Who will take responsibility of India's loss against South Africa?

India went through a very embarrassing and well expected defeat in the first test against India, at Nagpur. The Indian batting line-up, even in two innings, was not able to get par the South African first innings score of 568. Even after Sehwag and Tendulkar scoring a century each in two of the innings, why was the Indian team not able to do good? Aren't the Indian batsmen not capable of facing a quite good pace attack like that of South Africa?




It seemed to be a toss from the team selection committee. Who other than them are responsible for keeping out the batsmen who are in good form and picking up a set of fresh and inexperienced people to face a good pace attack like South Africa? There were more experienced batsmen like Virat Kohli, Dinesh Karthik, Suresh Raina etc., who were quite impressive with their bats in the recent past. The selectors seems to have forgotten all these names. If it was move towards getting exposure to talents, it could have been in their last match against Bangladesh. The selectors seemed to have just picked up some names from a huge list. Anyhow, they might be repenting about their action, and it has reflected in their decision to call back Raina, Karthik and Sreesanth.

The Indian team's performance seemed to be drastic all through the match. Together with some perfect professionalism from South African team, the whole Indian team was out performed, that's what a normal cricket fan might feel. Steyn had his forth 10 wicket haul in a test match. He and Harris scalped 3 wickets each in the Indian team's second innings. The only exception was Sachin's century, which also went in vain, as far as the team is considered. It was the master batsman's 91st international century.

The reasons for the defeat, after a quick analysis, could be averaged out to be the imbalance maintained in the team selection. Let's pray that the glorious Indian cricket team selectors, maintain a least sense by thinking, while making such crucial decisions.