bowled quicker on turning tracks and slower through the air on the flat ones.
I feel that if only Australia had picked Nathon Lyon, he and Zampa along with the tall fast bowlers would have been a really hot bowling unit to handle. Glenn Maxwell, the part-time off-spinner, is not Lyon but is still very important for the Australian attack.
India will do well to see off Josh Hazlewood’s first spell. Besides his Glenn McGrath-like accuracy, he extracts similar bounce from a good length and has a really good bouncer.
For India, I would like to see their batting repeating their flair. It may be the final but they don’t need to change anything. A playback of the 2003 World Cup finals is not too distant to erase that. The Sourav Ganguly-led Indian team ended up facing the occasion rather than the opposition and India lost the match in the first 15 minutes ofthe game.
I’m sure Rahul Dravid must have gleaned enough mistakes from the 2003 match to make the boys not repeat them. Anyway, the current generation of cricketers raised and bred on arclight, hype and large crowds, courtesy the IPL, have grown immune to the enormity of the occasion.
In terms of team selection, the team management needs to be ruthless if they wish to outgrow the “winning combination” mindset. Else, stick to the “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” maxim.
Only Virat Kohli and Ravichandran Ashwin know what it took to hold a winning trophy of this magnitude. Rohit and Mohammed Shami have come so close to it now through their dazzling performances. As Munaf used to tell us in 2011: “Winning a World Cup is like creating a fixed deposit which can be benefited from for generations to come.”
I’m sure the players are conscious of that.
Gameplan/Dinesh Chopra Media