The chasm between India and Champions League

By John Cheeran
Indian skipper Rahul Dravid can now rationalise his team's ouster from the Champions Trophy. After all, India lost only to the eventual championship finalists in their group matches.
Defending champions West Indies and world champions Australia have taken their rightful places in the Champions Trophy final to be played in Mumbai on Sunday.
Dravid can now say they had a tougher group and they came so close to defeat West Indies in Jaipur. There is no denying the fact that India lost to better teams on the given day.
I wish Indian cricketers had time (apart from shooting for commercials) to watch both semifinals of the Champions Trophy. Those two matches should have been essential lessons for these highly over-rated cricketers.
The way New Zealand fought back against Australia after teetering on the brink (35 for six) to stay alive in the tournament should make every Indian cricketer ask one question. Are we earning our pay packets by the sweat of our brow?
How often our players have thrown in the towel too early.
Australia boasts of top-notch fast bowling attack and all credit goes to Glenn McGrath for masterminding the Kiwi collapse. What a great bowler McGrath is. He is a fierce competitor, needling the opposition if it comes to that, and executing team's game plan without fuss.
He is ready to open the bowling whenever captain feels so, and does not mind the blow to his ego when Ricky Ponting holds him back.
How many Indian fast bowlers will bowl his quota of 10 overs on the trot like the way McGrath did to strangle the Kiwis? And McGrath is making his comeback after a long layoff. He is yet to hit the high note and England will have a tough time during the Ashes battle.
India just don't have a quality bowler such McGrath who can impose his will on the batsmen without letting the pressure ease.
If you have any doubt ask world's best batsman Sachin Tendulkar, and he will one day tell the world how frustrating an experience was it to take on McGrath.
If McGrath represents the one end of the chasm between India and class, Chris Gayle symbolises the other end.
Gayle's explosive batting wiped an intransigent South Africa off the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur.
Gayle is flamboyant but he is consistent too. And look at the pathetic sequence of scores Virender Sehwag has come up with for the last two years. There is much in common between Gayle and Sehwag. Both openers began their Test and one day careers roughly at the same time. Sehwag enjoys a better record in Tests but Gayle's one-day average is much more impressive. Both these attacking batsmen have triple centuries in Tests to their credit.
And both India and West Indies depend heavily on these two for their one-day triumphs. West Indies owe their remarkable ride in this edition of Champions Trophy to the coruscating batting from their Jamaican opener.
West Indians are the poor men of cricket world.
Cricket unite the disparate Caribbean nations and after what seemed to be an unending struggle they are turning the corner and reclaiming their lost legacy.
In Indian cricket we have plenty of maharajahs and yuvarajahs.
But they are without a kingdom; their only trophies are tennis elbows and pulled hamstrings, and are content to enjoy the privypurses that overflow from the Indian board's cash-laden lockers.