Unlearnt lessons

About 20 years ago, an Indian team on a tour down under suffered a 0-4 loss in a 5 match series following a test series loss in England. Don’t know what the outlook about the team was then (as I was too small to follow cricket!), having likes of Vengsarkar, Kapil Dev, Shastri, Srikkanth in the ranks. Yet that tour is remembered as the tour which gave birth to the next big thing in Indian cricket - Tendulkar and India’s spearhead bowler for the next decade - Javagal Srinath. Compare it to the last 8 months; Virat has been the find with the bat and likes of Ashwin & Umesh have impressed, albeit in patches. The analogy doesn’t end here itself!

Srikkanth and Vengsarkar quit test cricket after the final test at Perth, Ravi Shastri within the next 10 months, Kiran More in 1993 and Kapil Dev 1994. No need to elaborate why this could be analogous to the current scenario. The larger thought that needs to be addressed is the lack of lessons learnt to avoid a similar fate. India won just 1 test in the 28 it played outside India between the end of that dismal tour and the turn of the millennium. Do note that likes of Dravid, Laxman, Ganguly, Tendulkar, Kumble were a part of most of those 28 tests. Bottomline: even the great players took time to resurrect the situation and bring the house in order. Thus wholesale replacements or retirements are no solution, but change is inevitable and should be executed with priority.

The most pertinent question which most analysts and fans would be posing is the lack of changes to the line-up inspite of 7 (and 8^th very likely) consecutive drubbings. Committing mistakes is one thing but not correcting them is a bigger problem. The alarm bells were ringing after England, but they were masked if not neglected by putting it as an aberration. The people with power failed to address the issue then itself, lumbering on with same set of issues. No modifications were made to the batting line-up that has struggled to notch up individual hundreds and stack up totals in excess of 300. There are a couple of no-brainers, in the eyes of most, like the inclusion of Rohit Sharma for Laxman in the last test (if VVS hasn’t announced any retirement plans) or fluxing in somebody like Ojha or Mithun which haven't been implemented. India’s has gone too long without making any change, and there is a high probability of witnessing too many changes within no time, especially after this tour. Such extremes measures suggest lack of vision and inability to meet the tough questions head on.

Indian cricket has traditionally been struck with delayed and lack of timed decisions which eventually have resulted in consistent poor performances when the going gets tough, especially abroad. Just when you thought that Indian cricket was going in the right direction, all of a sudden you are confronted with a situation that can potentially take the team a long time backward. Many experts believe that the team will take a long time to recover from this period of continuous bashing and at the moment that doesn’t seem to be a wrong prediction. The above illustration does speak about a team’s struggle (especially away) after humiliating losses and subsequent retirements. So how does an Indian fan react to this? The most obvious reaction is anger, couple that to media pressure and you get some panicky selections.

There are lot of aspects to India’s disappointing two tours and the analysis will keep going. Experts and analysts will suggest ways to come out this phase, but ultimately it will boil down to the question of personnel forming the line-up. While the pressure on Laxman et al. mounts, it becomes imperative to not forget that the players we are talking about are not ‘just any other’ players and thus we should put up our emotions in a constructive manner rather than outrageously. Virat Kohli’s maiden test ton gives a glimmer of hope that the future isn’t as dark as it would be visualized by many. While the sun is setting for the legends of the side, new faces should light up a new dawn in Indian cricket. The Indian fan is the most underrated & underutilised entity in the cricketing set-up of this country. Rarely do you find public criticism being responded vocally or used as a tool to draw constructive reasons for the team’s performance but more often as a source to justify selections. He is the one who will go after the side when the performances haven’t been good but he is same person who will wake up the next morning believing in his side and expecting it to come back stronger, just like most of us do!