A tournament is always the best tailor-made opportunity for top players in a side to peak and perform throughout the fixture in a sport where it's highly improbable to succeed everyday. So, if those top players manage to actually perform well together in a tournament, they're more than likely to walk away as champions. They MUST BE the ones who drive team cohesion in a championship team.
Just have a look at what our top batters did once we take away the one big score:
Quote:
1. SoSa: Averaged 8.0 per match.
2. LKD: Averaged 12.3 per match.
3. Bijauy: Averaged 26.7 per match.
4. Ratul: Averaged 5.0 per match.
5. AA: Averaged 14.7 per match.
|
I don't think any team deserves a championship unless each of the top 5 average at least 35 per match in a tournament, not including his big 50 or 100. We have never been close to such a standard.
Even Bijauy fell 10 runs short of that standard while LKD and AA reached "double figures". SoSa or Ratul's failure is abysmal. Sure, SoSa showed up in the QF but would he have in the SF or the Final? The traditional scoring pattern doesn't suggest so.
Sad that we didn't see much of Saikat and had to depend on a gutless/clueless/talentless street cricketer like Salman in the QF.
Our top batters failed miserably in this tournament as a cohesive unit, ESPECIALLY in the knock-out stage. So we find ourselves back in familiar territory of sissies playing for pitiful places in a weird celebration of mediocrity.