Timber!!

(CricInfo 2006)

The third day of the South Africa-India Test belonged to two people - Dale Steyn and Virender Sehwag. Not since I saw Malcolm Marshall in 1984 have I seen such a sustained spell of aggressive pace bowling on Indian soil. But Steyn reminds me more of Kapil Dev because his stock ball is the one that goes away, the harder to bowl outswinger. Steyn has a long-ish run-up that builds up in pace, an easy action but some of the fastest hands in the business. After his jump his arms swing faster than his run-up suggests and the length of the ball is one that invites batsmen to lean forward and drive. A brilliant ball like that got Sachin Tendulkar to lean forward, slightly off-balance, and the movement did the rest. But Murali Vijay and Wriddhiman Saha, in particular, and other Indian batsmen barring Viru, in general, were tentative about stepping forward because of the 90mph pace and instead shouldered arms or prodded awkwardly and paid the price for their diffidence.

Leveling the playing field

Before the series began, Virender Sehwag stated that the Bangladeshi team did not have the firepower to take out 20 Indian wickets in a Test match. The Woofing Gods sat up and took note when he said this. They agreed it was true so something had to be done.

By the time the first Test finished, the bulwark of the middle order, VVS Laxman was out of the team. The Indians foxed the Gods by bringing in MS Dhoni and Murali Vijay. But the Gods did not get to float on clouds in the sky by simply sitting back when attacked. They responded by getting Rahul Dravid to duck into a bouncer that did not rise, caused Yuvraj Singh to rupture a tendon and got Sachin Tendulkar to take a tumble in the field while attempting a catch. Take that, mere mortals!

Suddenly, the Bangladeshis need to take just 8 wickets to win a Test if they get a lead. Of the 8 wickets, the trio of Pragryan Ojha, Zaheer Khan, and Ishant Sharma do not inspire confidence that they can last long. So that means they need to prise out 5 wickets. Ooooh, this gets easier now.

Bangladesh is 83 runs behind with 7 wickets in hand. They made a massive blunder yesterday by sending in a nightwatchman. Mahmudullah bats too low as it is, now he will be batting with one fewer tailender as a buffer. It is bound to play on his mind. There's only so many times a team can drink from that well.

All in all, a very intriguing two days lie ahead of us. My suspicion is that Bangladesh will take a lead, but not one that is too substantial. India has Gambhir, Sehwag, Vijay (promoted to #3), Tendulkar, and Dhoni to get those runs. It is time for Sehwag to put his bat where his mouth is and ensure that the task does not even reach Dhoni.

Maybe overcoming this adversity will appease the Gods...for now.

P.S. Quick math should tell you how hard it will be for Bangladesh to set India a target of more than 200. Trailing by 83, they need to score 300 runs to set a target of 213. Tamim Iqbal and Junaid Siddiqui put on 200 runs yesterday and it was the first ever 200-run partnership in Bangladesh's rich Test history. In a given day they will have to bat about 85 overs (a combination of bad light and MS Dhoni's typically languid pace of going through overs) and that would get them close to that 300 mark.

My gut feeling? Based on what I have seen so far, India will wrap up the win late on the 4th day or early on the 5th.

Word play

Descriptive without being adulatory, statistically-minded without giving you the generic stuff, and analytical without being preachy, Prem Panicker has a way of taking a day's play and making you relive the moments with clarity and fond remembrance. Here's his description of the second day's play of the ongoing India-Sri lanka Test match. It is for articles like this one that I rate Prem Panicker among the best cricket writers in the world.

Some samples to whet your appetite:

(...) what impressed about Vijay was the quality of shot selection and execution. Vijay’s driving through covers is classical [there was one bended knee effort of Welegedara that made you forget you were supposed to be working, and stand to applaud]; he plays with felicity off his pads; and he is clearly aware of the importance of singles as a weapon of attack [between them, the two openers had 59 singles (Vijay 27) in course of the 221 run opening partnership, that also had 26 fours and six sixes.]

(...)

The problem with appraising Viru in terms of stats is that the stats are so startling you begin hunting for the very adjectives you ran out of in the first place. Consider this: the man has six double hundreds, more than any other Indian batsman ever. And of those six, five are in the list of the fastest doubles of all time; in fact, he owns three of the top four slots, and is the only batsman to have more than one entry in that list.

Here’s why: his progression from the 180s to the double ton, in the 57th over of the innings bowled by Nuwan Kulasekhara, was dot, 4, 4, 4, 2, 4. With every other batsman currently active, you talk of the nervous nineties – with Viru, as someone pointed out to me on Twitter, it is the hapless bowlers who get nervous when the man approaches some landmark. With every other batsman -- including the great Sachin -- the rival captain brings the field in to add pressure; with Viru, they send the fielders out on the fence and he pierces or clears them anyway.

The point though is not so much his propensity to score big; the real key to Sehwag is that he scores those big runs at a pace that sets it up for his team, even as he creates a slipstream for his colleagues to coast along in.

Now, go and read the rest. Here's the link again, just in case.