Ten out of ten on Twenty20

I was surprised by the performace that the Indian team put up in the Twenty20. With no big guns and a new and inexperienced captain, the team set off on a voyage to perform a format they never knew of. Emerging victorious they explored themselves to be the greatest find in the history of Indian cricket for quite some time.

Gone are the big guns on whom the other water pistols and tpy guns depended. This is a team with a good armory to defend attacks and enough ammo to blast the best of their enemy camps.

This just makes me wonder what had gone wrong all these days in Indian cricket. We had great players Sachin, Sourav, Dravid, Kumble etc but never really won anything apart from hypes and mammoth individual records.

Words from Aussie opener Hayden that the Indian batsmen played for individual records filled us with dislike for the sayer rather than the dislike of the fact. We did not wake up let alone see the point.

Poor fielding, bad running between wickets and individual records and place in the field kept pulling the team down when we relished the batting records of individuals.

Now its a different story. No big gun fired today but all small guns turned big. No individual record was created but a team record was. Even if an individual record was created it was a mere side product of the team's cause.

India for once stood strong amidst impediments, fighting adversaries and words with hits, demoralising the demolishers, denying oxygen to the chokers, keeping jinxes alive by nerve wrecking the ones with nerve.

We out thought, out fought and out performed every other team to lift the cup. We may never win again with the team spiralling back to the spoils of Indian cricket. But the fact remains that this is a big jem by the little jems.