Now is the time, India

The World Cup couldn’t have come at a better time for both the Indian team and it’s supporters.

The simple reason being that it gives the country an alternate and welcome obsession at a time when some of the country’s politicians have been hogging the headlines for all the wrong reasons: scams, controversies and otherwise. India go into this tournament as favourites as it savours the “home conditions” and the opportunity to play in front of an expectant full-house.

Its campaign began on a rather satisfactory note on Sunday with the warm-up win against Australia. Important because India have traditionally been slow starters, gathering pace as the tournament tended to wear on. India’s batting has been its strength for a while.

A batting order filled with class, strength, subtlety and resilience with the only question mark being its form. Gautam Gambhir, Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag haven’t exactly played much of the one-day cricket India has off late and their form is critical to India’s fortunes. The middle-order is in a flux by itself with big question marks over Yuvraj Singh and Suresh Raina’s form and even the captain has been going through a barren patch in the past six months.

But these, of course, are  question marks and a good knock will rubbish them all as the tournament begins.

The bowling line-up, led by Zaheer Khan, has done reasonably well given the good balance of attack and defense. Sreesanth’s inclusion, as many Indian fans would hope, gives this attack a different aggressive look and hopefully, given that cricket has more or less tended to drift towards being a squad game, some of these back-up bowlers might well be called upon.

Apart from the World Cup being a stop in his quest for excellence journey, Sachin Tendulkar’s farewell has emerged as the theme of this team’s campaign. Some newspapers in India have focused their campaigns on Tendulkar. For a man whose heroics are well documented and someone who has never fallen short of raising his game on the biggest stage, a World Cup trophy would go a long way in capping what is at best one of sport’s monumental careers.

Unlike the last five World Cups he’s featured in, this time around, he’s part of a team that not just wants to win the Cup, but believes it can too. Should India make the final, Tendulkar would feature at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, his home ground, back-yard and all that.

India have it in them to make it to the semi-final, and that by popular consensus should be considered a “good” World Cup, but given that this hungry team has, in the recent past, tended not to settle for mediocrity, nothing less than a victory in the final would suffice.

Venkat Ananth is a Mumbai-based cricket columnist

Published in The Express Tribune, February 15^th, 2011.