The scoreboard doesn’t lie, but it’s a world-class gaslighter.

India beat the Netherlands. On paper, it’s another green checkmark in a column of relentless wins. Two points banked. The "all-win" record remains intact, shimmering like a fresh coat of paint on a house with foundational cracks. But if you actually watched the thing—if you sat through the clunky, gear-grinding middle overs—you know the truth. This wasn't a masterclass. It was a legacy system struggling to run a basic update.

We’re seeing a weird kind of tech debt in the Indian batting order. They’ve got the hardware. You look at the lineup and it’s all flagship specs: high-refresh-rate openers, middle-order processors with more cores than they know what to do with, and a finishing unit that should, theoretically, be screaming through tasks. Instead, we’re getting the spinning beach ball of death every time the opposition throws something slightly off-script.

The Netherlands shouldn’t have been a problem. They’re the scrappy, open-source project of the cricketing world—running on passion, duct tape, and a fraction of the BCCI’s lunch budget. Yet, for long stretches in the middle of the innings, they made India look like a bloated enterprise software company trying to pivot to AI. There was no "flow." There was just survival.

Rohit Sharma is playing a dangerous game with his own data. He’s trying to be the "disruptor," swinging at deliveries that deserve a bit more respect, as if he’s bored with the very concept of an anchor role. It’s high-risk, high-reward, but when the timing is off by a millisecond, it just looks like a hardware glitch. Then there’s the middle order. Watching them rotate the strike against non-elite spin felt like watching a 5G phone try to download a PDF over a 2004 hotel Wi-Fi connection. It’s agonizing. It’s slow. You know it’ll get there eventually, but you’re losing your mind in the process.

The friction here isn’t about the total on the board. 160 or 180 or 210—the numbers are almost secondary to the "vibe check." The trade-off India is currently making is safety for style, and they’re somehow failing at both. They aren't playing with the reckless abandon of the modern T20 era, nor are they showing the clinical, surgical precision of the great Australian teams of the early 2000s. They’re stuck in a middle-manager purgatory.

Let’s talk about the dot balls. Each one is a micro-transaction of failure. Against a side like the Netherlands, those empty deliveries are an indulgence. Against an Australia or an England in a semi-final, they’re a death sentence. You can't just "optimize for the win" when the process itself is leaking efficiency at every joint. The "batting fluency" the pundits keep whispering about isn't some poetic ideal; it’s the basic requirement of a team that claims to be the best in the world. If you can’t find the gaps against a part-time off-spinner from Amstelveen, what are you going to do when the real pressure starts cookin'?

The fans don’t care, of course. They see the "W" and move on. They’re happy with the shiny UI. But beneath the surface, the backend is messy. Kohli is grinding out runs like he’s trying to solve a captcha, and while the result is eventually a green light, the effort feels disproportionate to the task. There’s a lack of "snap" in the shot selection. It’s all very... manual.

Is this just a case of "playing down to the competition"? Maybe. It’s a classic tech trap: why burn your best engineers on a legacy maintenance project when you’ve got a big launch coming up? But momentum isn't a toggle switch you can just flip when the stakes get higher. It’s a muscle. Right now, India’s batting muscle looks a little atrophied, stiff from lack of real, fluid movement.

We’re told to trust the process. We’re told that winning is the only metric that matters in the end. But anyone who’s ever used a "functional" app that crashes every three minutes knows that the output isn't the whole story. India is currently the world’s most expensive piece of software—feature-rich, highly marketed, and theoretically unbeatable. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that the whole thing is one unexpected bug away from a total system failure.

It’s great that the win streak is still alive. Truly. But at some point, you have to stop patching the code and actually start running the program. How long can you keep winning while looking this bored by your own excellence?