Home disadvantage for Dhoni's boys

Winning the Twenty20 World Cup was great, but did the team have to do that victory parade in Mumbai?

By acquiescing to being paraded on an open-top bus, the Indian cricket team that won the Twenty20 World Cup has undone much of its good work. To be sure, it did much good work in South Africa.

It won the inaugural World Cup in a format that is surely the future of the game. (By the time the next Fifty50 world cup comes round, Australia may well be referred to as the winner of "the other World Cup".)

In the process, it won four matches on the trot, beat the three best teams in the tournament (South Africa, Australia and Pakistan) in succession, and played arguably the best semi-final and final in a tournament of this scale. It also answered, to our great relief, the question that had begun to rankle: who after the Big Three?

Unlike the Indian teams of the 1980s and 1990s, this one refused to accept defeat and showed spunk befitting its average age; Dhoni's rebuttal after the semi-final to Ravi Shastri, who had said Australia was the favourite, was only half in jest.

More importantly, this team has turned Umpire's Post's mother into a rabid cricket fanatic. Earlier, she would watch as if she was being forced to.

With hindsight, it is tempting to put some of it down to the "away advantage". For, the team turned regressive the moment it set foot on Mumbai soil.

This city was the most incorrect choice for a five-hour, 30-km Vijay Yatra, or whatever the breathless channels called it. The spectacle of politicians trying to hog the limelight was obnoxious.

In the players' defence, they did not organise it. However, they should have summoned the same spunk they showed on the field to say no to mindless jingoism and what may well have been a show of strength by BCCI to intimidate Subhash Chandra's breakaway league.

This is reminiscent of the Bharatiya Janata Party trying to cash in on India's success in Pakistan in 2004, only to lose the ensuing general elections.

The players perhaps do not realise it yet, but they have made themselves vulnerable to potential ridicule of the same gigantic proportions when their performance dips, which can be a possibility as close as the ODI series against Australia. If you accept one form of irrational exuberance, you cannot take the moral high ground when the other side of this coin, irrational hostility, surfaces.

One hopes that Dhoni and his boys have gathered enough equanimity to take in their stride stone-pelting at their houses, then burning of effigies and "" as seen four years ago, following the poor start to the World Cup in 2004 "" mock funeral processions.