A Fortress to Storm!

Fifteen years have gone but as with nightmares in general this one seems like it happened yesterday: Curtly - yes, Ambrose - and company blew India away on the final day as a  batting line up, with Azhar and Tendulkar in their prime and Ganguly, Laxman and Dravid on their way up, collapsed for 81 pursuing 120 at the Kensington Oval, Barbados. Sunil Gavaskar had reportedly looked at the pitch the night before the final day and wondered if the target was even attainable on it, let alone easily, against the Caribean pace attack which was still formidable if not invincible. The former Indian opener, who had been prolific against the likes of Holding, Garner, and Marshall, did not express his misgivings but they came true all right. It was the only test in the 1997 five-test series that did not have rains or a pointless surfeit of runs. West Indies took the series one-love and there was no love lost between the sides. It was Brian Charles Lara's first test as captain, as Walsh sat out due to injury. The Prince of Trinidad's initial taste of captaincy was as sweet as his initial taste of batting in international cricket had been. 

Five years on, the teams arrived again at Barbados in 2002. The Indians were, for once, one-nil up in an away series after some tight bowling had given them victory as light faded on the last day of the second test at Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. If the Indians had been buoyed by the scoreline, it did not show. In an irony of sorts, bitter for Indians it need not be said, the Indians were bowled out for 102 in the first innings - the zero and two transposing places compared to the score they had been set to win five years ago, also in the third test of that series. Half-centuries from Laxman and Ganguly in the second innings did only enough to make the WIndies bat for a second time but Mervyn Dillon, who picked up eight wickets in the match, had sealed its fate a minute into it when he bowled Shiva Sundar Das for a first-ball duck. After a drawn fourth test, which went on forever as tests do in Antigua, during which Laxman and Dravid opened their wickets' account and Ridley Jacobs, Chanderpaul and Hooper scored hundreds for the West Indies in the only innings they batted, the Indians flopped again in the fifth test at Kingston, Jamaica. The test is remembered for an open-ended sentence that had sadly become a refrain about Indian batting line-ups which always looked majestic on paper and were often crumpled like paper on the field by half-decent bowling attacks: if only India had batted for fifteen minutes... (for then the skies opened up and it seems it rained for a couple of days after that in Jamaica).

The 2006 series, which was decided 1-0 in favour of India in the final test at Kingston by Dravid's fine twin half-centuries and Kumble's grit with bat and ball, did not feature a test in Barbados.

Tomorrow, the Indians would once again set foot on Barbados to bury the ghosts of the past and try to beat West Indies on a ground that had been their fortress for many years. Even in home conditions, every team has something that is its backyard, a ground that visiting teams are in awe of having been called there as if to be summarily thumped: Barbados is West Indies' version of Perth (Australia), Durban (South Africa), Headingley (England) or Wellington (New Zealand). The home team would know that and even though they are weak they would want to exploit any remnant of a historical advantage there is.

 However, the Indians will be inspired both by their number one status, as opposed to the West Indies team's lowly number 8 ranking, as well as the home team's recent record at the ground. Since drubbing India, the West Indians have won only two of their eight games at the ground, drawn one and, more importantly, have lost to the better sides - England, Australia and South Africa. Besides, their bowling attack can be sharp on its day but is not one that will make a batsman lose sleep: considering that Fidel Edwards, their only genuine quick bowler, is coming of an injury, the task for the Indian batsmen would be a lot easier. Gayle's absence will also continue to emasculate the hosts and keep the visitors interested.

However, the Indians cannot afford to be complacent. A senior statesman like Rahul Dravid who has been there and done that would know that Indian cricket has seen many false dawns and do well to impress that upon his younger colleagues. Admittedly, the Indian teams of the last three or four years have been enormously consistent, so the alarm is, if anything, a cautionary note at best. And with a cool but no-nonsense man like M. S. Dhoni leading the team, the tyros would know that they cannot take anything for granted. That is just as well because the next five days represents India's best chance to win their first test at Barbados.

Three years ago, a resurgent Indian team stormed Perth after Sydneygate had laid them low, yet again snapping a winning streak the Australians sought to extend.  Back then, they had a gladiatorial man like Anil Kumble who led by example. Going into tomorrow, the Indians would look to a gentleman who loves the struggle, an artiste who would love to showcase some of his silk to fans in the Caribean before he signs off for one last time from the islands Columbus touched and a stoical captain who will tell them "to of course just go and enjoy the game." But winning it is not beyond Team India either.

The SSC saga and a malediction for bowlers!

So, the test match at the Sinhalese Sports Club is finally over. Save Rahul Dravid and V.V.S Laxman who would be cursing themselves for having missed an opportunity to escalate their averages and century counts, all the other batsmen enjoyed themselves, combining for close to 1500 runs for the loss of just seventeen wickets which is less than two bowled-out innings. And if Randiv never returns to play test cricket again, I will not blame him, although being a Sri Lankan I am sure he would be strong enough to treat the pitch at SSC as an aberration probably prepared by someone who carries psychological scars from his past inflicted by bowlers. And as the test series moves to P Sara Oval which is also located in Colombo, one wonders if the contest will get any better. Well, at this stage, it looks like even the concrete front yard of my house will be better for bowlers than SSC.

A number of things were wrong about the test match just concluded at Colombo, not the least of them being a surface that did not offer anything more than slow turn which barring Dravid everyone, including Mithun and Ishant Sharma, had time to tackle. Yet to blame SSC singly for hosting such drab test matches is to be purblind and willfully ignorant of grounds like that around the world. The Motera at Ahmedabad comes to mind and so does the Antigua Recreation Ground in the West Indies; the most recently played tests at both these venues produced results not far more or less insipid than the mind-numbing draw we witnessed at SSC. With the lone exception of Karachi, pitches in Pakistan too are flat, but at least they offer expected if not extravagant turn on the fourth and fifth days of a game. The Oval in London and the Adelaide Oval have also been batting havens for years but these pitches at least have true bounce given that they are in England and Australia and with occasional help from the weather bowlers at least have (half) a chance. In India, Sri Lanka and the West Indies when the summer is at its peak and batsmen are in full flow, there is absolutely no respite for bowlers let alone relief. It is precisely in these inhumane contexts that an extra layer of grass or a slightly less hard pitch may give the toiling bowlers a window of opportunity. 

As it is, test cricket is losing ground to its youngest sibling in the game, the T20s, and a number of detractors of the games longest version, including my shrewd co-author friend here, think that test cricket’s status as the game’s foremost format is but an artifact of unimpeded history and little else. If test matches like the second one between Sri Lanka and India become the norm – not that contest-less run fests are just exceptions, which is a cause for concern – then the game’s governing body can kiss goodbye to the format sooner than they may anticipate and focus full time on marketing the game played under floodlights, with glitzy jerseys and with a lot of éclat even if with comparatively less demands on substance. This is not to say that I despise the game’s newest format or that it is corrupting the game or even that it is superficial. If the game needs to spread globally, for instance, T20s are the only option. Even as an ardent fan of test cricket I am sensible enough to admit and understand that the game’s coffers and traditional values are situated in different places. So each format has its own raison d’ etre and is required for the meaningfulness of the game overall. But what I regret is the rapid dwindling of crowds in test match cricket as evidenced during the test at SSC. 

I had written earlier as well that if ICC is really, not just academically and rhetorically, interested in salvaging test cricket as a format, let alone as the most preferred one (a status which I believe it has already lost!), pitches are an area that the governing body should bring under its broad aegis. I am not too sure if there already is a pitch-related ICC committee, and if there is I do not see what it is doing. There is a touch of irony too in that when it comes to high-scoring games which end in predictable one-hour-before-close, not last ball, draws, we protest vociferously but the sonority fades soon enough. But when one ball rears up awkwardly like it did at Ferozshah Kotla, everyone goes gaga about it and fifty experts speak about how dangerous it is for batsmen to have such pitches! I am not encouraging pitches like those prepared at Kotla for the one-day game against Sri Lanka and India that was later abandoned. Sir Viv Richards Stadium in Antigua and Sabaina Park in Jamaica have also hoisted test matches over the years that have had to be called off barely an hour into the game because the pitches were underprepared. But the point is if some pitches are considered unsuitable for playing because they are a threat to batsmen’s physical well-being, then the pitches we have at the Antigua Recreation Ground, Sinhalese Sports Club, Ahmedabad and Faislabad should be considered unsuitable too because they are a threat to bowling itself. To relegate the latter form of unsuitability as an epiphenomenon just because it is less tangible than the possibility of physical injury betrays a want of commonsense and equanimity from those who are supposed to safeguard the interests of the game, which lay among other things in there being a contest between bat and ball.

While the sub-continent continues to host matches which are played in conditions that remain hell for bowlers, Pakistan’s last test match against Australia at Headingley and the ongoing one against England at Trent Bridge show how keeping the bowlers in the game interested is the only – commonsensical – way to ensure results in test cricket which in turn may bring more crowds to watch it. Indeed, one cannot expect groundsmen in India, Sri Lanka, West Indies or Pakistan to get the same sort of wherewithal that pitch curators in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or England get; the opposite case is true too. It is needless to say that weather conditions play a part and these are beyond human control. But the fact remains we can still prepare pitches that give something for the bowlers. The Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore is a great example. Nobody even presumes that it is like Perth or Gabba; it does not need to be. But the wicket always has something in it for the quick men, at least first thing in the morning, is beautiful to bat on once you get your eye in and offers appreciable but not threatening turn during the last day and half. 

At the end of the day, it is balance between bat and ball that one asks for, not a historical reversal where batsmen get repeatedly shot out for less than 250 nine times out of ten. I prefer low-scoring thrillers to high-scoring ones any day, but that is not the point. Getting a five-for or a hundred and fifty in tests, both should entail some effort in the game’s toughest format. If five-fors happen once in ten games but double-hundreds come around every fourth innings, there is something fundamentally wrong about the equation. This is precisely what has been happening for years, at least in countries known to produce flat pitches, and unless corrected soon, the plague may come to haunt the very heritage of test cricket in these parts of the world.