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SPORTS: CRICKET
No Guts,
No Glory
Unless Indians learn to take
on the Aussie attack the series is as good as gone
By Sharda Ugra
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HERE'S HOW, MATE: Waugh's men begin early celebrations
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Along with a huge
slice of humble pie, Indian cricket should try digesting this: defeat
to Australia inside three days in the first Test at the Wankhede Stadium
in Mumbai is the best news it has had in a very long time. The crushing
loss, to a team that has mixed their own singular cricketing cocktail
of inspiration and perspiration, left captain Sourav Ganguly's ears ringing
with boos, his batting line-up torn with self-doubt and his bowlers' bodies
and minds bruised from one afternoon of punishment from two guys called
Gilly and Haydos.
Gilly (Adam Gilchrist) has played in 15 Tests,
has a batting average of 58 and wouldn't recognise a draw if it shot him
in the head because his team has won every game he has played. Haydos
(Matthew Hayden) is this big, religious bloke who first leapt into the
air and then wept in the dressing room after hitting the winning runs
at the Wankhede Stadium.
So what's the good news? That it took only three
days to reduce reputations to rubble, expose every flaw and blemish in
the country's most beloved sporting side and show that the mighty house
of Indian cricket may be colourful and corpulent with cash but it is still
made of cards. Kim Hughes, who led an Australian team to India more than
20 years ago, believes the current series will force Indian cricket to
take a long, hard look in the mirror, "I think too much adulation
is paid for one-day performances. The one-day specialists come in and
slog on flat tracks with no bounce and claim to be great players. They
need to take a reality check." Before they could even respond to
the suggestion, the wizards of Oz, bursting with plan and purpose, slammed
it down on the table.
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Australians take another Indian wicket (left)
and Warne runs out a harried Ganguly
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In Mumbai, Steve Waugh revealed that his decision
to field first on winning the toss was guided partly by some homework
done on the Indian batsmen (the Aussies broke up into groups, each group
given two or three Indians to dissect), the Wankhede wicket (Shane Warne
sought out former Mumbai players at a party to talk about the track) and
partly by the fact that he believed the Indians were not battle-hardened
enough. "India haven't played enough tough Test match cricket in
the past 12 months and we thought we'd put them in and under pressure."
It is this absence of tough cricket on a regular basis that will continue
to debilitate Ganguly's team, whether it play at home or away.
Away victories have acquired a dreamlike status,
but even at home things are getting heated. The last time Indians won
a close series at home was in 1998, beating Mark Taylor's Australia 2-1.
Twelve months ago, India lost its first home series in 13 years, 0-2 to
South Africa. Rather than serve as a wake-up call, India chose to play
only three Tests between then and now-against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.
It is a calendar devised either by a lunatic with the weakest of grasps
on common sense or by an accountant with the heaviest of hands in the
till.
Ravi Shastri, allrounder-turned-no-nonsense
commentator, believes the only solution is brutal. "Bring on the
best-South Africa, Australia, Pakistan-here every two years, get those
batting averages in the 40s down to realistic numbers and get rid of the
false confidence that we have in our team," he says. It did not take
the Australians three days to win the Mumbai Test so emphatically; it
has taken them three tours in five years to come to India and stride the
Wankhede wicket like they owned it.
As other nations learn, India continues to drift
and the bitter-sweet story of Sachin Tendulkar shows just how. Eleven
years into his international career, his batting is a masterpiece in progress.
But during that time, the results of the team he plays in have been nothing
short of tragedy. He made his debut in 1989 against Pakistan and 10 years
later is part of a team that has lost (both home and away) its last five
Tests against Australia, last four against South Africa and two of its
last three against Pakistan. In between there was also a defeat to Zimbabwe.
All this with a Tendulkar striding in to put out fires only to have them
flare up again the moment the opposition catches sight of his retreating
back.
In Mumbai, the Indians looked like they couldn't
frighten geriatric grandmothers. Where they needed patience and plan,
there was panic. Tendulkar's partners ran out of breath even though he
did all the sprinting. Shastri believes the first stumble came when the
Indians started considering their job as good as done with the Australians
at 5-99. "The self-belief of a winning team is itself such a huge
factor that you can never be overconfident." The Indians had only
the smallest opportunity in the match after putting up a poor total and
Gilchrist's cavalry charge took that away from them.
But never mind this bat-wielding compatriot
of Errol Flynn, it was the failure of the Indian batting, their strong
suit as is the Australian bowling, that is still the maze the Indians
must find their way out of before the second Test. It's a problem that
comes in heaps: the openers' inexperience against high-precision, high-quality
seam bowling, Ganguly's indifferent form, and Rahul Dravid and V.V.S.
Laxman's inability to build big totals from bright, battling starts. It
means no partnerships worth putting on paper, no totals to give the paper-thin
bowling attack any hope.
For India to find a way or make one in this
series, it is a batsman other than Tendulkar who must put his hand up
and either find a way or forge one through the commando-style obstacle
course that is the Australian bowling attack. There are still 10 days
more to go for the next Test but acres of ground have already been lost.
Maybe it is in the demeanours of the two leaders.
Waugh walked into the post-match press conference wearing his 120-odd-Test-old
battered, faded Baggy Green cap, at ease as the 35-year-old greying sage
of international cricket. He manages to be both the "great philanthropist"
to quote a suburban dairy which presented his team with a glass-framed
collage in tribute, and a master of the fine art of "mental disintegration",
to quote a leading Australian sports psychologist. The Aussies displayed
the gaudy gift out on their coach's work table near the boundary even
while Waugh twisted the knife a little more. "You only had to look
at the Indians' body language when they went out (to bowl a second time).
They were pretty down so I think we've made some inroads into the second
Test match."
The Indian captain's best attack of this match
came when he snapped, "We've lost, yes. We have to suffer all the
blame. But if you ask so many questions after one Test loss, it's difficult
for me to give an answer to everything." The Bengal left-hander is
27, but greying quickly with far less happy memories than Waugh. Every
day he fights all manner of inner demons and it has begun to show very
early in this, his first searching examination of character. What remains
to be seen is what this reality check does to the captain and the egos
of his teammates.
Ganguly grew weary of the questions but his
team produced another kind of a reply. After the match, the singing and
celebrations in the Australian dressing room were drowned out by a louder
noise: of someone closing the Indian change-room door with a very violent
kick.
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