India : Time for Major Overhaul

[Rachael]

Originally Posted by Wisden

His game was built around a near perfect technique and enormous powers of concentration. It is hard to visualise a more beautiful defence: virtually unbreachable, it made his wicket among the hardest to earn. He played with equal felicity off both front and back foot, had an excellent judgement of length and line and was beautifully balanced. He had virtually every stroke in the book but traded flair for the solidity his side needed more.

Sounds like a description of a classic Test opener to me... occupy the crease, see off the good balls and put away the bad balls. Hardly the stuff of a genuine Test middle order bat though... where you'd classicaly look, rather, for an ability to nudge and nurdle runs with low-risk, delicate touches off even half-decent balls.. which sounds like a description of Thorpe or Laxman.

If India had a couple of genuine opening batsmen ahead of Dravid, Tendulkar and Ganguly then having Laxman at six would be perfect. The problem is not that Laxman's a poor no 6 Test bat.. it's that as a Test no 6 bat he's not coming in with the oposition bowlers kackered after 4 sessions of play.

Sehwag's the ODI batsman of this Indian line up. He's like Tendulkar in one way: he likes to feel the bat on the ball, to get a feel for the ball, and to time his shots. Where he seems unlike Tendulkar is in his temperament when faced with very few balls to hit: instead of just leavig everything that doesn't need to be hit and forcing the new-ball bowlers bowl where HE wants them to bowl he plays into their hands.

[Mike Small]

Originally Posted by Ernest

What he had to say, I have been saying on these boards since I joined, one day cricket does Test Cricket no favours. He goes on to say, how India had played, and he was sure that the India players had been playing Test Cricket, in one day mode. I could not agree more, India are a team of stroke players, no doubt about that, and they pick certain habits up playing ODIs, that they find hard to shake of, when they play Test Cricket.

Sunil Gavaskar here is perhaps making a different point here, one that a lot of people have made in the past, that being how teams from the sub-continent need to find the right balance between the amount and timing of one-day and test cricket they play. And he does have a valid point.

Australia hadn't played test cricket for 3 months coming into this series. In between this series and their last test series against Sri Lanka at home, Australia had played only 7 one-day internationals (3 matches in The Videocon Cup, Amstelveen + 1 NatWest International match vs Pakistan + 3 matches in the ICC Champions Trophy, England). India, on the other hand had a gap of 6 months between this test series and their last one in Pakistan. And more significantly in between that they had played 13 one-day matches (6 in the Asia Cup, Sri Lanka + 2 in The Videocon Cup, Amstelveen + 3 in the NatWest Challenge in England + 2 in the ICC Champions Trophy, England). That's one short of double the number of one-day games Australia played.

I have always felt that teams from the sub continent have been guilty of playing too much one-day cricket. Gavaskar is not the first person to sight an over dose of limited overs cricket as a reason his teams' batsmen's decline in the longer version of the game. Recently Bob Woolmer, Pakistan's coach blames his side's defeat in the first test against Sri Lanka to similar grounds. Pakistan had played even more one-day games (15 to be precise) than India since their historic series and the current one.

Perhaps we can argue that if you are good enough, which I believe most of the Indian batsmen are, then you should be able to make that adjustment. But the fact remains that when a team will play test cricket after such long intervals -6 month in India and Pakistan's case- they will always take longer to make that adjustment.

[Beny]

Indian squad for the Mumbai Test

The need for nurture

Analysis by Amit Varma

October 30, 2004









As many as four players who have never played Test cricket were named in the Indian squad for the Mumbai Test, but you couldn't accuse the selectors of a kneejerk reaction. The Indian team is tattered in spirit and mind, and changes were needed. They are good not just for the team, but also for the players who were dropped. Parthiv Patel, Aakash Chopra and Yuvraj Singh all need a break to sort out their game. Ajit Agarkar bowled well only in patches, and he surely must agree that he hadn't done enough.

The four new players were all from different zones, which may raise familiar questions about how the selectors conduct their business. Be that as it may, it is hard to complain about any of the new selections. They have all excelled in domestic cricket for some time now, and have performed at the India A level as well. They deserve these opportunities, and one hopes that they get a decent run in the side to prove what they are capable of.

Dinesh Karthik had an excellent domestic season last year, scoring hundreds in both the semi-final and the final of the Ranji Trophy, and performed well for India under-19 and India A as well. The selectors, of course, would have looked at his wicketkeeping, rather than his batting, as the core reason for choosing him. We shall soon find out for ourselves how he keeps to the Indian spinners, but he certainly has more experience of Indian pitches than Patel, who has yet to play a Ranji Trophy match, did.

Dheeraj Jadhav, who plays for Maharashtra, used to be a doughty middle-order batsman a couple of years ago, who then transformed himself into an opening batsman who stroked the ball around fluently. He made a century recently in the practice game before this series between India and India A at Bangalore, timing the ball so exquisitely that Sandeep Patil, the India A coach who has seen him in action often, said that he should be the next Indian Test opener.

Jadhav will contend for that place with Gautam Gambhir. Gambhir, who turned 23 when the Chennai Test began, has been prolific in domestic cricket, and his first-class average is an impressive 55.85. A couple of years ago he made successive first-class double-centuries, one of them against the touring Zimbabweans. (The previous three Indians to make 200-plus in a tour game at home were, ahem, Sunil Gavaskar, Dilip Vengsarkar and Sachin Tendulkar.) His footwork has been considered suspect, but the sheer volume of runs he has scored should not be disregarded until he gets a chance at the highest level.

Shib Shankar Paul took 50 wickets in eight matches in the last domestic season, and was lethal in an India A match against Zimbabwe A recently, where he took 12 wickets. He may not get to play in the final XI, with Ashish Nehra likely to accompany Zaheer Khan, but India need to develop their second-string, and Paul should be groomed.

Sridharan Sriram, who has been in stirring form of late, was unlucky to miss out. He is a middle-order batsman, and the Indians are not planning any changes in that area. In fact, if Sourav Ganguly is declared fit, the team management will face the knotty question of who he will replace. Mohammad Kaif, after a combative 50 in each of the last two Tests, deserves to retain his place, and it will be hard to drop a player of VVS Laxman's class, despite his poor form of late. Will both Jadhav and Gambhir stay on the bench as a makeshift opener is tried out? It is a tricky problem.

The selectors cannot be faulted in the choices they have made. But one worries about the men who have been dropped now. There is no disputing the talent of Patel and Yuvraj, and they must be nurtured so that their technical flaws are ironed out and their confidence returns. That is how one builds bench strength. Australia have a system in place which does just that, but does India?

When Patel goes back to Gujarat to play the Ranji Trophy, the level of coaching and physical training he will receive will nosedive. Who will help him put his wicketkeeping technique together again? And if it does come together, who will notice? As Deep Dasgupta pointed out recently, wicketkeepers in Indian domestic cricket are noticed only for the runs they make, and Patel's will count for nothing, because his batting ability was not in question anyway.

Consider that all of the wicketkeepers tried and discarded in the last few years have never come back, but disappeared in the deep black hole of domestic cricket. Rumours have been floating around that Dasgupta's wicketkeeping has improved dramatically, that Ajay Ratra has been working hard, but these are forgotten men. Patel must not be forgotten. Our cricket academy must have a program in place where players like these receive guidance, and where their improvement is monitored. Karthik may turn out to be the wicketkeeper that India has been looking for, but his back-ups should be confident men capable of withstanding the rigours of international cricket.

Consider, as an example, how many of this Australian side were comeback men. Matthew Hayden, Damien Martyn, Simon Katich, Michael Kasprowicz and even Shane Warne were discarded from the Australian side at some time or the other. And then, via the infrastructure available to them at the first-class and academy levels, were nurtured back into the top level. It made them stronger characters, and it made Australia a great side. There is a lesson there for India.