HAHAHAHAHAHA.....excuse me laughing friends, but i had this premonition (i know it's an inauspicious one tara ke garne) since yesterday that this was coming. i mean, we all know our limitations, don' t we? we know how we bat and that too under pressure phew!. it's a different ball game altogether if you ask me. even good world-class teams choke under pressure (South Africa, India to name few) and we are still a relatively younger (inexperienced) team than many in international podium.

one thing though, and this was on my mind since the moment i saw the tie sheet for this tournament: since these are all qualifying matches and we have only handful of teams, it would have been fairer for the teams consistently playing well if there was just the round robin instead of the knock-out (semis). i mean when just the top two are going to be qualified in the next round, the semis automatically become painfully and humongously important (in fact like the final) and the actual final just formality. that's kinda ridiculous. i wished if they had super 4 (round robin or sth) where everyone plays with every other team and the top 2 are qualified.

now look at nepal. it's a classic example of the discrepancy in the format of this tournament. nepal were unbeaten until yesterday and with a long busy schedule where they had to play a match every day, apart from playing well, consistency in winning depended on several other factors like physical and mental wear and tear. and against those odds we were performing well (in fact winning them all fairly easily) when even a loss or two wouldn't have been that much detrimental, but now when we were placed in the all-important knock out, we failed to perform and the result --- we're OUT, not only out from this tournament but all hopes we harbored for playing in the 2011 WC are shattered.

And look at afghanistan's stats (look at their individual performances in the tournament), it clearly shows that they are inferior to nepal, but having played better than nepal in the one match which happens to be the darn semi, they're in.

how good it is for the ICC world cup itself? they want a  team which play consistently well or someone which has high peaks and troughs in its performance curve? what's the reason of all these qualifiers in the first place when better teams can still end up not getting qualified???

i am by no means defending ourselves for today's performance though. neither i am whining. just expressed what i thought about this tournament.

whatever it is, there's no denying that we sucked big time today. while i understand the pressure of the knock out stage and all, it was just the damn afghanistan  and a goddamn division 5 tournament for heaven's sake losers!!!