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If the Indian bowlers have Pakistan in trouble in
the first session of a Test match in the future,
with three wickets falling for less than twenty
runs, the Indian captain will be well advised to
gift a few runs to the batsmen so that they get to
about seventy or eighty before the next wicket
falls.
Corny as this may sound, the Indian think-tank
should consider this seriously. For, a team is not
known to lose a Test despite taking six opposition
wickets with less than forty runs on the board in
the first session of the game. But India have
pulled off this 'miracle', not once but twice.
Pakistan were 26-6 on the opening day of the
Kolkata Test of the inaugural Asian Test
Championship in 1998-99. They went on to win the
Test. The Indians struck early blows, but failed to
deliver the vital knockout punch. As it was proved
at Karachi, they had clearly opted to remain
indifferent to history, and not surprisingly, it
was repeated.
Ask even a casual cricket-watcher with no deep
feelings towards the game, and he too will tell you
that an attacking approach is any day preferable to
a defensive one. But there are stages in every
sport, as indeed in life itself, where one has to
remember that discretion is the better part of
valour. Rahul Dravid was perfectly justified in
crowding the pitch with fielders shortly after
Irfan Pathan's sensational first-over hattrick
reduced Pakistan to 0-3 in the very first over. The
Indian captain was spot-on when he decided to back
his bowlers with slips and several infielders,
considering that Irfan, Zaheer Khan and R.P. Singh
were making the ball talk.
However, he ought to have done a rethink when
Kamran Akmal and Abdul Razzaq started plonking
their respective front foots down the wicket and
driving the bowlers through the covers again, again
and again. Had the field been made more defensive
at that stage, who knows what may have happened?
India lost the game on the very first day itself,
by allowing its opponent to reach a score of 245
after being 39-6. The Pakistani pacemen then took
over, and they were helped by some mediocre
batting. Whether the Indian batsmen like it or not,
they have to accept the 'fairweather' tag. Their
disastrous performance in both innings proved
beyond doubt that they do not possess the expertise
to tackle opposition bowlers in different kinds of
conditions. Talent, they have in abundance, but
they aren't utilizing it productively to excel on
strips that are not featherbeds. The record-books
state that luminaries like Rahul Dravid, Sachin
Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag and VVS Laxman failed to
score a single fifty on a wicket on which newcomers
like Kamran Akmal and Faisal Iqbal scored hundreds.
That's a damning indictment.
The defeat has brought with it the inevitable
deluge of post-mortems. Anybody and everybody is
slamming the Indian batsmen and blaming the
reluctance of groundsmen all over the country to
prepare grassy wickets on which the batsmen can
prepare themselves. But don't we know what all this
is leading to? The answer is 'nowhere'! The rave
reviews gathered by the Karachi wicket
notwithstanding, the one-day matches will be played
on flat tracks that will not offer the bowlers any
assistance, for the simple reason that authorities
in the sub-continent, along with the majority of
the followers, have convinced themselves that
entertainment with synonymous with boundaries and
sixes, not with bouncers and Yorkers.
The Indian batters will in all probability
recapture form in the one-day series on flat
batting tracks. They will also pray that the
memories of cricket-lovers in India remain as
fickle as they have traditionally been. One fifty
by each of the batsmen, and their fans will forgive
and forget the Karachi debacle. The fact that the
batsmen let their team down in the 'real' form of
the game, in a situation 'where it mattered', will
be overlooked. One-day cricket might be an exciting
sport, but to compare it to the 'tests' that
cricketers have to undergo in Test cricket is
highly ridiculous.
It is high time the fans stood up and posed a few
hard questions to some of the prima-donnas in the
team; "Are you giving 100 %?" "Don't you understand
that you let down a billion people whenever you
fail in critical situations?" "Don't you think you
need to make way for a youngster who might be
hungrier for success?" But then, this is like
expecting a pig to fly, isn't it? No one is going
to interrogate the Superstars, and the latter know
that only too well. All they have to do is hammer
fifties and hundreds on featherbeds in the
forthcoming one-day series.
If India run the hosts close in the one-day series
or even win it, and then go on to give England a
hard time on our home pitches, Karachi will be
forgotten by one and all. Until the next time our
batsmen get exposed on a greenish wicket, that is.
That will be followed by another series of
recriminations, and so on.
There will be the odd die-hard who will search for
positives even in the bleakest of situations, and
point out that the Indian team's topmost priority;
the 2007 World Cup, will be played on flat tracks,
for they no longer make greenish tracks in the
Caribbean anymore. Hence there is little or no
sense in practicing on such wickets, for Karachi
will come once in a blue moon. Yes, there is the
tour of South Africa in 2006-07 to contend with,
but it is more than six months away.....
While there is nothing wrong in believing that
every dark cloud has a silver lining, it shouldn't
be forgotten that there is a very thin line between
optimism and inanity.
But one important lesson must be learnt and imbibed
by all future Indian cricketers - never take six
Pakistani wickets for less than forty runs on the
first day of a Test. It's a bad omen. Another
equally worse omen is the tag of India's next 'fast
bowling hope'. For whoever gets anointed with this
title, loses pace after a couple of years of
international cricket. It happened to Zaheer Khan,
and it has now happened to Irfan Pathan.
Greg Chappell may want journalists to recommend
upcoming fast bowlers if there are any, as he
jocularly stated at the post-match conference, but
he and his support-staff first need to identify the
factors that might be pushing India's 'young and
quick' backward instead of forward.
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