AA Edit | Team India can still do it!

Team India may have taken an eternity to get home. In fact, so many days did Hurricane Beryl take to move west beyond the southeastern island of Barbados that the T20World Cup organisers could have held a best-of-three finals at the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown so that any lingering doubts about Team India being a worthy winner could have been made to disappear.

Having found a former national carrier willing to send a huge aircraft out to evacuate the victorious Indians, the team were jetted directly to New Delhi to meet the Prime Minister. But, before the Opposition, given today’s polarised world of Indian politics, can raise any objections, let it be said that the triumph in the 1983 World Cup, a revolutionary event that turned the cricket world upside down, felt more complete when the then PM Mrs Indira Gandhi said to the team, famously, “India can do it.”

Having driven India’s enthusiastic cricket fans numbering way over one billion to the point of vexation in a decade of non-performance in the most crucial of knockout games, Team India proved they could play to capacity and win something as major as the T20 World Cup once again. Which is why whatever was laid out for Rohit Sharma’s team of achievers by way of a grand welcome as they brought home the cup was something that they so thoroughly deserved.

A ticker tape welcome was once given to the first achievers in international cricket of Ajit Wadekar’s team who won Test series both in the Caribbean and in England in 1971 and lit up the expectations of an Indian public who progressively became crazy over the game. When Kapil’s Devils beat the champions in ’83, it became an explosive moment that changed Indian cricket forever.

As MS Dhoni’s men won the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007 they helped transform the sport so much that it soon became an Indian game that is spreading around the globe much more now. And what Rohit Sharma and Rahul Dravid’s men have achieved now is to prove that “India can still do it”, win Cup finals to justify the talent, the money, the attention and the adulation that Indian cricketers receive from their adoring fans.

It appears now that the sky’s the limit for Team India, currently ranked No. 1 in all three formats, because Rohit’s men broke the shackles of the inhibitions, the anxieties and the fears that may have seen them stumble at the last hurdle for too long. They are truly champions of cricket now.