Lot and much more has been said about sachin in this column. Nobody can deny the ability of sachin as a team player, whether he is in form or not in form u can not put the single mark on his attitude. even i cant singled out any player in this generation (i.e. after the world cup 96) whose commitment is less for his team. every player has performs according to his skills. we can say that tendulkar is not on that level on which he was used to be, but it given an another oppurtunity to India. Now Tendulkar is playing in middle order and it is more dangerous to the opposition. Look in this way, earlier when tendulkar was opening main target of the opposition was to getting off the tendulkar as early as possible and to make the planning in smooth after that. but now when he will be playing either at 3 or 4 it is not very easy for opposition to get rid of him quickly. In some cases the damage has been already done at the top before tendulkar either by sehwag or uthhapa. so now opposition has first to remove them and then they have to concentrate on removing tendulkar. This is not so easy job. they have to work hard in compare to prior one when tendulkar was opening. You can judge my comments on this way, Gayle is best batsman of WI, remove him quickly, see the difference, remove gilchrist quickly, see the difference, remove smith (SA) quickly, see the difference, remove jayasurya quickly, see the difference. All of them are the best batsman of thier countries in terms of explosive power. If u want to win the matches u have to get rid off them quickly, otherwise they will score in any situation. Same rules is also apllid on sachin. he is also explosive, not so much what was before but still his strike rate is lying between 80 to 90, which is not bad by any means and dropping him in the batting order he can destroyed better to prove a personal point to team management, that he is still lion and champion. Team management has laso taken very wise and bold move to drop him in the batting order and to maximise his abilities in much better way. My final eleven is hyping only on the fact that what confidence team management is carrying in the bowling abilities of pathan. If they are ok with pathan, then my eleven or may be team india eleven as per thier batting order is as follows: ganguly, sehwag, sachin, yuvraj, dravid, dhoni, pathan, harbhajan, agarkar, zaheer, munaf. in some cases pathan can come at no. 3, but that is too hypothetatical to me. And if they are not going with pathan then first eleven should be as follows: ganguly, utthappa, sehwag, sachin, dravid, yuvraj, dhoni, harbhajan, agarkar, zaheer, munaf. in both cases kartik would be 12th man. 2nd team is looking very sound but in this one our bowling options are limited. four main bowlers have to perform consistenly and thats make a problem, if any bowler is out of colour on a given day india may loose on that account. Thats why pathan gives the flexibility to bowling department. pathan and sehwag form is very criticla to team india, if they can perform around 70 to 80% of thier potential then i am seeing india in last four and from there on it is any body game. at last not forget apart sehwag and pathan 2 out of other top 5 have to be cliked for cover of loss of other guys. We can make it to the semis. just keep faith. we need performance from 2 batters (out of 7) and yeah 1% luck for 99% efforts. semifinal should be between aus/sa/ind and 4th one either sl or nz, eng, wi and pak has weak chances due to lack of depth in thier bowling. keep it up guys and best wishes for india. cheers. Vivek Jain, viv_jain@rediffmail.com
