17 December 2012, 05:49 PM IST
Certain things are improbable nowadays: a Parliament session without a walk-out, a month without an Arvind Kejriwal expose, a week without a Messi goal. For millions of cricket lovers, the Indian team, losing two Tests in a row at home belonged to such a list of unlikely events - it had last happened against South Africa back in 2000. MS Dhoni's million-dollar men achieved that feat a week ago. Today they also lost the home four-Test series against England; another irregular event that last took place in 2004 against Australia.
For most of us, home is a comfort pillow. For every owner, his/her 10 feet by 10 feet room is the best place in the world. There's no more comforting smell than of a familiar bedsheet. Home makes us feel wanted. It is a place you yearn to go to every evening. It is the last port of refuge in our shrivelled life.
It's no different in sport. Every team prefers playing at home. In their heydays, Liverpool's Anfield stadium, or for that matter, the Real Madrid's Santiago Bernabau, was compared to an impregnable fortress. You never lost here.
In the unforgiving world of Test cricket, home has meant a lot to the Indian cricket team. India's first Test win came at home in 1952 against England; it was another decade and half before we carved out our first win abroad: 1967-68 in New Zealand. Our most famous victories have in faraway lands. They were famous because they were so rare.
Perhaps that's why when the India-England series started a prominent television sports channel started a series of sly promos mocking the visitors. Perhaps it was popular wisdom that we will win the series handsomely and avenge the 0-4 away loss last summer. After all, this was home.
But midway through the series, the promo vanished like smoke in the wind. The Englishmen, led by Captain Cook, had ensured that with their outstanding performances on the pitch. Home was no longer home. Today India lost a home series to England after 28 years. If the last game ended in a draw, the credit primarily goes to the Nagpur curator. He should be in charge of a graveyard.
Let us face it; England outplayed us. But they also surprised us. Their spinners bowled better than us. Their batsmen were far superior to ours. Even contentious umpiring decisions, which were more in our favour than theirs, couldn't alter the balance of play. Imagine the hungama, if Sachin had got two bad decisions in a single game. It happened in Nagpur to Cook, their most in-form batsmen in the series. And they just carried on with the game. Kudos!
Every cricket fan knows why we lost. For starters, we have to persist with the world's best batsman who cannot be dropped despite repeated failures. We have an unsure opening pair; Sehwag is in good form but continues to display a serious lack of application. He should be put on notice. Gambhir is trying hard. But his best doesn't seem to be enough anymore. The Yuvraj experiment went wrong. Kohli struck form late. And the pacers, especially Zaheer Khan, were no match to their English counterparts. Ditto for the spinners.
Remarkably, we dropped less catches than them. That only means this is perhaps the poorest English catching side to visit India. Add to that, the decisions that went against them. If England still won with plenty to spare, it only underlines how bad we were.
It's a collective failure. But captain Dhoni must take the lion's share of the blame. As former India great Mohinder Amarnath rightly said, the Indian captain has been living off his ODI World Cup success. In his last 15 games as a Test captain, Dhoni has lost 9 and won only 5; four of them against lowly New Zealand and West Indies at home. Now the cat is out of the bag that the selectors didn't want him to be the boss. Yet, he is being persisted with. Perhaps it helps when you are captain of the IPL team owned by the BCCI boss.
Now consider this. Ajit Wadekar won us three Test series in a row. The first two 1-0 against West Indies in 1971 and 1-0 against England were India's first away triumphs against those two cricket-playing countries. They were historic wins. Wadekar then followed it up with 2-1 win over Tony Lewis' England in 1972-73. But the moment he lost one series, 3-0, again against England away in 1974, he was sacked. Just look at the history of Indian cricket. No captain has survived setbacks like Dhoni.
It is said, a captain is good as his team. In that case, why did the captain get most of the credit for the twin World Cup triumphs? You cannot eat your cake and have it too.
To begin with, did it make any sense asking for rank turners at the very beginning of the series? The brave and disciplined 99 at Nagpur notwithstanding, Dhoni is the problem child of the Indian Test team. As a captain, he has too many fixed ideas. If you don't fit into his scheme of things, you can be among the reserves for over a year like Rahane but you will not get a chance to play. If you are a part of his scheme of things, you can be drafted into the squad today and play tomorrow like Jadeja, a fellow CSK player.
His handling of bowlers has increasingly become strange. Do you remember that he used Umesh Yadav in the 48th over for the first time in Ahmedabad? Do you remember that for some strange reason, he refused to use spinners from both ends on the turning track? Can anyone explain why he opted for four spinners and one pacer at Nagpur although it was much safer and more logical to go with two pacers and three spinners?
He has been ultra defensive with his field placements too. When England started their second innings in Nagpur, most commentators wondered at the shortage of fielders in catching positions. Was Dhoni trying to win the match? Or just saving the game and his skin?
People are bemoaning lack of talent as part of the crisis that Indian test cricket has plunged into. The point is this: does anybody really know how a player would fare in the deep end of the ocean until he has been really thrown there?
Did any pundit claim that Virender Sehwag was a major batting talent when he first arrived on the international scene? Did anyone predict that he would score two triple centuries, something that nobody - Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly or Laxman - could achieve? If one remembers the words of the pundits those days, there was a constant and near-unanimous view that Sehwag's feet didn't move. The truth is that the nawab of Najafgarh seemed to be playing on a different pitch in Kolkata in the second innings and the England attack appeared to be toothless, before he was felled by off-spinner Graeme Swann's dream delivery for 49.
Similarly, who would have thought that Ganguly would end his career as India's greatest left-hander with over 7,000 Test runs when his weakness against the short-pitched delivery is common knowledge to every cricket lover across the world? Did anybody foresee him becoming an all-time great ODI opener? Actually, it was an Englishman who first saw the potential of playing Ganguly as an opener: Geoffrey Boycott.
Some more examples - did anyone predict Sanjay Manjrekar and Vinod Kambli to have such short Test careers? And in 1996 who foresaw Dravid becoming a great ODI batsman?
Sometimes even the most prodigious talent doesn't translate from potential to performance on the big stage. We might have a Tendulkar, a Ponting or Lara who synergised their talent with hard work and became great players. But we also have a Mohd Ashraful, an Umar Akmal or a Ross Taylor -– all major underperformers considering the talent they are supposed to have.
MS Dhoni is no talent spotter. But the sad thing is that he comes to conclusions about certain players without giving them opportunities at the right time. On the other hand, he gives unlimited opportunities to those whom he thinks fit. In ODIs, just compare the number of chances Rohit Sharma has got vis a vis Manoj Tiwary and you'll know what I mean.
As a Test batsman too, Dhoni has his limitations. He may look pretty good in India – he had a great batting series against the Kiwis – but outside when the conditions are not favourable, he often looks like a tailender. In Australia last year, he didn't score many and didn't look like scoring more. His scores were 6 and 23, 57 not out and 2, 12 and 2. His wicket-keeping is, by and large, decent but most experts acknowledge that Saha is the best keeper in the country. Interestingly, like Dhoni, he too plays for CSK. But when he gets a chance to play, which is rare, he seldom gets to keep.
In this scenario, Dhoni should be stripped of his veto power as a captain which effectively keeps every other wicket-keeper batsman outside the frame. He should be made to fight for his place like everybody else.
So who's the new captain? Virat Kohli will be an exciting choice. South Africa went for Graeme Smith when he was 22 and he has served them well. India's Test team needs fresh blood and fresh ideas. And Kohli seems to have these qualities that India is looking for.
As I have written before, transition is tricky business. Transition also takes time. As the baton passes on from one generation to another, the Indian cricket fan needs to be patient. There may or may not be a pot of gold at the end of it all. But there's no other way. And there's no harm in thinking brave and radical.
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