MS Dhoni and the useless one shots I like to come up with

Perfidious Albion

Will anybody ever be talking about how ridiculous the 2011 tour of england was? We landed there as world champions, our team packed with once in a generation players and then everything went downhill from there. Like nine players got injured,, ffs the squad is usually of fifteen and nine of them got injured like it is so sad that it is comical. If I was MS Dhoni, I would be hysterical. Rohit dislocated his finger. Sachin played with a toe injury and ended up getting ruled out of the ODI series. Zak got injured first day of the first match. Yuvraj came back and got injured in the second test. Bhajji too, second test injury. Sehwag shoulder injury. Ishant ankle injury. Gambhir concussion. Praveen Kumar ankle injury. Munaf Patel, one of the most underrated keys to winning the cup got a career ending injury. There was this interview on cricinfo, some postmatch thing where the journalist found it ridiculous to face as quoted "the proud man who had lost the last ten matches he had played,". Because really what was there to say even, the main pace attack gone, most of their main batsmen gone, Virat was having to bowl so much in that series and he picked up a minor injury too. Any other man would have gone crazy, all it did to Mahi was make him a bit cynical and too used to disasters. In a way he was almost amused, which I guess is the closest to hysterical he can get. India needs to hire him as their resource manager, because somehow with next to nothing he managed to put up a fight. He ended up as the player of the series for ODIs, Rahul was player of the series for the tests, Virat was doing everything he could and more. If there were perhaps even one less injury (mainly Zak, come on he was the backbone of pace), we could have won something but no we fall like a pack of dominoes XD. A literal fucking jinx that tour.

This one shot is well, from that jinx of a tour. Here's to one of my fav duos carrying the Indian team almost single handedly in that tour. The title Perfidious Albion is an old nickname of England. England used to be called Albion- derived from latin word Albus meaning White. Perfidious Albion used to be used by critics to describe England's duplicity or treachery. 

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Rahul loved England. He may have a lot of thoughts on its inhabitants, not all of them friendly, but there was no doubt about the charm of the country itself.

- "Country and citizens are intrinsically linked yeah, but I don't know- the country is not its people you know? That's like saying the parents are the same as their kids. We get some things from our parents but they were different people and we are different people. Country and people have the same relation to me,"-

Mahi had once said those words to him on a late slow night, sometime after the disaster of 2007 CWC. They used to do that a lot during his own captaincy run, sit on the terrace and just talk. Those were his loneliest years but he could never forget those nights, sharing cups after cups of tea because that was one thing they both liked. Mahi had made the silence of his friends so much more bearable just by being his strange, introspective, childish self. He hadn't been captain back then, just Jammy's kid. A strange kid with a lot of profound thoughts that seemed to come out of nowhere but his nonetheless. Those words had helped him get over the bitterness of the public reaction to their ouster. Rahul wasn't like Sourav, he couldn't use people's hate to fuel himself on. He wasn't Mahi either, who had turned entirely scornful of media. He wasn't Sachin, who was battlehardened, worshipped as much as hated. He was just Rahul, just a normal guy who did get hurt when words pierced through his defences. He was just some guy, so yeah, despite being familiar with the fickleness of public opinion he had still felt betrayed. He had also felt a bit guilty for liking England so much, until the distinction between the country and its people became real to him. He didn't feel so guilty now. He loved England, with its cloudy weather, its theaters, its literature and its little posh gardens. But even he had to admit, England undoubtedly was still somehow cursing them Indians with misfortune some sixty years after Independence.