Batting, bowling and fielding. India head coach Amol Muzumdar cited their failure in all three departments across the "entire tournament" as their reason for missing out on the semi-finals of the Women's T20 World Cup, following the six-wicket loss to Australia in their last league game.
India, in a must-win situation at Lord's on Sunday, posted 170 for 4 after choosing to bat, and Muzumdar called it a "par" score. Australia chased it down with six wickets and six balls to spare, smashing 63 runs off the last 30 balls they faced.
India took three wickets in the first 10 overs but slid quickly in the second half once Ellyse Perry and Ashleigh Gardner began finding boundaries regularly against the spinners. As compared to India's count of four overs in which they scored 10 or more runs, Australia had nine such overs, especially a hot streak of four in a row from the 15th to 18th overs, which brought their asking rate down from 10.33 to a mere 2.50.
"I think if I have to pinpoint on certain things in the entire tournament, I think we really need to think about our bowling and our fielding," Muzumdar said. "We also need to be a little aggressive with the bat, and we could have maybe [scored] 15-20 [more] runs as a cushion. But having said that, if you look at our bowling attack, it's been very inexperienced as far as international cricket is concerned. So I've said this before in the previous press conference, that give us 18 months and this attack will be a different one."
India hung on to all their catches against Australia which was a vast improvement after they had offered three lives to Marizanne Kapp, which had effectively cost them their game against South Africa and severely hurt their qualification chances. By the end of the league stage, India had put down 10 catches, the third-most in the tournament behind the 12 each dropped by England and New Zealand.
India's pace attack, meanwhile, never looked settled as they kept changing their combinations. They never played the same attack for two games in a row, giving three matches each to Nandani Sharma and Kranti Gaud and two each to Renuka Singh and Arundhati Reddy. Nandani fared the best among the seamers with her three wickets and economy rate of 8.69, but didn't play against Australia, while Reddy and Gaud went wicketless through the tournament.
Overall, India conceded 7.43 an over across the tournament, a worse economy rate than any of the four teams that made the semi-finals: Australia (6.21), South Africa (6.93), England (7.23) and West Indies (7.36).
India's batting, too, never fired on all cylinders. They lost middle-order wickets in clusters in each of their first four games, and when the time came for the final punch against Australia, they couldn't take off after a cautious opening stand of 66 in 9.1 overs. It was only because of Harmanpreet Kaur's sizzling 27-ball 56 that India posted a challenging total, scoring 36 runs in their last two overs. Could they have attacked more from the start to push for a bigger total?
"Yes, we could have had," Mumzumdar said. "I mean, every time you lose a game, you would want 10-15 runs more in the pocket, but I guess that wasn't the case. Of course, the powerplay didn't really go our way. It could have gone maybe 10-15 runs more at that time. Maybe that could have been the difference.
"But having said that, we hadn't lost any wicket then, so we were in total control of things. But as I said, I think Australia chased it down really well. They were also three wickets down [at the halfway mark], mind you."
One spot that India also looked unsure with was the one that belonged to Yastika Bhatia, who mostly batted at No. 3, which pushed the more experienced Jemimah Rodrigues down to No. 5. India chose not to bat Bhatia on Sunday and promoted Deepti Sharma in the last over, a sign that Bhatia was not at her best, but the toss-up at the start of the World Cup between Bhatia and Bharti Fulmali for the No. 5 spot unsettled their line-up. Bhatia finished her World Cup with 41 runs from three innings at an average of 13.66.
With neither the batting line-up settled and firing, nor a steady pace battery that could rally around a spin attack that combined for 29 of the 34 wickets they took, it's no surprise that India didn't eventually make the final four.