An hour of madness

THE defeat at Harare should teach a few lessons. Of course, cricket is a learning process but every step, every match, you learn something. How best you utilise that knowledge decides the course of your career.

I often used to ask cricketers like Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Mohinder Amarnath as to what it takes to make a successful, complete cricketer. And the most important thing I learnt from my interaction with these greats was that to be hailed as good you had to be consistent. It does not come overnight and it takes a lot of hard work.

And hard work is what the Indians lacked in that defeat at Harare. I know Zimbabwe is not the strongest team in international cricket but it is not the weakest either. So, any sense of complacency was bound to have a negative effect and that is what I suspect happened when India planned for the match.

Team composition, to me, is like a puzzle. You miss one block and everything comes crashing down. In the case of the Indian team, the picture was quite hazy once it was known that Sadagopan Ramesh was not fit to play the second Test. The planning went haywire right from the time the team management picked the XI for the match.

Messing up the winning combination was a mistake. I can understand Ramesh pulling out on fitness grounds but pray, what wrong did Zaheer Khan do to sit on the sidelines? For him, watching the Test from the dressing room must have been a very frustrating experience. The team had everything going for it in the first Test but this Indian team cut the very branch on which it was sitting.

How could they leave out Zaheer? It was hard to understand. In the company of Ashish Nehra, this left-armer had bowled a very effective spell and was constantly a threat to the Zimbabwean batsmen. And here the team management left him out when Zaheer should have been firing away at the opposition.

How can any team management justify the inclusion of Ajit Agarkar? I have nothing against Agarkar. He is a promising lad, likes to compete but how long will he continue to be promoted as a promising bowler?

The aggression that Zaheer brings into his bowling is something the team needs. He bowls his heart out and makes no compromise on the field. Indian cricket could do with a few more like Zaheer and Nehra but certainly not Agarkar, who is yet to assume the role of a strike bowler. At the most, Agarkar can be seen as a support bowler provided he does his job well. I have no complaints against Agarkar as a one-day bowler. He justifies his place there. It should also be remembered that he is good in Indian conditions when he gets the old ball to reverse swing. Overseas, he can't succeed without getting the ball to swing in.

Now, look at how the team management has treated the opening slot. It is a position which needs a technically accomplished batsman. Openers are a rare breed and a batsman who is not good technically is vulnerable straightaway. He has to have the temperament to blunt the attack and lay the base for the middle order. Having flexibility is fine but that should not mean making a middle-order batsman make his Test debut as an opener. In my opinion, Rahul Dravid is suited for this job and it is time he assumed the role.

I don't understand how the team left India without a third opener in mind. You can't go looking around for one only when Ramesh or Das gets injured. If they could not have persisted with Ramesh, the tour selectors should have asked Dravid to open. After all, he is a team man and it was in the team's interest that he opened the innings.

Going back to the defeat in the second Test, I don't agree that we played bad cricket. It was mindless batting for an hour which did the damage.

The tour, otherwise, had been productive and did help the team discover a few players with a lot of potential like Das and Nehra. India lost the Test only in that one mad hour on the fourth morning when the batsmen let the team down badly. It was one of the most inept batting performances from an Indian line-up for a long time. It also hurt because it came against an average international attack. The Indians had dominated the series until that pathetic procession which undid all the good work.

I agree with what John Wright said of some batsmen playing poor shots. It is time V. V. S. Laxman realised that it is different playing the ball on the rise on dead tracks in India and doing the same overseas. Extravagant strokeplay does not help the team at all and India cannot afford to lose a batsman like Laxman cheaply.

It was a bad match for Javagal Srinath in the sense that he did not bowl to his expected standards. I know he tried hard in the second innings but at times he gave the feeling that he was not going flat out and was holding himself back a little. I know he also must have felt the need to contribute in that crucial hour but sometimes things don't work your way despite your best and honest effort. This match was one which Srinath would like to forget in a hurry, I am sure.

Last, but not the least, it was a tough time for Sourav Ganguly. As a captain, he has failed to lead by example but it is also true that nothing is going right for him. He needs to be backed. He must keep his chin up and motivate himself and the team. It is a long season and Ganguly will have plenty of opportunities to prove his worth. Let him remember how Mark Taylor went through a similar turmoil and came out strongly. Taylor was never rattled by failures. Ganguly should learn a lesson there. It is only a matter of time before he finds his form and plays a greater role in the team's victories.