That's what former India goalkeeper Ashish Ballal felt as he watched Australia tame India

Ashish Ballal felt Indian team let down their fans against Australia

That's what former India goalkeeper Ashish Ballal felt as he watched Australia tame India

India began rather slowly and in contrast, Australia, as they normally do, began at a brisk pace.

Before the Indians on the ground realised it, the Aussies were not one or two, but three goals up in the first 15 minutes. The noise quickly died down and it felt as if the crowd got wind of the fact that this Indian team has been totally subdued by the faster, fitter Aussies.

But then, India earned its first penalty corner in the 22nd minute and I thought this was the moment to get the house in order.

If we could pull one goal back, we were in the game and in all probability would have then rattled the Aussies a bit. But that was not to be because surprisingly Sandeep Singh, tried an indirect variation.

In all the years that I've seen Sandeep take drag flicks, I've never seen him score off the indirect version. I thought even goalkeeper Adrian D'Souza was found wanting in the first 20 minutes of the match.

Thankfully for us, however, he came back very strongly and made some brilliant saves in the second half. But even he could not halt the Aussies from adding a couple more to the tally.

I think, overall, the Indian team let down the thousands of fans who had gathered to watch them yesterday after their brilliant show against the Pakistanis.

It's not that I would have expected India to win by a huge margin because after all, we were up against the
No 2 team in the world.

But the point is, we didn't play well.

Here on, I'd prefer that the Indian team picked up the positives from this game, even though there were not many.

I thought Adrian came up with a couple of brilliant saves in the second half besides warding off a penalty stroke taken by Jamie Dwyer.

Also, I thought Arjun Halappa's magic was worth viewing.

He made the second goal for India with some fine trickery inside the circle dodging past three Australian defenders before unselfishly relaying the ball to his captain Rajpal Singh to score.

However, there's still a long way to go for India in this tournament.

We still have three league matchesu00a0-- against Spain, England and South Africa. I think a semi-final spot is still very much a possibility.

As told to Ashwin Ferro

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