Dark clouds ahead?

A few weeks ago, at the start of Day 4 of the 3rd India-Sri Lanka Test match, the visitors were in trouble, trailing by 322 runs with two days to go. At the start of that day I predicted that India would win the Test match because all they needed was 10 bursts of inspiration/factors to go their way to prise out the batsmen. The pitch was not too helpful and patience was the key. Sri Lanka managed to stretch it to the 5th day but still lost by an innings and 24 runs.

At the start of the 4th day's play of the first Test between India and South Africa, India were trailing by 259 runs but with just 8 wickets in hand. The wickets the SAffers had bagged were the big guns - Virender Sehwag and, more crucially, considering his recent form, Gautam Gambhir. Therefore, to win the match the SAffers needed just 8 bits of inspiration/luck/factors to go their way. The word of the day was patience. The SAffers would need lots of it as batsmen would be difficult to prise out once they settled in. And patience is a virtue that the SAffers have in dollops.


One after the other the Indian batsmen came across the economical bowling lines of the visitors, particularly Paul Harris (more on him in a second) and played themselves in, eventually perishing to a misjudged bit of aggression after a lot of the hard work was done. An orthodox left-arm spinner when confronted with a pitch that has variable turn and bounce adopts to bowling wide outside the leg-stump into the rough only as a last resort. Harris flipped that thinking on its head and made that his primary mode of attack bowling. By the end of the innings he had prised out Murali Vijay, Sachin Tendulkar, and MS Dhoni, 3 of the 4 mainstays of the Day 4 resistance movement. The tail wagged as only a tail can in these circumstances (giving me great insight into why the SAffers couldn't get the #10 and #11 English batsman out in 2 Test matches a few weeks ago) but Graeme Smith showed great patience. He believed a win was around the corner and attrition was the way to go. The way the day unfolded was exactly how he scripted it.

SRT helped himself to that oddity - a century in an innings defeat. Much was expected of him and for a long while, with Dhoni for company, he promised to deliver but fell right after he reached his 46th century. A statistical accomplishment and not much more in the final analysis.

The Indian defeat was not as earth-shattering to me as some others in the media would have us believe. To put it into perspective, less than 5 weeks ago this very same South Afrian side was at the receiving end of a resounding innings defeat at the hands of the English team, ranked 5th by the ICC. So don't fret, Indian supporters, while it is disappointing that the Indian team lost, it is not the end of the world. Also, VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid will not solve the real problem this team has developed - the inability of 2 of the top 3 bowlers to take wickets when it matters.

I will leave you with two thoughts, one brief and the other more detailed.

First, the 4th fastest South African bowler in the Test match was Jacques Kallis, who clocked in close to 90mph. He was faster than the fastest Indian bowler!

Second: In the Midwest cricket league that I participate in every summer, a trend has emerged of late. Every team has at least one or two bowlers who come in from a 1-2 step run up and lob the ball really high (calling it flight is understating it, honestly) so it lands about 5 feet in front of the batsman. The idea is to get the batsmen to step out of the crease and try to cream the ball over the boundary since there are 5 fielders waiting on the edge. Should the batsman miss, the keeper is ready to stump him on his way. Batting has become reduced to simply either patiently taking six singles an over or hoping that some of the hits clear the fence. The quality of the batsmanship and the strokeplay has deteriorated and attritional victories are being achieved. Watching Paul Harris operate almost exclusively to a leg-side theory made me more uneasy than anything I have observed (tactics-wise) on a cricket field in a long time. I shudder to think that in the near future we will be reduced to bowlers operating from wide of the crease, putting the ball outside the leg-stump and hoping to bowl batsmen around their legs or get them to throw their wickets away.

What saddened me even more was that the tactic worked. I was hoping the Indians would find a way to counter it, score lots of runs, and relegate it to the dustbin. I fear for Sehwag, Dravid, Tendulkar, and Laxman the rest of this (short) series. I hope they are practicing how to play this negative line. Otherwise, it wont be too long before we have a bowling-machine-like monotony to the proceedings while the genius of Dale Steyn and Zaheer Khan's swing bowling becomes the exception rather than the norm.