TRENT JOHNSTON INSIDE VIEW

INDIA is a vast country and every time you travel you seem to have to go through Mumbai or Delhi. It was on the second leg of our flight from Bangalore to Chandigarh that I realised my knee was getting bigger and angrier under the cast and my chances of playing West Indies on Friday were fading fast.

As I write this, they are still in the balance. The swelling has gone down but there is very little strength in the joint and it won’t be any better than 85 per cent capacity if I play on Friday morning. So we have a big decision to make.

Beat West Indies and we may only have to beat Holland to get to the quarter-finals. Lose and we’ll have to beat the Dutch and South Africa. You don’t have to hedge your bets on how I feel. This is my last 50-over World Cup and I want to play in every game.

The trouble is, it might be taken out of my hands. We have a 15-man squad and our physio, Kieran O’Reilly, reckons I will be 100 per cent for South Africa next Tuesday if I sit this one out. We’ll sit down and discuss it on the eve of the game but it will probably be left to the last minute.

Having said all that, I’m quite relieved I’m still in India. When I crashed down onto that rock-hard wicket in Bangalore on Sunday, the impact was so great it left a 1½in crater that they couldn’t flatten out with a sledgehammer. India’s Yuvraj Singh came in to bat and said there was no way he was going to bat with such a big hole in the left-hander’s line of fire.

Looking back at replays, I’m amazed I didn’t shatter my kneecap. Unfortunately, if I fall on it again on Friday that could be exactly what happens. In truth, I won’t be able to bowl properly when we train, so if I play I will be going in blindfolded.

On to a truly serious matter. After our first two games out here, seasoned Irish cricket observers may have been wondering what happened to my chicken dance — the ridiculous jig I introduced to the watching world in 2007.

I had decided not to reprise it in this tournament, but the kids kept pestering me so I decided that if I knocked over a top player, I would do it. Cue the histrionics in front of a billion people when I got Virender Sehwag out on Sunday.

I will now stick to my selective policy. If a bowler celebrates getting a No 9 or No 10 batsman out like that you are only going to look like an eejit, but if I get Chris Gayle or Graeme Smith’s wicket, there will be dancing.

I keep saying it, but it’s not lip service: we genuinely believe that we can win every game we play here. We beat England and we gave India a proper test, and if we had got 40 more runs and I hadn’t got crocked they might have been staring down the barrel of a real cliffhanger.

So we can beat South Africa next Tuesday. That’s why if we lose to West Indies, we are not out of the tournament.

Having said that, it is a scalp a lot of our fans have targeted with good reason. Sometimes the West Indians just seem to wake up on the wrong side of bed, or maybe one or two of them will assume they are going to beat us.

They have some great players — we have to get Chris Gayle, Shiv Chanderpaul and Ramnaresh Sarwan out early or they could take the game away from us — but I assure you they will have to be on their game to beat us.

I just hope I’m involved. I’m now very proud to be ranked No 12 among one-day international bowlers, and my target is to break into the top ten before we go home.

Above all, though, we have to start winning games. We’ve only got two points on the board and I’d swap all the praise in the world for the six we need.