Gavaskar’s verdict on where India lost the 2019 World Cup

It has been over a year since England won the 2019 World Cup in dramatic fashion on their home soil. India, one of the favourites in the run-up to the tournament crashed out in the semi-finals against the other finalists, New Zealand. Much postmortem has been performed on what might have been, but the debate still rumbles on.

Sunil Gavaskar, the legendary Indian cricketer, has now given his two cents on the matter. “What we need to look at is to have somebody at 4, 5 and 6 who are very good batsmen, who would otherwise bat at the top but because 1, 2 and 3 are occupied they are batting in the middle-order. We made a mistake by not having a proper No. 4 at the 2019 World Cup. If we had had a proper No. 4 for the World Cup then it might have been a completely different story,” Gavaskar told India Today. 

There was much deliberation in the lead up to the 2019 world cup about who should get the nod for the infamous No.4 position with the selectors playing chop and change in an attempt to find the best option. However, the move seemed to have backfired as India failed to find a player who could nail down the spot for the mega tournament. Gavaskar echoed the concerns saying, “India’s top-3 batting lineup is such a fabulous batting lineup that often it has happened that numbers 4 and 5 at the initial stages of the World Cups haven’t got the opportunity to play long innings, to get their eye in. Suddenly when your top-3 are dismissed cheaply, and that can happen in the odd match, unfortunately for India, it has happened in a knockout game and that is where number 4, 5 and 6 haven’t been able to cope with the loss of your earlier prolific batsmen.”

Incidentally, India’s top 3 of Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul and captain Virat Kohli who had been the backbone of the Indian batting in the tournament were all dismissed with only 5 runs on the board against New Zealand in the semi-final, leaving a daunting task ahead for the rest of the batting line-up. India crashed out losing to New Zealand by 18 runs.
 

[Hindustan times inputs]