India is a good team, but not even close to wearing the tag of a “great” team

India is a team that plays to its strengths and does well to hide its weaknesses.

By Vidooshak

The Lord’s Test confirmed to me what I feared after Dominica. India is a team that plays to its strengths and does well to hide its weaknesses. This India isn’t Kapil Dev‘s 1986 India or Steve Waugh‘s win-at-all-costs Australia or Clive Lloyd’s attack-relentlessly West Indies. This is not a criticism; it’s simply recognition of reality.

This India is not about winning and losing and letting the ranking take care of itself. It seems for this Indian team, managing the ranking is critical. Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s press conference at the end of the Lord’s Test was as much an exercise in excuse mongering than anything else that I have ever heard. It did his standing little good.

Batting in the fourth innings is never easy. It’s, in fact, rare that a side facing 458 and more than a 100 overs can stave off defeat. However, it also appears that India were aware of this fact. In fact, they seem to have memorized these types of statistics. Therefore, while I saw gallant effort, I somehow didn’t see bloody-mindedness. I didn’t see the Sachin Tendulkar battling through back pain in Chennai or the Tendulkar batting with Prabhakar while scoring his maiden hundred. I didn’t see VVS Laxman fighting tooth and nail at Sydney to restore some pride to a losing Test. I didn’t see the Dhoni of 2007 resolutely keeping away everything to instill confidence in the fans that he was not just a swashbuckler, but a man on a mission who had a decent head on his shoulders. Right from the moment, Rahul Dravid fished foolishly outside off stump, it felt like India didn’t believe they could save the match.

The match was more or less lost when India lost Zaheer Khan on Day One. Dravid came back into his own and helped India make a match of it. So India is a good team. But unfortunately, India is still not close to wearing the tag of a “great” team. But this is more a misalignment with my romantic notion of wanting India to be a dominant world beater, than a problem with the Indian team. The Indian team has found a formula for success and is relentlessly sticking to it and executing it with great discipline.

While on the subject of Dravid, no one has scored more runs for India since his debut and no one has turned out in more Tests than him. The fact that he has found his mojo again is great news for India. He has also graciously acknowledged that Tendulkar affords him the luxury of failure, although it has been rare until recently.

Somehow, the World Cup win seems to have lulled India. It’s now been two Tests in a row that India has given up on the last day facing high odds. There are huge positives coming out of this Tests, that suggest that India can pull one or two back in the three Tests to follow. Praveen Kumar, Ishant Sharma and Rahul Dravid. Maybe adding Sreesanth to the mix will create unpredictability required to the bowling. Harbhajan Singh perhaps needs some rest and needs to make way for Amit Mishra. Harbhajan isn’t batting or bowling well.

With Tendulkar and Gautam Gambhir hopefully finding their rhythm, India could be expected to win at least one Test out of the remaining three. India has dealt with English batting reasonably well, despite not getting England out even once. With another bowler, India can take care of that. They seem to have good plans and are executing to them. However, I did feel that on the first morning Praveen Kumar and Ishant Sharma weren’t making the batsmen play enough, but that’s probably because they were still coming to terms with the amount of swing they were getting. With this Test, behind them, India has much better chances of winning – with or without Zaheer Khan.

This loss didn’t hurt as much. The series has just begun.

(Vidooshak is a blogger @Opinions on Cricket. He was drawn into cricket by Golandaaz as a schoolboy. His bluster overshadows his cricketing ability. He played as a wicket-keeper in a college team but was promptly dropped. The college selection committee had slightly higher standards than Pakistani selectors. He did reasonably well in tennis ball cricket until he was benched for a final game by the team that he captained. To say some of it was due to his opinions would be an understatement of sorts. Regardless, Vidooshak finds time to opinionate relentlessly and lives a vicarious life by watching cricket teams make obvious mistakes. Good news for Vidooshak is that someone always loses a cricket game, someone always gets belted and someone always flops. Vidooshak always looks for an alternative explanation and rarely agrees with mainstream consensus. Needless to say he has no friends, only ‘tolerators’! While not throwing his weight around, Vidooshak does not run marathons or draw pictures, but reads voraciously on all topics, volunteers at local failing schools, is an avid but average golfer and runs an Indian association in mid-west America)

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