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India vs New Zealand 1st ODI: Kiwis’ scrambled heads yet to derive best batting approach in India

For any team to have spent more than a month in India and still not having derived what can be termed as the best approach to batting is flabbergasting.

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Tom Latham’s 79 saved New Zealand from a lot of embarrassment on Sunday © AFP

For any team to have spent more than a month in India and still not having derived what can be termed as the best approach to batting is flabbergasting, and New Zealand have no one else but themselves to blame for their misfortune so far. Their troubles with the bat have certainly compounded with the poor shows of their star batsmen, and to top it off, the Indians have found wickets at regular intervals from their spinners as well as fast bowlers. But if there is one thing that will disappoint New Zealand is their failure to make most of the favourable conditions which Dharamsala had offered, and they now head into the remaining four games of the tour with a bagful of worries. FULL CRICKET SCORECARD: India vs New Zealand, 1st ODI at Dharamsala

India captain MS Dhoni, who invited New Zealand to bat first in the opening ODI at Dharamsala keeping the dew factor in evening in mind, admitted at the end of the game that even the hosts were not sure about the nature of the pitch. With the Indians naming two specialist spinners in their ranks, New Zealand would not have expected the seamers to cause as much damage as Hardik Pandya and Umesh Yadav did at Dharamsala, setting up the game nicely for their side. But then, was it due to consistent good bowling by the Indians, or the Kiwis faltered on their part and lost the game?

In the first ODI on Sunday, Hardik Pandya provided the first breakthrough, removing Martin Guptill on a delivery that bounced more than expected. If Guptill got a good delivery, New Zealand captain Kane Williamson played a stroke in the air that went straight to third man. In desperate need of runs, Ross Taylor could have looked for a cautious approach coming in at 29 for 2, but he attempted a half-stroke on the first ball, only to be caught behind for a first-ball duck. Jimmy Neesham was dismissed on perhaps the gentlest of deliveries, and Luke Ronchi let his team down by playing one straight to mid on at a time when New Zealand needed their batsmen to drop the anchor.

This was not the first occasion that New Zealand imploded. Let us go back into the second innings of the first Test at Kanpur, as on Day Four, the wicket was still supportive to the batsmen who wanted to apply and play as per the merit of the ball. But New Zealand shot themselves in the foot again, Taylor got himself run out, Guptill played the price of being over-aggressive and Tom Latham missed a straight delivery from Ravichandran Ashwin.

Throughout the Test series, New Zealand kept getting surfaces which were excellent for batting. Various Indian batsmen at different stages showed them how to, but there was absolutely no one in their Kiwis’ ranks to take a leaf out of the hosts’ books. Agree, that for touring batsmen, even the Indians, replicating that their hosts batsmen are doing can be tough, but then, isn’t international cricket, especially Tests, are all about learning on the job and giving your best? But it is certainly a crime to keep juggling between the aggressive approach and being cautious.

The South African cricket team showed far more gumption that this New Zealand side when they toured India in 2015-16. The South Africans, who were then at the pinnacle of Test cricket, did get some of the most vicious of pitches to play Test cricket on. But wasn’t their planning and execution spot-on when they played the limited-overs leg of their tour? For those who have forgotten, out of the three series that South Africa played in India in 2015-16, they won two. Indians have generally remained a dominant force at home like every other top international side. But South Africans did manage to breach those strong walls and hammer India in the ODI and T20I series.

New Zealand cannot be expected to emulate South Africa, or even England, for what they did in 2012. If at all the Kiwis want to try and replicate what the South Africans did in 2015-16 in limited-overs series and England in the Test series in 2012, they will find that both the teams had their batsmen scoring heavy. Here, the Kiwis are yet to score a century on their tour of India 2016-17!

In Kolkata during the second Test, while the Indians did struggle in their first innings, Kiwis were blown away by Bhuvneshwar Kumar’s seam bowling. Even at Indore in the final Test, where the pitch remained good for batting on all four days, New Zealand lost the contest by batting horribly in the final session of the fourth day. New Zealand were not expected to win in India, but the least they could have done is to learn how to bat in such conditions against quality spin, especially when the wickets were favourable for batting?

Williamson is among the best batsmen in international circuit at the moment, and going by his aura, he will remain among the best in time to come. But for New Zealand to expect Williamson to do the bulk of scoring will be catastrophic, as no team in international cricket today can win series riding on the exploits of a single player. The lack of runs from Guptill and Taylor must have some repercussion when this is all over, as New Zealand are not as bad a team as they have turned out to be on this Indian tour.

It also comes down to what approach the individuals adopt before any big series. Back in 1998, when Australia were set to tour India with the mighty Shane Warne in their ranks, Sachin Tendulkar practiced endlessly against Laxman Sivaramakrishnan. Tendulkar made the former leg-spinner bowl on the footmarks outside the leg-stump, anticipating that the Australian spin wizard will trouble him with that kind of bowling. When the time arrived for the contest, it was Tendulkar who emerged tall with a splendid 155 at Chennai.

For New Zealand’s defence, the poor Williamson had already cited the lack of preparatory time that his team got ahead of the tour of India. New Zealand arrived in India less than a fortnight before the start of their Test series, and played only one tour match, that too against a strong outfit like Mumbai. Williamson might be right in claiming that his team did not get enough time to prepare, but then, who does? In international cricket today, there is only one team, England, who always give themselves ample amount of time to prepare for any overseas tour.

Maybe, at some point in this tour, New Zealand will look into themselves, rather than in excuses to figure out what has gone wrong. Unless they do that, and arrive at solutions and methods that will truly work for them, New Zealand will keep performing the way they have.

(Devarchit Varma is senior writer with CricketCountry. He can be followed on Twitter @Devarchit)

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