The Nagpur Test was a no contest by any standard. And the Indian fan didn't know how and where to hide his face. His team's early card-like collapse of 37 for 5 wickets on the fourth day brought the humongous defeat by 342 runs evoked tremendous recalls of Leeds in 1952 when we were 0 for 4 (sic) and of Lords in 1974 when the entire team was simply crushed for 42 all out.
Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman, the high and mighty trinity, succumbed without the semblance of resistance to bowling that was fast and accurate on a pitch that gave bounce, with Laxman hooking the first ball of newly introduced Kasprowicz as though he had only the last few moments of his life to live.
It was left to Sehwag and Parthiv Patel to claw back and show to the Aussies that at least some Indians had b***s behind their flannels. Zaheer Khan's two sixes off Warne and Agarkar's three successive fours of McGrath redeemed the humility. It was all hopeless to influence the outcome, of course. But they at least chose to die with their boots on.
In the first innings too, Indian's frontline batsmen played as though the green top pitch had Improvised Explosive Devices planted therein and it was their job to first defuse them -- they were all so suspicious, so slow in run-getting until Kaif and Patel lent a semblance of respectability to the total. To them, fast bowlers McGrath, Gillespie and Kasprowicz were like frightful looking aliens from Mars who were not to be confronted face to face; the batsmen preferred to play them always on the back foot as the balls lifted and left their tentative bats.
Not one among our 'great' ones were bold and imaginative to stand a foot or so outside the crease -- as Hayden does -- and convert the short-of-good length balls into balls that could be driven off the front foot for fours or pushed hard for singles and twos.
The net result was slow motion batting with one horrifying exception: Laxman cut a Warne delivery into the hands of the gully fielder without following the basic principle of first assessing the bounce which the world's best leg-spinner was getting on the spongy pitch. Laxman did not learn; in the 2nd innings, he chose to hook Kasprowicz without adjusting to the pace and bounce of the pitch.
This inability of our batsmen, including the 'greats' to take ones and twos has now become chronic. They will just not push the ball slowly to the deepish fielder or between two fielders so as to scamper for a single. Instead, they will stay cribbed, cabined and confined waiting to smack the bad ball to the boundary. But these computerised fast bowlers of Australia just do not bowl those bad ones.
It was left to Agarkar and Zaheer Khan to mock their seniors with aggression that brought a 10th wicket partnership of 50 off 37 balls. The bowlers they hit all round the field were the same that had struck terror in the bats and hearts of our 'great' batsmen; the only fact that had changed was that the ball had lost its hardness and hence its bounce off the pitch -- the development that our earlier batsmen the 'great' ones, you know -- could not achieve.
There's no question that India's batting was the villain that gifted the Australians their historic series win here after 1969. Yes, their bowlers did bowl well, very well, but our batsmen let us down badly, very badly. On the other hand, while our bowlers were at least one street behind their rivals, the entire Australian batting performed creditably -- from both the openers to number 10. The Indians have just had one centurion so far; the Aussies have had four with two scoring in the nineties as well.
It's futile and mean to blame the green-top Nagpur pitch for India's defeat. After all, didn't we lose by over 200 runs at Bangalore when the turning pitch favoured us?
Similarly, it would be churlish to ascribe the defeat at Nagpur to the absence of Ganguli and Harbhajan. Both were there at Bangalore and what happened?
The truth of the matter is that this Indian team has not only been out of form but has inherent weakness that are one too many.
Firstly, it just doesn't have a Test class wicket-keeper; no computer software is available to calculate the impact of Parthiv Patel's shabby keeping on the team's overall performance.
Secondly, the team doesn't have a Test class opening batsman to partner Sehwag.
Thirdly, the team just doesn't run well between wickets.
Fourthly, our bowlers are not so good as to run through the opposition for low-scores; unless our batsmen get big scores, our bowlers can't get us victory.
Lastly, there is our field placing. See how, in match after match against any opposition, the rival batsmen get their singles and twos quite easily. See how Damien Martyn just made merry with his off-side strokes -- New Zealand had shown in a recent season how a cordon of cover fielders bottled him up and his performance. See the number of times our bowlers give away boundaries in the fine-leg region just because there has been no fielder kept in that position.
In this context, it is learnt that before the current series John Buchanan, the Aussie team's coach, readily accepted an Indian statistician's offer of computerised areas to which Indian batsmen played a majority of their strokes, and Buchanan makes good use of that that data to choke up our batsmen or trap them. John Wright, India's coach, is said to have refused a similar offer on Australian batsmen's stroke making.
Yes, cricket is as much a mind game as it is a game of physical skills and discipline. Gilchrist's entire team had those qualities in larger portions than India's team.
Congratulations to them, then, in recording a series triumph in India after 35 years.
Well played mate, very well played.
