It's just for the sake of the confidence of batsmen & especially had they included Marvan in the line up.

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God must love stupid people. He made so many.

I think you should play every game to win. Be ruthless.

Younis, that's a good point. But sometimes a team need to address their own problems as well. They could have batted first to get a huge score and then could have cleaned-up the opposition under 100. That's is also being ruthless.

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God must love stupid people. He made so many.

To be precise he is not a quick scoring player. He had a wonderful time in Australia (2006 VB series) scoring around 450 runs (against Australia and South Africa) in 11 matches. Also he had a wonderful ODI year of 2006 scoring lots of runs. In ODI rankings, I still think he is within first ten, perhaps first five. That's why I consider his form is far too low.

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God must love stupid people. He made so many.

Look, all i'm saying is that in this world cup he averages around the same number of runs as he does for his career. It is not a worry. He'll get back on form in due time. IMO, his glove work has made up for lack of runs however few...

I don't think that the Irish bowling is that bad at all. Against Oz and SL, they had hardly a total to defend and so the bowlers were disheartened to start with. But if you look at it one way, The Irish bowling attack defated Bangladesh who beat South Africa who in turn beat Sri Lanka. I know that cricket does not work that way, but this fact at least shows that SL might have tried to give thier batsmen some practice by going in first.

I see your point, but i think in doing that they are straying from doing the upmost to win. Although their win was never in doubt, i think they did the right thing.