Team India, as we knew it, is clearly on its last legs. It is time for a new beginning but where are the few good men who can stand up to be counted? saibal chatterjee and Ajay Rana conduct the postmortem of a death foretold
On Tuesday, Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s boys registered a thumping victory over England in Kochi’s Nehru Stadium to draw level in the ongoing five-match ODI series. The beaming captain was quick to acknowledge that “this is the kind of pitch we were looking for”. Unwittingly, he was articulating a bitter truth. Things have come to such a sorry pass that it appears that the Indian cricket team can no longer win a match in any format of the game unless it is handed a 22-yard leeway by the curator.
After India lost the tall-scoring opening game of the current series in Rajkot, Dhoni trotted out an excuse that would have been dismissed as funny had it not been so spectacularly ludicrous. He suggested something to the effect that the outfield was lightning fast and the strokes played by the English batsmen got more value than they deserved. He however did not go on to claim that the outfield had slowed down when India came out to bat. Small mercy!
Well, Dhoni has been under tremendous pressure of late and some of his post-match utterances have only reflected the state of his mind. The World Cup triumph of 2011 is a distant memory. A nation that was once high on MSD has been brought down to earth by a string of humiliating Test defeats over the past year. Captain Cool has lost his much vaunted calm.
For great cricket teams (like Clive Lloyd’s West Indies, Steve Waugh’s Australia and now, South Africa), winning is a habit. For India, on current form, losing seems to be routine, especially in Test cricket. So questions are bound to arise. Is cricket in this country in terminal decline? Or is this a mere blip in the radar?
“What goes up must come down,” says former India captain and legendary left-arm tweaker Bishen Singh Bedi. “With a little bit of effort, it will go up again.” The spin meister may be right, but is there anybody out there willing to put in that “little bit of effort” that can make the difference in the long run?
Given the present flow of things, the Indian cricket fan has little reason to be optimistic. And that is a far cry from the state of affairs that prevailed virtually all through the last decade, one of the most eventful in the history of Indian cricket.
From the time former New Zealand opener John Wright took over as the Indian team coach in November 2000 and struck up a successful duet with captain Sourav Ganguly, India has been a force to reckon with in strictly cricketing terms, and not merely as the nation that generates 70 per cent of the game’s revenues. The slump since the 2011 World Cup is easy to explain. Lack of planning for the future and widespread complacency brought on by the continuing commercial gains have been the bane.
The rise and rise of Team India, which was built on epic triumphs both at home and overseas, culminated under the Gary Kirsten-Mahendra Singh Dhoni combo. The team wrested the number one spot in the ICC Test rankings in 2009, albeit briefly, before winning the 2011 ODI World Cup. India was on a roll.
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