Despite a good start to the tournament, India's Super Eights stage has gone from bad to worse. First there was the collapse to Australia which left the Indians requiring two wins from their next two games to stay in the competition. In the first of those two games, against the West Indies in Barbados, they ran into the blade of Chris Gayle and some hostile, if inaccurate, bowling from Kemar Roach, Darren Sammy and Jerome Taylor. It all combined to give the home team a win by 14 runs, and leave India with a complicated series of results necessary for them to remain in the Caribbean.
Winning the toss, Mahendra Singh Dhoni opened the bowling with Harbhajan Singh, who got proceedings off to a tidy start. The next over also yielded only two runs, but after missing out in his game against Sri Lanka, Chris Gayle was in no mood for a repeat. Following a powerful sweep off Harbhajan for six, the runs started flowing - for Gayle, at least. Shivnarine Chanderpaul had a tougher time of it, hitting only two boundaries in his 29-ball 23. Dhoni ran into the same problem he did in the Australia game, that none of his other bowlers were able to replicate the control of Harbhajan Singh, who finished with 4-0-16-0. As the runs came, the Indians started wilting under the pressure to keep the West Indies to a manageable total: Gayle skied Ashish Nehra when he was on 47, and Dhoni and Yusuf Pathan both collided with each other in an attempt to take the catch. All Nehra could do was grimace.
The nightmare of Ravindra Jadeja contined: brutalized by the Australian batsmen in his last game, his first over went for 16, with Gayle and Darren Sammy both striking sixes. Sammy and Kieron Pollard were both dismissed going for their shots, but the West Indies had enough of a formidable total on the board not to mind. Like Mahela Jayawardene before him, Chris Gayle went into the final over of the innings with a century at his fingertips - but unlike Jayawardene, Gayle was run out on 98, trying to retain the strike for the last two balls. Disappointed as though he and the crowd were, the Windies finished on 169/6, leaving India a stiff challenge if they were to continue in the tournament.
Murali Vijay fell after a slow start. After striking three fours, Gautam Ghambir had to go as well, sent back by a scorching delivery off Kemar Roach that Ghambir could probably have smelled as it went past him. 28/2 after five overs, and the required run rate was already 9.46. Pollard had Rohit Sharma caught behind, but the batsman didn't go quietly, insisting that the ball had come off his forearm, and went so far as to urge umpire Billy Bowden to refer the decision to the third umpire. Nothing doing, and India found themselves at 42/3, needing 10.66 an over. Yuvraj Singh and Suresh Raina threatened a comeback, until Gayle removed Raina for 32, and Singh fell the next over - 82/5, with more than two a ball required. Dhoni and Yusuf Pathan resisted, until Pathan was caught off a Jerome Taylor bouncer, and Dhoni was brilliantly run out by Dwayne Bravo for 29, the highest score of the innings. Kemar Roach ended up bowling an 11-ball penultimate over, with four wides and one no-ball, but India were out of chances by that point.
India now face the reality that if they do not beat Sri Lanka in their next game, they are out of the tournament. The situation is bad enough that even if they do beat the Sri Lankans, they have to do it by a margin sufficiently large enough to add health to their net run rate, and have to hope that Australia beat the West Indies. For the West Indies, their big loss to Sri Lanka means that losing to Australia will knock them out of the tournament, and defeating Australia will have to be done by a margin large enough to compensate for their low net run rate. It all makes for a critical- if confusing - day on Tuesday for all teams.