Looking beyond Tendulkar to the 2015 World Cup

India’s victorious 2011 World Cup campaign was the culmination of a three-year plan that was set by then coach Gary Kirsten when he took over the side in 2008. In an editorial for the Hindu after India won the final, he wrote that “We set our goals as a team way back in October 2008. We wanted to become the number one ranked Test team in the world and win the World Cup”. Having concrete goals and a plan to achieve them gave the team both an objective and a means of measuring their performance. There could be no excuses.

It is one thing to groom a side for home conditions, where even players new to international cricket would have had experience playing in domestic cricket. It is quite another altogether to take untested players to Australia and expect them to cope with the pace and bounce under the intense pressure of a World Cup at the first time of asking.