Cricket India

You should honestly congratulate yourself in choosing cricket as your favorite game because there seems to be no game which commands so much attention in our country. Illiterate street urchins and knowledgeable parliamentarians find time to comment on the poor performance levels of Dravid and co and ignorant as they are of the game are adamant that they also should be heard while solutions to the debacle are discussed.

I am surprised by the willingness on the part of certain bigwigs to go to any distance to get ridiculed. If you are elected to the parliament on the basis of your strengths, you better stick to them. Entering uncharted waters with impunity seems to be the privilege of parliamentarians.

But such outbursts on the part of these gentlemen are pardonable as they have a history of badmouthing everything they don’t know about. But a little more common sense is expected from the educated common man. Something better than total lack of sensitivity. If only they had gone through the stats of the recent one-dayers played in South Africa, they would have thought twice before crying foul about Indian team’s dismal performance. Only one team- Australia- has won more matches than they lost in S.A. All others have 70% to 80% going against them. Against such a historical handicap, an Indian failure need not be and should not be interpreted as a colossal ignominy.

They, South Africans, are brought up on those bouncy and seaming tracks. They have through continued exposure and trial and error, have learnt to do better. Against such a team, all tourists are at a disadvantage, especially the teams from the sub-continent where pitches because of obvious reasons are low and yield spin. So an Indian team which has several delightful artists with the willow on home tracks, finds the SA tracks a little too hot to handle. No wonder in that. Unlike olden days, the present day teams don’t get even a semblance of a chance to get acclimatized to the local conditions. They straightaway are asked to play the ODIs or tests. How do you think the players can make the necessary adjustments without sufficient exposure? If that is the case with batting, this argument is equally valid for bowling also. The Indian pace men might find the pitches there a little more helpful but they would soon realize that the local batsmen who have such stuff for breakfast, lunch and dinner handle them with magical efficiency. Then they have to look beyond parameters like line, length, swing or seam. Which again comes only through exposure. And that obviously is denied to the teams.

Newlands was definitely a better show than Durban. India had South Africa on the mat and only some superhuman hitting allowed them to run away with the match. And in their reply India could be happy about Dravid’s and Dhoni’s displays. It shows India’s performance could improve as days go by. But the one-dayers will be over soon and the more spiteful tracks might be waiting for the tourists.

Such a tour should be understood and accepted as a unique experience for our players and instead of criticizing them mercilessly we better would look at the ways in which the teams could be better equipped to handle such challenges on a long term basis.

Tags: SA pitches, Bouncy tracks

# posted by Upendra Varma @ 12:38 PM