A TROUBLED land with little to entertain and four-day Test matches means time hangs heavy in Zimbabwe. Television is marginal, newspapers are more like state handouts and even the eclipse, where we were, only achieved 98% totality. That is about as interesting as going to see a thriller and getting out before the climax.
The advantage of not being in paradise though is that it allows the mind to wander and to dream. If you love Indian cricket that can be a frustrating exercise but having chosen to love it you must withstand the odds. If that sounds like a line out of a movie, it will be even more if you allow a scriptwriter a shot at translation, put it down to the old weakness; romance over reality.
There are a lot of romantics here in Zimbabwe; which is a lot better than having a lot of cynics in power. And they have all been debating how Indian cricket can go forward, which straightaway makes the discussion very different from what happens in the BCCI. And in spite of having filled the pages of The Sportstar with this before, I must return to a critical, and terribly neglected, issue. India needs opening batsmen and till such time as that happens, we will not win a Test series overseas. It is occupying the minds of coaches, of cricket players, of the media, basically of everybody except those that need to think about it. We now have one opening batsman and while he is good, we run the risk of telling him that he is supernatural. The best thing that can happen to Shiv Sundar Das, and to Indian cricket, is to confront him with three other openers so that he continues to walk down the path of growth. He has so far, but in the absence of competition the best minds can rust.
If there is one thing to be learnt from the little success that Das has achieved, it is that openers are rarely converted players. You need a different technique, a different mindset and that is a rare combination. But it is not an impossible one to find. There are a few young openers in India but they are being destroyed by our pitches and our selection policy. We have pitches of low bounce and so they cannot play the rising ball. And they do not get picked. We pick two openers in a training camp of 26. As one of the players here put it, "If those two were Gavaskar and Greenidge, you could close your eyes and pick two" But are they?
The way ahead, and it is an obvious path, is to pick the eight best players and send them immediately to the MRF camp, or to Mohali, to play against the best fast bowlers on really bouncy pitches and see who can cope. If we had an 'A' team touring, we would have been able to sift a few already, but then 'A' tours are boring; they make no money for the BCCI. If you are busy plucking fruit, why bother sowing seeds?
And so we continue to ask middle order batsmen and wicketkeepers to open the batting. It is bizarre. Ask yourself what you would do if you needed opening batsmen. Would you keep plonking good young players in or would you pick the best of the specialists? To my mind there isn't even a need for debate on this. It is a special job and it needs specialists? If you had no spinners, would you ask a fast bowler to run in from three yards and bowl off-breaks? If nobody is asking Zaheer Khan to bowl leftarm spin why are we asking Hemang Badani to open the batting?
The funny thing is that it is easier for an opener to bat at number six than for a middle order man to open the batting. So if we have to err, we must err on the side of more openers, not less. And the results are there for everyone to see. Look what Atherton and Trescothick have meant to England; look at what is happening in the West Indies where they send out a new pair everytime; look at what Das has done already.
It is very easy for the selectors to say, 'Where are the openers'? If it was that easy, a tribal in Bihar, a boatman from Kerala and a priest from Haridwar could be selectors. We have to pick from what we have. When there is drought you eat what you have, you don't sit and cry for mangoes. If they can show foresight in picking Nehra and Zaheer Khan, I wonder why they cannot pick two young openers. We must all be naive because it sounds too simple.
But the selectors are only the tail-end of the process. It is a process that must begin with the administration. There must be a clear path and we don't even have a dust-track yet. In our obsession with the end, we have forgotten the beginning. And so all we talk about is tours and more tours; sponsorship and more sponsorship; logos and more logos. We want to go to Pakistan and we want to go to Melbourne for a week and we want to stuff more three and four-nation tournaments down our cricketers' throats. Tours and sponsorships and logos and press conferences are fancy affairs; they put you in the news and in fancy hotels. Searching for openers is so drab by comparison, isn't it? like searching for pyjamas instead of Armani jackets. It is not fashionable.
What a tragedy that Indian cricket and the men that run it, are so caught up in the icing that they are not interested in the cake anymore. We need openers, we need 'A' tours and we need to spend some time and money on them. We need to look at roots from time to time because they produce the flowers and the fruits.
The openers are the roots of a side and till we have them, we will never have a strong tree. The pity is that we have almost everything else!!
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