Former Indian opening batter Sadagoppan Ramesh didn’t mince his words as he tore into the management after the side led by Shreyas Iyer lost the opening T20I against Ireland by 34 runs on Friday. The visitors failed to chase down the target of 183 after being bundled out for 148. To make matters worse, India failed to bat out the full quota of twenty overs, and Ireland tasted its first-ever victory over India across any format. Ramesh put down India’s loss to overconfidence and to treating the Ireland series as a “picnic.”
No batter apart from Abhishek Sharma failed to leave a mark in the series opener, and India’s tally would have looked all the more abysmal had the left-hander not scored a half-century off 19 balls. Even skipper Shreyas failed to get going, lasting just seven balls in the middle.
Ramesh said that Ireland should be lauded for doing homework and pushing the boundaries back to test the Indian batters. The former India player said that Ireland taught India a lesson, and the visitors should now take it as a warning.
“Ireland deserves praise for using the bigger boundaries and testing the Indian batters out with the short delivery. It was clear that India played the match casually. They thought the Ireland series was a picnic tour, they would win easily, and they were serious only about the England series. But Ireland taught India a lesson by saying this is no picnic spot,” Ramesh said on his YouTube channel.
“The Ireland series was not even originally scheduled. It was like a pickle to the main course, which was England. But India embarrassingly couldn’t handle the spice of the pickle, which is Ireland. Irrespective of what excuses can be cooked up for this, it’s a shocking and terrible defeat for Team India. Overconfidence is never healthy, and it’s because of that that India’s story was over last night. India must be confident but not overconfident,” he added.
‘Shocker’
Ramesh also added that it was unacceptable to see India go down without a fight against Ireland, saying the defeat is all the more intolerable considering the Men in Blue won the T20 World Cup some months back.
He also highlighted how India were poor in the fielding department and how dropped catches allowed Ireland to score more than 180 runs on the board.
“Yes, even an elephant occasionally slips up. But how can it happen against Ireland? This is a shocker, especially for a team whose last T20 match was the final of a World Cup. After a month of T20 cricket in the World Cup, all the Indian players played another 3 months of IPL. To play 4 months of continuous T20 cricket and then lose to Ireland is unexplainable,” said Ramesh.
“India played shockingly poor cricket. They’ve been dropping catches from the T20 World Cup to the IPL to yesterday. They seem to always drop high catches. In the IPL, you can just bat or bowl and hide your fielding because of the Impact Player option. But in international cricket, you have to be a good fielder to be in the 11. Many players escaped in the IPL because of the Impact Player rule by just batting.”
