Team India are world beaters for sure but not what you were made to believe

The here-and-there glories and the dominance of BCCI built a perception—that we are the new leaders of international cricket. But believing is not enough.

India cricket captain Rohit Sharma after the team's loss to Australia in the 2023 World Cup final at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad | Photo: ICC

This was supposed to be a comparison article about why India’s 2023 World Cup ‘win’ is more authoritative, sweeter, and satisfying than the 2011 World Cup. Instead, it’s the 2003 heartbreak all over again. We couldn’t become the world champions for the third time in the tournament’s almost 50-year history. Never before did India deserve a World Cup more than it did this time. But it took only one day to end the Indian cricket team’s 42-day dream run, during which it defeated every team that stood against it. Ten clinical, classical, complete victories that should have culminated into only one kind of finale. What happened on Sunday wasn’t in the script.

And yet, 19 November did happen. Standing so close to shaking hands with the joyous moment from 12 years ago in Wankhede, the day leaped a further eight years back to embrace the painful Johannesburg chapter. Was it the pitch, the toss, the Kohli-Rahul partnership, the dew in the second innings, or just the great, strategically sound Australians’ tenacity that took all the glory away from India?

Most cricketing analysis is focussed on India’s brave showmen who didn’t turn up on the day; some would argue, based on the ten-year dry ICC trophy run, that Indians are the new ‘chokers’. The truth is that we have piled the past Aussie-West Indies’ supremacy burden on the Indian team and declared Indian cricket as having “arrived” even before that ‘arrival’ could ever really come.

Go beyond the perception 

The ‘arrival’ has come, but in parts—in Test cricket on Australian soil, in the emergence of a never-before pace quartet that global media raved about, in Virat Kohli’s defiance, in Rohit Sharma’s blitzkrieg against fast bowlers, in snatching victories from the jaws of defeat. All of that happened. What hasn’t happened is the perception created by these here-and-there glories as well as the BCCI’s dominance—that we are the new leaders of international cricket. Perhaps it flowed from the desire to extend the perceived global clout of a ‘political India’ onto the ‘cricketing India’. Everything, from BCCI’s near-control of international cricket to the creation of a team unimaginable a few decades ago, played its role. But the burden, and hurdle, are too big to be crossed by just believing in the perception.

So what’s the real picture of Indian cricket then? It’s bittersweet. Missed moments, painful losses, bursts of unbelievable success, and some dizzying heights of individual performances—it’s how Indian cricket has always been recognised. But the big difference lies in what separates the 20-year gap between the two World Cup final losses—2003 and 2023—which are replete with painful similarities. In the former, the journey was a surprise; in the latter, it was the result. This is where Indian cricket has arrived; not in some imagined wonderland where any Indian success should be conflated as era-defining or our own version of the ‘Aussie brand’. After all, the hard fact is this: a World Cup final encounter that was supposed to be India’s revenge of 2003 ended up being Australia’s revenge of 2011.

While the venue’s name change from 2011’s Sardar Patel Stadium to Narendra Modi Stadium captures the monumental shift for ‘political India’, change in ‘cricketing India’ is epitomised by the difference in this loss from that of 2003.

We never believed India stood a chance 20 years ago; on Sunday, the belief that we could win never left the game. That’s something to savour.

Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)