A Preview of the Upcoming India-Australia Test Series:

Some weeks ago, or may be it is months – I am not sure given that I have done very little that is non-phonological during these queerly dark ages as far as entertainment is concerned – Peter Roebuck wrote how the upcoming India-Australia test series may be a faint encore of the type of cricket these two nations have produced over the last decade. Given that Roebuck has the predilection, like yours truly often does, to get such things wrong, I hope and wish he is wrong again. Nonetheless, there is more than a grain of lingering truth in the journalist’s words.

The two test series that kicks off next Saturday is not about a contest between the top-ranked test team in the world and a resilient outfit that can still be world beaters although for the sake of appearances it looks like that. Rather, it will be a time-filling dress rehearsal between one team which got the saddle of being the best by the inexplicability of default statistical logic and another which prepares to take on in its own backyard arguably the strongest England team to have visited those shores in years. That way, there is more for Australia to take out of this short series. For India, it will probably be a question of: “Will Harbhajan Singh once again regain something like his lost form against the Aussies who bring out the best in him?” “Will Laxman again be very, very special?” “Will Tendulkar leave Ponting even farther in terms of hundreds?” “Will India continue their stay at number one for a little while before the bubble collapses one night?”

Personally, this series still induces just enough excitement for me as I am one of them rare breed of test cricket lovers who have been outnumbered, outstripped and outflanked by the followers of the game’s youngest sibling – namely T20 cricket. Also, the prospect of seeing Rahul Dravid bat again in a home series, especially after his deplorable outings in Sri Lanka where he “found new ways of getting out”, is more than just a consoling thought. Add the fact that Zaheer Khan, my favourite Indian bowler among those playing now by a distance, and Gautam Gambhir are back in the team, the side promises to be a balanced one that can retain the Border-Gavaskar trophy the Indians took in 2008 after a 2-0 triumph, one of the rare one-sided series these two teams have played out in the last eleven years. (Cheteshwar Pujara’s selection is another enthralling prospect and although he may not make the eleven with Raina in silken touch, there is one guy who may splice the Indian middle order in the years to come).

For the Australians, the rookie and the veteran alike, there is a point to prove. Ponting himself would want to do more than just that. Undoubtedly, one of the run machines of the decade and the greatest players of the modern era, Ponting’s sub-twenty-five average in India does not quite become of a player of his class. As a captain, who has been widely criticised as having ridden on the back of a great team without exceptional leadership skills, Ponting has to conquer the final frontier too, one which Steve Waugh failed to do despite his most intense bids and one which the Australians did way back in 2004 under Adam Gilchrist as injury kept Ponting out of the two matches that Australia won to take an unassailable lead. Michael Clarke expects big things from his captain and I hope he is right for the sake of Australian cricket. Clarke himself is a transformed batsman in test cricket these days, if his Ashes exploits last year are any indication, and with the likes of Hussey, Katich and Watson he would like to forge a strong batting combine to help his captain in the conquest. Although Australians are thin in the bowling department, with Mitchell Johnson, arguably their spearhead, wavering between Herculean and pedestrian, one can expect them to raise their game against a tough opposition when the stakes go up.

After all is said and done, the outcome will still be hard to predict not despite but because both teams are far from playing their best cricket. In terms of consistency and ruthlessness, England followed by South Africa has been playing the best cricket in all forms of the game for some months now. Under those circumstances, the focus of an India-Australia series can for a change be on the actual cricket and not on whether one team is the undisputed the leader and the other a rightful successor. Right now, both teams are miles away from the Holy Grail. The cricket between them, however, may be as exciting as it has been at Kolkata, Adelaide, Nagpur, Sydney, Perth and Mohali over the decade because it is always a challenging task to play India in India and it is always daft to write off any Australian team.

So as spend the week eating into the workload left for my submission, I will also wait for the umpire at the popping crease to call play. And just for the fun of it, I would say it is likely to be 1-0 India.

Has the Wall cracked?!

As the India-Sri Lanka three series rubber, which in hindsight can be called quite literally that, reaches the business end with an Indian interest surprisingly remnant in the last two days,  I am contemplating the swan song of one of my favourite cricketers ever and my favourite batsman to have ever played the game. Swan song, some may ask, because Rahul Dravid himself has not quite evinced any interest of retirement? Yet sport is as metaphorical an agent of human destiny as any other where a practitioner's end foreshadows him. So, as Sachin Tendulkar's second coming - or is it third? - continues with staggering consistency and keeps putting the master beyond Ponting's and everybody else's grasp among other things, Dravid's half century-less series which may well conclude that way does give me that lump-throat feeling of truth as I had pointed out on twitter. And it is not at all about the number of runs he has scored which can vary with good fortune or lack of it. 

Sample this. Venue: Sinhalese Sports Club (a.k.a bowlers graveyard these days). Sri Lanka has mauled the Indian bowlers in getting to 642. Vijay and a marauding Sehwag have put on 165 for the first wicket. Enter Dravid, plays eighteen balls for 3 and then plays back to one that's only slightly quicker, by no stretch of imagination a Goliath-slayer so to speak. Gets adjudged LBW beyond a smidgen of doubt. In an innings where every other Indian - barring Harbhajan Singh - would get off the mark and reach double figures, Dravid's end was uncharacteristic and dismal considering the pitch but sadly betrayed the only technical defect that he arguably has, playing round the front pad, which lets him down when he is out of touch. Fast forward to the post-tea session on Day 2 of the final test at the P Sara Oval. Dravid strokes some silken drives through extra-cover and down the ground to get to a rapid 23. And then he plays slightly back to a ball he should have been forward to. The ball would take half of leg stump and Simon Taufel does not give those not out even in dreams within a dream! A finely blossoming innings done in - again by playing round the front pads.

For a casual onlooker, Rahul's dismissals within a space of a session under ten days may not ring any bells. But for someone like me who has followed his career closely as a cricket aficionado as well as a fan of his batting, these successive dismissals suggest something that has been, in cricketing circles, unheard of as far as Dravid is concerned: they were an action of replay of each other, the variables being the pitch, the bowler type of the bowler and the umpire who gave the verdict on the two occasions. After fourteen years and 140 odd tests Dravid remains a keen student of the game and he himself would know exactly what I am pointing out. Is it a mere coincidence? If it is not, is it Dravid's physical reflexes which are abandoning him (for the mental side of his game hardly becomes casual and remains one of his greatest assets)? 

Even the gritty forty-four in the second innings of the crucial test at Galle ended with a casual - read unDravid-like - airy flick on the leg side. That the dismissal triggered a batting implosion heralded by retiring giant Murali will go into Sri Lankan cricketing lore forever. What if Dravid and Tendulkar had survived the night and batted the next morning? Perhaps, we might have saved the test match and the series would still be love-all. Yet sport just like life cannot take more than just cold wisdom from the teachings of hindsight.  

While a lot seems to have gone on in the Wall's cricketing career since his return from that inopportune injury he sustained in Bangladesh earlier this year, an effect that time allied by a challenged and therefore desperate mind is able to concoct when the going gets to thwart your sanity among other things, only four innings have in reality gone by without his scoring a hundred. Yet this glorious game, often abominably reduced to reams of statistics, is more than just numbers. Dravid himself understands that better than others who may get carried away by the lovely but sometime superficial contours of statistical Manhattans. Which is why the mode of his recent dismissals becomes such a stark signal begging - if unwittingly - the question: has the wall cracked to the extent that even innings displaying qualities of great fight will be seen no more?

The last time I asked that question was sometime in the December of 2008 when everybody, including the likes of my dearest friend Siddharth and me, was preparing to give the Wall a half-sighed half-smiled farewell. He already had ten and quarter thousand runs then and twenty-five hundreds. What followed was satisfying for a Dravid fan: a fluent 136 against England at Mohali, a consistent although ton-less tour of New Zealand, and three more hundreds. Along the way, Dravid has gone past 11,000 test runs, crossed Allan Border, returned from another injury and looked solid before returning to the pavilion to singular mistakes which Dravid would own up to.

One more innings remains for Dravid and India in this series, and going by the way the match is shaping up it may be a match-winning - and series-winning - innings or a match-losing outing. So often in the past, Dravid has stepped up to the plate in crucial last game scenarios: Jamaica 2006 and Rawalpindi 2004 come to mind instantly with the freshness of today's dawn. Even as the realist in me wonders if Dravid has the capacity to bite the bullet, quell the jangling nerves and do an encore that gave him the tag Mr. Dependable, the undying romanticist in me, that will love Dravid irrespective of whatever he accomplishes or does not accomplish henceforth, hopes for a miracle. With a two-test cameo series against Australia in the offing, Dravid may well be looking forward for substantial runs against the previous decade's Indian arch-enemy in tests too for it could be his last battle against them. 

But as Peter Roebuck rightly says: there are only so many battles left in a man. Perhaps, Dravid's reserves of resilience are at their dregs. You could say that whatever Dravid has been since he warded off two seasons of woeful form are a bonus! Tendulkar remains a genius and merits no comparison with anyone else on any given batting criterion, even those yet to be invented, unless the criterion goes simply by the surname Bradman. Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara, Manish Pandey, Rohit Sharma, Badri and others are chipping away in domestic cricket, their runs becoming a fusillade at various position in the Indian batting line-up. Dravid's own position at 3 is not as strong as it used to be. But for what it once was, and for a very long time, Dravid's name in Indian cricket will remain synonymous with dependability, dedication and depth. 

That he will always be remembered as a foot solider and not as a commander or a general is not an embarrassment and is sometimes, in fact, irrelevant. It stands for whatever Dravid has stood for, through victories at Rawalpindi, Headingley, Kandy, Kingston, Perth, Kolkata and Adelaide, draws at the Oval, Port Elizabeth, Johannesberg and Hamilton and heart-breaking losses at Durban (1996), Karachi, Barbados, Sydney and elsewhere. It stands for a sportsman who has made the most use of his abilities and pushed the boundaries of limitations manifold more than anybody including he would have expected and a man who more often than not challenged the best out of himself when the team was down for the count. Pride, performance and forthrightness have driven Dravid on the field making him a Steve Waugh-like champion. And humility has kept him grounded as a person off it. 

    

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.

India Sri Lanka Test Series: Preview

So once again Sri Lanka takes on India on the cricket field. As someone – I do not remember whether a friend or a cricket journalist – recently said India-Sri Lanka contests are becoming a bit like bet matches between two close-lying neighbourhoods in a city. The last test match the Emerald Islanders played was against the Indians, late last year and after that the two teams have taken on each other in a number of (partly futile) One-Day internationals, including the finals of the supposedly coveted Asia Cup. Now the attention turns to the longer version again with the first test of a three-series rubber beginning in Galle tomorrow (July 18, Sunday).

As I had already discussed in my previous post, the greatest significance of the match will arguably be that it will be Muttiah Muralidharan’s final test. As the veteran off-spinner stands on 792 wickets, the local crowd would be keen to see if their country’s greatest cricketer can get to 800 and add one more feather to his overcrowded cap. If Murali takes at least eight in the match at an economy rate we have come to associate with him (barring the last few test matches), then Sri Lanka may take a 1-0 lead in the series. That is exactly what Murali and the Sri Lankan team and fans will want.

For India, the challenge represents yet another opportunity to correct one of three blemishes in the country’s status as the world’s No.1 ranked test team: they have not beaten Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka. Should the Indians pull this one off, they will then be left with the task of beating the top two teams of the last decade in their own backyards – South Africa and Australia. It is however sensible not to get too far ahead of oneself and look at this particular series as yet another opportunity to win abroad.

While the Indians have the batting wherewithal, the bowling attack is surely hamstrung by the absence of India’s premiere bowler – both in sub-continental and pace-conducive conditions – over the last two years, Zaheer Khan. As Harsha Bhogle quips this may as well mean that 50% of India’s bowling attack is gone which speaks volumes about Zaheer’s role as India’s bowling vanguard in recent years but also suggests something of the extreme reliance placed on him by skippers. However, indispensability in thought is a crime in life and particularly in team sport and Zak’s absence represents a chance for his replacement(s) to step up to the plate. Even if Indians pick the best squad from the resources they have, picking up 20 wickets in Sri Lanka is going to be a huge challenge especially if Harbhajan Singh and his spin partner do not contribute significantly.

The batting line-up that continues to be one of the most-vaunted batting line-ups in World Cricket too did not give a good account of itself in the preparatory match against the Board President’s XI where the Indians were out-batted and out-bowled. Apart from Gambhir’s solid hit at the top of the order, which proved once again that he is India’s emerging Mr. Consistent in all formats of the game, Yuvraj Singh’s breezy hundred was a positive. Nonetheless, Yuvraj’s inclusion over Pujara who has been in sublime form as evidenced by his exploits for India A in England recently smacks of the same kind of ineptitude that BCCI’s selections generally involve. While it may not be a great idea to read too much into a solitary tour game, the fact that they gave six wickets to Mendis – who menaced them the last time they were there –in the first innings may be a little unsettling for the visitors.    

I do not like to pick verdicts especially before even the first ball has been sent down in a series. But it is clear that it is going to be a battle of two bowling attacks in attritional conditions, one under-par and the other with a lot of potential but which has not seen much of test cricket lately. The bowling attack that performs better is likely to win the series as both batting line-ups are studded with fine players, tons of experience and plenty of runs.  My hunch though is Sri Lanka may just take the series 1-0 or (if all the pitches are result-oriented) perhaps 2-0 or 2-1. As usual since the Indians are at the other end, I hope I am wrong. We will know in four weeks’ time.