It is sad to see a bunch of supremely talented cricketers bow out so meekly to a clearly weaker bunch of contemporaries, the story of yesterdays DD vs DC match. DD being the better lot (my personal opinion explaining which would entail a whole post in itself) here, comprising of Sehwag ,Dilshan,Warner,Gambhir,Collingwood which I believe is evidently the second strongest batting line up in the IPL after royal challengers(KP ,Kallis,Taylor,white,uthappa,dravid) and a bowling attack that is much better than DC, should have clinched the match with a paltry 145 to chase but failed miserably.
What clearly lacked, was the discipline in batting and if we dig deeper the root cause was the flawed team selection. Discipline is a word which one usually does not associate with Mr sehwag,dilshan and warner, which in turn also makes them uncanny match winners but when these three gentlemen make your opening three the risk you are subjecting yourself to is way too high. These three have the same style of play, and on a given day all three can obliterate the opposition, but their style of play also makes them very vulnerable to early dismissals too. What this does is that it increases the probability of both exceptional/disastrous starts thus subjecting the team to the two extremes of the performance spectrum. This season’s DD team failure was a perfect example of the importance of a balanced team. You can have at max one or two Sehwag’s in a team and a gamut of batsmen with different style’s of play to balance the team.
In a nutshell, the Delhi team took a risk too many by playing all three together (even after seeing the potential consequences in the previous two matches) and with them in the worst of forms, what was feared actually happened, thus leading to the downfall of one of the mammoths of the IPL.
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