Come on....dont blame pitch. Batsmen need to learn how to bat....consider it like batting agaisnt Australia chasing 360...same pressure adn application is required if we want to win the World Cup. So let Indians learn how to bat in difficult conditions....

Chappell man-handling, Security fears and now a terrible pitch.Cuttack is hosting its final International match today!!

Well one should ride on Pune roads during monsoon

Lets wait to see the West Indies response , i think blaming the pitch will be rational only if the West Indians too struggle.

If pitch is the culprit, WI should also have same problems. But I suspect they will win by 9 wickets

To find winning ways in all kind of pithces and conditions. What if we get pitches like this in WI for world cup. Now that our team is aware of its weakness, they can work for it and be ready to face any challenge

You cannot have these sort of pitches for ODI. Yes, you can have sporting pitches like the ones you have in SA and Australia which assists both Batting and Bowling. Even the best of the teams like Australia would have struggled to score in these sort of slow pitches, do u remember the test match in Dry, slow Mumbai Pitch? Dont blame indian batting.....

A final word on the pitch is probably undue until the west indies chase, or even until india's lower order performance. Interesting to note though that KKD Karthik, perhaps one of the few who has taken domestic cricket seriously is holding up one end well. Did Tendulkar opt out of the pre-series domestic fixtures? Surely not!

It does not make any sense to not give a pitch that is going to be vastly different from the ones we are going to find in WI for the world cup. I mean, are India playing as a prelude to the World Cup, a sort of a getting into groove, getting used to the conditions or just because BCCI needed to satisfy the WI board and make some more money?

Nope you've got it wrong, there's more than one thing worse than the Indian batting, its the rationale behind their batting order. Agarkar has a highest score of 95 in ODIs and a hundred at Lords. What on earth is he doing behind Harbhajan in the batting order? If the pitch is so bad how come Dravid was doing pretty well on it, as in scoring runs at a quite decent rate, as is Karthik at the moment. There were two soft dismissals, I don't think the pitch can be blamed for those two.

Blaming the pitch won't do any good, u need to adapt u'r selves to different conditions....that's what International Cricket is all about

I guess they tried a little too hard to prepare a pitch like in the windies. But thats no excuse for the sorry Indian score. This is a 225 pitch where you need to build innings with singles and twos. I think Karthik is going to WC now. Bring back Kaif too. He is good in playing such innings. He will be useful in WC.

The problem lies not in the pitch, but in the minds of our batsmen. Its time that they should stop doing advertisments & start playing cricket. If they cannot play on this types of pitches, ask them to play at Shivaji Park, Mumbai.

Does the horrible state of the pitch prepared for an ODI reflect why Orissa does not produce even one player worthy of the India Blues? Going by what they did to Chappel at the airport and now the way they prepared the pitch at Barabati, Orissa may as well kiss hopes of hosting another game in the near future and deservedly so!

With all the confusions I think Indian batsmen forgot how to bat on such pitches. BCCI has to make sure that when India play the pitch should be like the one in Nagpur.

Problem with the batting !! Most of the wickets are soft dismissals !

Most of the times only the opposite happens. Every time people say dew factor this that. Those who won the toss should bat first and pile up big score then put pressure on the team batting second. I have always seen the team batting first been bundled out for low scores. WHY????!!!

lol..i totaly agree with what Sanjay said...v wil lose by 9 wickets and probably 25 overs remaining, u cang blame the pitch if the batsmen dont know how to play..i dont know when will be the time when india will actually win a world cup...may b in 31 century..may b never...

Come on guys, do not blame the pitch, the pitch can be a factor, see karthik how he is batting and he is still in the crease, why can't others, for karthik alone is there a special pitch? Come to reality, let us see how WI responds for this

yeah keep blaming it on the pitch...the straight and simple thing is that all these guys dont have the fighting spirit...it will be a miracle if india goes to the top 8 in the world cup

This is like a bollywood movie now. Among all the news of security, backslaps and what not, Indian cricket.. or rather a match involving the Indian team.. sticks to the usual formula of batting failures and innings collapse. And I am also sure of the calls to strike numerous names from the list (with the addition of the stadium and the curator this time though) first thing tomorrow morning. But, we the fans, still look forward to our team winning the match... or atleast say "well fought, hero!"

The pitch may have some demons in it, you also so should give credit to some good bowling from the bowler. We are use to giving away alot of extras and today hasn't been the case so far.

You say pitch has demons. Karthik is managing pretty well out there? There was lack of application with some guilefull bowling to contribute to indian batting collapse.

It seems the players took this game too lightly . Thus resulting in lack of concentration . Before they realised that the pitch is bit different than they expected . It was too late . Lets hope Kartik and the tailenders cross the 100 mark.

We were not able to play on southafrican pitch and even the same thing happened in INDIA for the mini world cup.so on which pitch does our team wants to play, should there be an new pitch for our boys or what does the team needs when others are able to play in our own soil and make us to sit and watch.

Indians Always Make a Mess out of thier Selections Don't They !! When the pitch was like in a condition that allowed 338 + 324 runs in it They play an Extra batsmen .. But today they play one batsmen less ... Its amazing how they just go around Taking Wrong Decisions when the situation demands !

Well, my oppinion is that the pitch is not at all suitable to International standards,perhaps I personally feel Indian batsmen must have shown some application after the fall of Gambhir`s wicket OR Sachin`s wicket. But still people like Dravid hung around for a while and getting him cleaned up is a big question. But still I believe WI will struggle also and my gut feeling is India will win this match by some 21, 23 runs, lets wait and see.

ha!ha! I feel bad for the Indian team; if they play well, its a "flat pitch"; if they're battered even on a bad pitch(like today)we question their talent!

its just how good or bad a team plays on a given day. period! its a bad pitch, and even if the windies do well, it will remain a bad pitch.

Hmmm!..., yeah yeah, if you can't blame it on the sunshine, then blame it on moonlight, with the last match played, Indian players became Heroes. And now what? The last match was not one sided at all. It was a very close contest. India will never win Matches if they don’t change their attitude. This game is not about batting, bowling and fielding alone, it’s all about mind setting that goes with it. It is very important to know what goes in the mind of a player when he goes into the field to play. What is his confidence level?. Well, not much to say, I leave it in the hands of cricket management. Or Learn from Australia. How they go about it.

When india are scoring big on a belter, no one complains...now there up against, not WI but rather a considerably difficult track...there is so much fuss. Please,just let the better team on the day win...they both play on the same pitch.

Seems like the ODI wickets in India surely bring more excitement than the Test wickets.
At least the wickets are not boring as well as the fact that it gives the bowlers a chance to get a few wickets. Remember Gillie said last week that very soon scores above 400 will be common. So, in the age were high scores are common this makes ODI cricket, if not JUST CRICKET, very interesting.
Who knows, WI may have problems of their own when batting.
I think its a cricket game. It still needs to be finished!!

Lets stop looking for 'scapegoats' for everything series that we lose or match that we underperform. Our team is at its lowest ebb right now and we have to accept. What beats the heck out of me is individually each of the members are world beaters; or at least they have proved their worth in the past! I cannot understand the theory of 'hit out or get out'??!! I mean that is 'gully-cricket' jargon. Cant we start at basics; say last for full 50 overs of the match? We can easily say 'pitch is bad', but if the Windies can chase our total (whatever it is) successfully, then we cannot blame the pitch. The point is how do we win a match; whether pitch is bad or not??

There is no consistency in Team India. For every failure we blame something else...Why not the players? Why can't they learn playing in any condition? How Kartik is standing at other end?? We have made Sachin Voice Captain though he is not performing well.

If Kartik and Agarkar can score more than 100 runs between them what stops these so called "GREAT" batsman from scoring runs. There was a clear lack of application amongst the batsman. No need to blame the pitch

Stop blaming pitches. We don't know how to apply ourselves in different conditions. Flat pitches everyone score. They should have learnt from Kartik. This is their profession and one should understand the profession completely. Bad pitches are part of the game they should know how to play beside that they gave away their wickets not that pitch has done more.

Indians have a way of making the pitch look more difficult than it really is. And sachin tendulkar and other seniors are becoming masters at this art. Remember teh final test in South Africa? SA batsmen found no devils and kumbe went wicketless on the 5th day. If u had seen sachin and Dravid play the previous day....
Its high time they show some guts, adapt and sweat it out..
The way windies play will show the true colors of the pitch... Ofcourse, the pitch will ease up, we will bowl badly... and our great batsmen will escape all blame...

Several knowledgeable fans have pointed this out but it bears repeating. Team India have no consistency what so ever. They are reduced to one or two players performing well over a series only for those same players to disapoint later. Whether it's Irfan Pathan, Sehwag, Tendulkar, H. Singh, or any other established player, they simply are up and down at home and abroad since spring of last year.

The dispointing thing is that in terms of raw talent/potential, the Indian players are on par with any other team in the world. However, they cannot perform consistently to utilize all that talent. It's no secret that players like Pathan/Khan/H. Singh, and batsmen like Sehwag, Tendulkar, Ganguly, etc have tremendous talent and experience but all of that is wasted when it is not applied with regularity in live match situations. Dravid is the one and only player that has played consistently because he is a student of the game that puts the basics of playing cricket/stroke play above all else. If only the rest of the senior players were are attentive and meticulous in their preperation and dedication.