On the 4th day of the Indo-SA Test match I watched the worst display of batting I have ever seen by any one individual. And the shocker was the identity of the individual -Sachin Tendulkar. His innings was so gutless, defenceless, and irresponsible, that I am still fuming about it a good 24 hours later.
(For more specific details about his (mis)-deeds read this piece by Sambit Bal, the editor of Cricinfo, who feels the same way I do about Tendulkar's second innings farce).
I cannot fathom what the man was trying to achieve. He was facing a debutant and went into a defenceless shell that would not have been acceptable in any era of Test cricket. The man reputed to have given Shane Warne nightmares was not even trying to do anything about the way Paul Harris was bowling, except to occasionally try that paddle sweep of his. Batting as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders he pottered around for a long time and in the end he did not just give the initiative back to the South Africans. He literally threw it back into their laps - gift-wrapped and all.
Rahul Dravid was batting with him and I hold him just as responsible for the display as he did nothing whatsoever to change Sachin's mindset (or at least did not appear to be trying). How can these two batsmen, who are widely regarded as two of the best batsmen in the world, come up with such a spineless display?
For a few weeks, as the failures have been piling up, I have been supporting Tendulkar, even as AV kept giving me examples of the times when the man has choked in the limelight. And that is the best word I can think of to explain his batting yesterday - he choked. When the pressure built up and it was time to take action he simply froze. Like a deer on the road at night when confronted by an oncoming vehicle.
Halfway across the world I stay awake at night watching the Indian team play. I am not the only one. We deserved a lot better than this. Regular readers of my blog will know that I am an advocate of attacking the bowling as the best form of defence. I do not see how defending our way has helped us either here in the third Test or in the second Test. And when I say attack - I do not mean that every ball should be slammed into the hoardings. Instead it means that you approach each ball looking to score runs and only defend (or leave it) if it is not bad enough to do so. As Kumar Sangakkara says, being positive does not mean you have to hit every ball.
This is not the first time Tendulkar has done this either. At Bangalore, against the Pakistanis, he hung around for 140 minutes, scoring just 16 runs and India went on to lose that Test match, too. Not having learnt his lesson from Bangalore he proceeded to give us an encore performance that has rattled me enough to contemplate not wasting my time any more when he is at the crease. For weeks, I have been egging him along to score more runs, more centuries, even as Ponting is rapidly gaining ground. Now I do not care any more. If anything, he deserves to have his record be eclipsed soon. It is time for him to decide how he wants to be remembered in the waning days of his career - as a man who who stamped his authority on the game or as one who let the bowler dictate the situation to him. A few more such innings from him and he will be dropped, much like GR Viswanath was dropped after the disastrous tour of Pakistan in 1982, never to get a a whiff of the playing field again.
2 comments:
one hates to blame the coach and the selectors when this happens but there is a collective sense of a team with a deer in the headlights look that is alarming.
while it is good to state that players are on watch and that nobody can take their places for granted, there is also a need to clearly define what has been communicated as expectations to each player - and then hold them to it.
I have never seen Laxman play as cautiously as he has done throughout this series, Sachin seems to be sleepwalking playing shots from memory and defending like a madman when awake, Ganguly and Dravid have had opposite ends of the luck spectrum - with the former seeing every edge and more fly through no-mans land and the latter being given out in error repeatedly.....the only players who seemed to have escaped with better reputations than before are Dinesh Karthik (who by rights should be the Indian keeper, Dhoni is welcome to try and earn a place as a specialist bat) and Sreesanth, with Zaheer Khan earning a very honourable mention.
Greg Chappell is a failure, and why was Vengsarkar in South Africa at all? If they were playing Sehwag as a specialist bowler, then Harbhajan who was there to bowl would have been a better option - I would love to have godfathers like Virendar Sehwag seems to have....
Now back to India and they will pick the lineup for the Windies based on some fraud games in Indian conditions??????? Yet again, the Indians seem to wish to repeat in the Windies the mistakes they made in the ODIs against the Springboks.
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