India vs Namibia Highlights, T20 World Cup 2021: India thrash Namibia in Kohli's last game as T20 skipper

Stephan Baard, Michael van Lingen, Craig Williams, Gerhard Erasmus (c), Zane Green (w), David Wiese, Jan Frylinck, JJ Smit, Jan Nicol Loftie-Eaton, Ruben Trumpelmann, Bernard Scholtz

KL Rahul, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli (c), Suryakumar Yadav, Rishabh Pant (w), Hardik Pandya, Ravindra Jadeja, Ravichandran Ashwin, Rahul Chahar, Mohammed Shami, Jasprit Bumrah

"The wicket is beautiful, nice and dry and compact, so the ball will go through beautifully. Not much of an advantage batting first or second. The only advantage batting second will be the dew, so it will be harder to hold the ball, but the wicket is beautiful to bat and bowl on." - Shane Watson

India skipper Virat Kohli wins the toss, opts to field first against Namibia in Dubai.

After the ODI World Cup and the World Test Championship, New Zealand once again officially ended India's disappointing T20 World Cup campaign, beating Afghanistan by 8 wickets on Sunday. But the next T20 World Cup, in Australia, is barely a year away. Preparations for that should begin in right earnest with the T20 series against New Zealand, which starts in Jaipur three days after the final of this World Cup. The forthcoming series presents India with the perfect opportunity to rest fatigued multi-format players and infuse some fresh blood.

Cricketing giants India exited the Twenty20 World Cup after New Zealand beat Afghanistan to book the second semi-final berth from Group 2 on Sunday. Virat Kohli's team came into the tournament as hot favourites but let their future depend on other teams after big losses to rivals Pakistan, who were the first team to make the final four, and then the Kiwis. India thrashed Afghanistan and Scotland but it was all too late and now they find themselves out of the tournament even before their final game against Namibia on Monday.

The perils of not waking up early in a tournament as unforgiving and unpredictable as a T20 World Cup finally took the expected toll on the Indian team on Sunday evening. On the eve of their last league game in Group Two against minnows Namibia, Virat Kohli & Co. bowed out of a campaign in which they never really belonged. The two losses to Pakistan and New Zealand -i n which they got outplayed - had already put India on the exit path. From there, it was more of a battle pitching hope against hope and it eventually all came crashing with New Zealand's eight-wicket win over Afghanistan.

It is still not clear whether Kohli will be seen as a one-format captain in Test matches but his performance in the last four ICC tournaments leave a lot to be desired. Now that he is approaching mid 30s and showing signs of playing a conservative game, one can only hope that with eleven months left for the next T20 World Cup, India would start with a fresh slate and fresher approach.

A combination of factors led to this debacle and if Kohli's poor captaincy and selection is one factor, the problems were certainly compounded by players like Hardik Pandya, who did not reveal the full extent of their fitness status to the national selectors. While Pandya did show his original self against Afghanistan, he would get very little credit for that performance after failing to score as a pure batter against quality attacks like Pakistan and New Zealand.

It is also the first time since the 2013 Champions Trophy that an Indian men's team has failed to reach at least the semi-final stage of an ICC event. They were champions in the 50-over Champions Trophy in 2013, followed by runners-up finish in T20 World Cup in 2014. In the 2015 ODI World Cup, the team lost in the semifinals. The 2016 T20 World Cup saw them reach the last four stage while they lost to Pakistan in the 2017 final of the 50-over Champions Trophy. In 2019, their ODI World Cup campaign ended in the semi-final and the two-year long World Test Championship also ended in a finale defeat.