India’s craven and humiliating surrender, not only of the four-match Test series against England by the third game itself, but also of the much-vaunted numero uno ranking among Test-playing countries has raised a raft of troubling questions. And this a mere four months after India scaled the peak of World Cup success! Not only were Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s men played off the park by a tough and resilient England, it was clear they were struggling to find answers to their opponents’ relentless aggression, and England’s dogged unwillingness to let slip the slightest advantage. In the first two games, at Lord’s and Trent Bridge, India at least had their moments but could derive no advantage from them. At Edgbaston, they were in a completely different — and far inferior — league. So glaring was the difference in Birmingham that it seemed there was only one cricket team on the ground, and a ragtag bunch of amateurs facing them. This, mind you, in the presence of batsmen like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Venkatasai Laxman and Virender Sehwag, not to mention Gautam Gambhir and the captain himself. Edgbaston brutally exposed the difference in form, approach, discipline and hunger between the two teams. The figures are shocking: defeats by 196 runs at Lord’s, 319 runs at Trent Bridge, and now by an innings and 242 runs in Birmingham. These are numbers not easily digested — or indeed expected from — the world’s top-ranked team, but they also tell a story of an ever-increasing distance between the two rivals.
Quite naturally, given the enormous expectations and involvement the average Indian invests in the national team, answers are called for. Even an improved showing — however improbable that may sound now — in the fourth and final Test at the Oval and in the five-match ODI series that follows will do little to balance the scale of the three defeats. Post-mortems of this hammering there are bound to be in plenty, but former skipper Sourav Ganguly made a significant point when he said he had not seen an India team as poor as this one in the last 10 years. There were signs in the West Indies where India could not even once cross the 300-run mark in the six innings of the Test series. It was variously put down to the absence of regular openers Sehwag and Gambhir, Tendulkar’s decision to concentrate on getting ready for the England tour, and an unsettled middle order, and that helped hide the fact that the Indians had failed to effectively tackle a below-par Caribbean attack. Against an Ashes-winning bowling combination, it was always going to be a different ballgame altogether, and that’s exactly how it played out.
The mandarins who run Indian cricket have as always maintained a sphinx-like silence, but at some point they will have to come up with explanations — on fitness, scheduling and whether, as the captain has indicated, Team India were indeed playing too much cricket. Other than the break after the IPL, most members of the national squad have been in action almost nonstop, and even though the cricket board has brought in a policy of giving breaks to players who feel the heat of such tight itineraries, that has not paid off either. Clearly, the malaise goes much deeper, the rot is far more widespread than previously suspected or believed, and there are no easy answers to be had in the face of such a fearful mauling. Better scheduling? Wholesale personnel changes? Splitting of the captaincy? None of these seem adequate at the moment. For now, it can only be hoped that a change in format will bring in its wake altered fortunes.
Source: The Asian Age
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