India Versus Bangladesh, Queen's Park Oval, Port of Spain, Trinidad, March 17.
Before the game, we called it the 'luck of the draw' -- what, after all, could be more calculated to help the team ease into top gear than a lung-opener against everyone's favourite whipping boy, Bangladesh?
The gods listened, and they laughed mightily at the hubris. On a juicy pitch conducive to swing and seam, captain Rahul Dravid won the toss and surprisingly opted to bat first, in one stroke overestimating the strength of his batting and underestimating the potency of the opposition's bowling.
Predictably, the wheels came off the bandwagon.
Aided by a string of rash strokes from India's finest, who seemed to view the game as a foregone conclusion, Mashrafe Mortaza led a bowling lineup that epitomised 'team effort': Syed Rasel's control was the perfect foil to Mortaza's prodigious swing and seam; Abdur Razzaq and Mohammad Rafique spun a mesmerising web, the fielders performed prodigies on the ground and in the air, and Team India collapsed in a stunned heap.
Then Bangladesh came out to chase 192 -- and the second half of the game reversed the first.
The batting, led by three teenagers with an average age of 18 and a combined match experience of 35, took the bowling by the scruff. Tamim Iqbal, playing his 5th one day international, led with a rapacious 51 off 53 balls, thrilling the crowd with the sort of buccaneering batting never seen since Sanath Jayasuriya in his 1996 prime. Saqibul Hasan and Mushfiqur Rahim clinically applied the coup de grace, while India's bowlers grew increasingly flustered and its fielders spilt chances like so much milk.
The biggest upset of the Cup, the headlines screamed the next day -- only, it wasn't. What it was, was the sort of disaster that happens to teams approaching a major tournament with its mind on other things.
Image: Bangladesh's Mushfiqur Rahim celebrates victory as Munaf Patel looks on. Photograph: Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images
Also read: 'We shouldn't have played West Indies, Sri Lanka'
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