Tuesday, May 20, 2008

A post-mortem: Deccan Chargers

This blog is dying. It's been for a while now. A lot of things have contributed to it's downfall.My negligence, lack of time (really), other interests taking over writing but I do want to keep it alive for as long as I can. So in a small initiative I think from now on I'll keep coming back once every week to put something on. I should've done it long back but better late than never.(We cant do without cliches can we?)

So to start off with, for all Deccan Chargers fans here's an appeal to not lose heart and keep our hopes high. We will come back next year and irrespective of whatever we do, we will do better than this year. However, a quick post mortem of what went wrong.

1.Laxman's captaincy: Should we've won our first game against Royals we would have been a different team today. Laxman should've given that over to Sanjay Bangar. That game took the morale of the Royals to a new high and that of the Deccan's to a new low.

2.Erratic Gibbs: He just failed to fire.

3.Afridi the dog, devil and angel: He bowled well and kept pegging the run-rate and taking crucial wickets yet didn't contribute a dime with the bat. If he'd scored even 30 runs more over these dismal ten games, DC would've been a contender for the semis. He failed everytime he was expected to deliver down the order.

4.Local talent not firing: Pragyan Ojha and lately Venu were the only guys who stood their ground. Vijay, Krishna, Ravi Teja even Sanjay Bangar- none of them were consistent.

5.Vaas and Zoysa: Hate them. Vaas came off a series where he was smacked for a six on his last ball and he continued that form and I doubt if Zoysa ever was in any form except his own uniform.

6. Tepid Franchise Owners: We've heard every franchise owner stand up for or (in one case, uptil now) against their team's captain's or strategies. Only one owner has detached himself from the whole proceeding. Not to say making sweeping statements would've made a world of difference but hey someone please own up this team!

Depressing, I tell you...