Before the India-England series was to start I had told my friend that it would be one of the toughest series for India. I was not proved wrong because India lost all the matches on this tour to England. It is an irony that India had to come back empty handed and one could easily say that it was India's most disastrous overseas tour.
There are many reasons why the Indian team fared so badly on this tour. One could start by blaming the board for planning such a hectic schedule before this important series. There was no need for the Indian team to play the matches in West Indies but the Indian board thought otherwise. They also did not include more warm up matches as a result the Indian team did not get the necessary match practice to adjust to the local conditions. Then you could blame the Indian players who preferred to play the cash rich IPL rather than focus on the upcoming series. Some of the seniors suffered injury during IPL matches as a result they never played the full series. In fact the list of injured players is so large on this tour that you could build up a team of injured players alone. Then you have to blame the senior batsmen in the team who performed badly during this tour. Selecting Rahul Dravid for the one day series showed the desperation of the Indian team in finding someone who would star in the English conditions. Lets not talk about the bowlers because I felt that after the injury to Zaheer Khan the Indian team did not have a bowler who could threaten the English team. This was evident in the Test matches when we were unable to polish off the English tail and even in the one day series where despite scoring good runs we lost the matches. We all could see that the Indian players are good on the sub continent pitches but their performance abroad is not that good.
When coach Duncan Fletcher took over the Indian team it was on a high, but after this performance on the England tour it has lost valuable position in both the Test rankings and the One day rankings. I have no doubt that we will beat England when they visit India but we have to plan for the tour of Australia. Looking at the current performance I have no doubt that the same fate awaits us when we tour Australia this winter. I can only hope that the injured players recover and find their form quickly. Also we need a potent fast bowling attack in Australia and not a medium military attack. It's time for the BCCI to wake up and plan for the future else we can only expect more such disastrous overseas tours.
