India must be patient with Ganguly

IF frustration could be the seed for progress, India's cricketers can tell themselves that they achieved much in the six weeks they spent in Zimbabwe. But frustration can be a double-edged weapon. Through its distasteful odour, it can push performers away from itself and towards huge success. But it can also consume those that are of weaker resolve. In the weeks that follow, we will discover whether India emerge stronger from the frustration of good performance and no result.

Make no mistake, India played good cricket here. In fact they have been playing fairly good cricket over the last eight months and yet, except for the two Tests against Australia, they have fallen at the brink of success each time. India were a game away from winning in Nairobi, in Sharjah, at home in the one-dayers against Australia and here in Zimbabwe and maybe there is a story there. Maybe there is an art to winning, to playing the big moments well that is currently beyond this Indian team.

It is amazing how the end-result can cloud our analysis of a side for very often, results are achieved by half an hour's performance. A little evil can outdo a lot of good and that is the big lesson for India in the last few months. They have done all the hard work but have failed the last step. There is something missing.

That is where great players and great teams make the difference. They play the big moments better; when the time comes to close out the opposition, they do so with strength and finality. Knowing how to win is one of the biggest stages in the evolution of teams and having been subjected to years of indifferent results, Indian cricket is struggling to make the transition.

The fear, the mystery, of winning still shrouds their performance. The same set of players, with a greater drive to win, would have beaten Pakistan 3-0 at home in 1999, would have closed out the game against Zimbabwe in the World Cup and would have brought home the ICC Trophy last October.

If the gap were to do with the art of playing cricket, it might have been bridged long ago. But the gap is in the mind; the key to the lock lies in the resolve, in the belief of the side. It is when the tide turns that strength is tested and for all the good cricket that India played in Zimbabwe, when the tide turned, they scattered a bit. The better side lost in the final at Harare, there is little doubt about that. But they lost as much to their own inability to correct a situation as to a wonderful move by the West Indies team management. It was a high risk manoeuvre to go in with only three specialist bowlers but taking chances is the prerogative of the weaker side for they have less to lose. It worked, it may not on another day.

And so India return frustrated and when Sourav Ganguly looks back at it all a little dispassionately, he will ask himself if he should have been in greater control during the first two hours of the final. He is a young man, only recently turned 28, and tends to be driven by the heart. You could see that he was all charged up, too hyper, almost too eager to win every point.

When he didn't win the first few, he let the heart get the better of head. He was clearly the leader, you could see and hear that, but temporarily, he lost the calmness that must envelope a leader. He was rattled, he could see all the good work slipping away and yet he needed to take a step backwards, to take a deep breath and count ten in the old-fashioned way. When the leader is in control, the team believes there is something else coming, when he is upset the ship can lose direction very quickly.

But these are developmental stages and India must be patient with Ganguly and his very good young side. They took some big steps on this tour and it was heartening to see the way youngsters like Ashish Nehra, Zaheer Khan and Reetinder Sodhi performed. They had fire, more than anything else, and that is a good attribute to possess. Happily, it is infectious and there is no doubt that there is a different breed of youngsters emerging. Even Sameer Dighe, though not quite the youngest, showed himself up for a fight and certainly in the one-day game he showed enough to suggest a place for a while.

This Indian team is now a better catching side than at any time in the last few years, in spite of losing two brilliant fielders in Azharuddin and Jadeja. But it needs to be a better fielding side. They fielded poorly in the final where the quick feet of Hemang Badani and Ajit Agarkar were sorely missed; and they need to import some throwing arms. On larger grounds, teams will take two quite easily. In Harare, India had Nehra, Zaheer Khan and Laxman in the deep and those were heavy legs.

Nobody found the tour more frustrating than V.V.S. Laxman. There is little doubt that he is gifted with very special talents and he did himself little justice. He was a bit like a firecracker, a bit of fizz, a bit of sound, some celebration and it was all over. Everytime he walked to the crease, he looked like producing a big score and he played the shots to remember. But you get the feeling that he is playing on instinct and though it has served him well in the past, it let him down just a bit. The wonderfully gifted often have little time for prosaic things like steel, patience and resolve. I do not know how much ambition he has for my old city, Hyderabad, sometimes sold itself short on that count. But there are interesting days ahead for him for he has the ability to have audiences, and opposition bowlers, enthralled.

The way he reacts to the frustration of this tour, indeed the way the entire team reacts to it, will determine where they go from here. They do not have much time and they need to harness the fire that must inevitably accompany frustration.