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Australia crush India by 41 runs

On a day characterised by mediocrity, it might, on the surface, seem unfair of me to pick the dismissal of Anil Kumble, in the last over of the game, to lead off with. But for me, that dismissal was symptomatic of India's cricketing sensibilities -- more accurately, the lack of them.

When Jason Gillespie scythed through the top order of the Indian batting to reduce the side to 44/5, any hope of winning the game was abdicated. So what did they have to play for from there? The all-important net run rate is what -- tomorrow, India plays Sri Lanka and if India can win, then the second finalist will be decided on the NRR.

A novice at math will tell you that when you are playing for run rate, batting out the 50 overs is mandatory. If you are all out ahead of that mark, this means that the full 50 overs are taken into consideration and your NRR dips correspondingly. That being the case, with just four balls of the 49th over to play out, why on earth did Kumble need to go dancing down the wicket, playing a wild heave at a Lehmann delivery? As it happened, he missed completely and was bowled -- and that will make a difference to the run rate. Sure, the difference could be 1/100th of a point -- but final places are sometimes decided on just such hairline margins.

A phrase you hear judges use often, when throwing out badly conceived petitions, is that there has been "no application of due thought". Based on the evidence, India's cricketing brains wouldn't last a day in court, would they?

It is this thoughtlessness -- and I am not suggesting that Kumble is the sole culprit, for this is a disease that goes right down the line -- that is, more than any other single factor, responsible for the ills of Indian cricket. The attitude of our players to the game mirrors the attitude of a government employee to the files on his table -- he will worry about it, if he must, between the hours of 10 and five (of course, taking his due tea breaks, lunch breaks, gossip breaks et al in that period) but not a moment before, or after.

India went into the game knowing that irrespective of the result, the place in the final had to be decided on Sunday when it went up against Sri Lanka. However, a win here would have put the Indians in a much better position, so India was in the luxurious position of having everything to play for, and nothing to lose.

Sachin Tendulkar's back is, reportedly, stiff again -- so the management decided to make him sit this one out, keeping him in shape for tomorrow's clash. Meanwhile, M S K Prasad's indifferent performance with the gloves coupled with his lacklustre batting made the management think in terms of giving Dravid the gloves, and bringing in the extra batsman.

Ajay Jadeja, leading the side, won the toss at the Sinhalese Sports Club grounds and decided to bowl first. Good choice? Sure. In hindsight, you would say that a team that had strengthened its batting should have opted to bat first, but the Indian strategy was perhaps to find out just how much of a target they had to chase and then play accordingly.

India lost the game in two phases. The first was in the first 15 overs. In fact, within the first five overs, there were two occasions when Vinod Kambli, fielding out at deep backward square leg, had the ball hit straight through him. On both occasions, he just bent at the waist to pick up, fumbled, and let the ball through for four. At the best of times, Kambli's attitude to fielding practice mirrors that of Brian Lara. However, unlike Lara, he is today overweight and several leagues short of match-fitness -- which meant the team has to hide him in the field. And you can't, against the top teams, carry a passenger in the field and not pay a price for it.

Kambli was a one-man horror show, sure -- but the lackadaisical attitude in the field was all-pervasive. Time and again, you found fielders standing pat, waiting for the ball to come to them rather than making any effort to attack it and cut down the runs. And even as the ball was hit out to a fielder in one part of the ground, you could see the rest lolling around. Contrast that with the way the good fielding sides do it -- when the ball goes out in the V, say, on the off, you have the fielders on the on side racing in to cover the possible angles on the throw. This cuts down the overthrows, obviously -- but it also creates a bustling impression in the field, and this in turn puts a touch of doubt in the mind of the batsmen.

The Australians were in no such doubts. They simply played the ball away from the stumps and ran -- seemingly confident that the Indians could never hit the stumps from anywhere. And this steady drip-drip of singles is costing the team dearly, in game after game.

Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad turned in brilliant spells on the day -- the former quickly taking out a tentative Mark Waugh with one just around off seaming away, forcing the touch through to Dravid behind the stumps, and then putting the brakes on to such an extent that Australia, from 23/1, managed to progress only to 44/1 at the end of 10 overs (and this, mind you, in the face of prodigal Indian fielding). What was interesting about the Waugh dismissal was that on the previous ball, Srinath pitched an identical three-quarters length and seamed the ball rapidly in to go right through the batsman. The next ball landed on the same spot, just around off, forcing Waugh to push at it without a clue which way it was going -- and this time, Srinath just took it away to feather the edge.

It was around this point that the attritive effect of singles manifested themselves. Neither Adam Gilchrist nor Andrew Symonds were, in the early part of their innings, quite assured in their strokeplay -- and yet, they got singles at the rate of four or more per over, which meant that the strike kept getting rotated, the pressure was off and they were able to settle down.

The advent of Nikhil Chopra into the attack was another turning point -- and this time, I suspect Ajay Jadeja missed a bet when he brought the offspinner on without a slip in place. In the first two games, irrespective of the position, Chopra had bowled with a slip, and often another close-in fielder, in place and looked good, getting the ball to bite and turn and causing problems for everyone. Here, without that close-in fielder, he went back to bowling flat and fast and the batsmen, aware that there was no one close to take advantage of mistakes, went after him.

At the other end, Anil Kumble continued the form, if you can call it that, of his bowling throughout this tour -- in other words, two, three good balls, then the gimme ball pitched either too short or too full, a lethal cocktail against two batsmen content to push the good ones away for singles and rock back to blast the short ones out of sight. Around this period, the Indians appeared to have given up on the whole thing, and there was an air of simply hanging around, going through the motions, waiting for something to happen.

Something happened all right -- Australia cruised along to 77/1 in 15, 105/1 in 20, 132/1 in 25.

If you've been following this tournament, you would have noticed that in every game thus far, the Aussies have played the first half of the innings well and flubbed the second half. For a team that believes in pre-match planning, this would have signalled a vulnerability; it would have had the team thinking in terms of shutting down the hatches in the first half, bowling tight, concentrating on keeping the runs down and putting the pressure on. However, the Indians virtually abdicated the first half the first innings, which meant that the Australian slide in the second half didn't set the batting side back as much as it should have.

Gilchrist played a superb innings. Playing well within his limitations, he hung around, focussed on getting runs mostly in singles, hit hard only when occasion allowed and was looking good for a century when, in one Chopra over, he followed two clinically swept fours with another sweep that found the top edge for backward square to hold.

Srinath then came on and took out Symonds. In the first over of his comeback spell, Srinath produced a probing maiden that had the hard-hitting right hander (who, today, was effective without being as impressive as in the earlier game) in all kinds of trouble. In his next over, he finished it off with a late-seaming leg-cutter that took the edge through to the keeper.

Prasad then took over to knock back Ponting, to a superb catch by Laxmi Ratan Shukla substituting for Srinath, out at deep backward square. The youngster from Bengal is pretty impressive in the field -- full of hustle, attacking the ball all the time, very enthusiastic, has a good pair of hands and a flat, hard throw that keeps the batsmen honest.

A perfectly pitched leg cutter on the off stump then took out Michael Bevan and, in between, Ajay Jadeja with a direct hit from point had Darren Lehmann caught out of his ground. With wickets going down quickly, the Aussie momentum was arrested -- from being 164/3 in 30 overs, the team went to 180/3 in 35, 204/4 in 40, 227/5 in 45 and, without a single boundary in the last 9 overs, managed to get to 252 in the allotted 50.

The full impact of India's lazy performance in the field in the first half of the innings is evident when you notice that Australia had only three partnerships worth the name -- 40 for the first, 110 for the second and 48 for the fourth.

For India with the ball, Srinath and Prasad were the standouts. Robin Singh after an untidy start produced a very good spell at the end, keeping a tight line and length to check the pace of scoring. Chopra, as mentioned above, was taken to the cleaners and Kumble -- whose parsimony is something the team banks heavily on -- was prodigal.

As for the fielding -- the less said, the better. Right here in India, there are school sides that field with a lot more enthusiasm.

The key to the chase was going to be the first ten overs, given that Australia for the first time in the series had teamed Glenn McGrath with Jason Gillespie. India needed to see off those first 10 overs -- but the Australian quicks needed only 7 overs to see off India, scything out Ganguly, Khurasiya, Dravid and Jadeja inside 6.2 overs to finish any thoughts of a successful chase.

McGrath began with two bad balls to Ganguly who put both away through his favourite point region for fours. And then he produced one of fuller length. It was as if Ganguly had by that time come to expect the short, wide ball outside off as something of a birthright -- he was already shaping to cream his third four when he realised that this one was on line of the off and fuller. Changing his mind, he pushed at the ball, which lifted and seamed away to find the edge for a regulation catch to first slip.

Amay Khurasiya plays his shots from the first ball, which is commendable. He doesn't seem to know when to throttle back, which is worrying. And as the bowler runs in to bowl, he does things with his back leg, going towards leg, then coming back again, that would have had John Travolta green with envy in his dancing days, but which seemed a touch out of place at the batting crease. All the extra movement means he keeps bobbing around all over the place, and Gillespie clinically took him out with a quicker ball pitching on off and seaming just enough to go through the gate.

Rahul Dravid, by virtue of having kept throughout the innings, was batting a spot down the order. In two previous innings, he had gone attempting to play the ball away from his body -- this, from the batsman who earlier used to be a textbook example of the perfect leave outside off. In the previous match report, we had in fact suggested that the team management would do well to talk to Dravid about this. Apparently they haven't, yet -- Gillespie pitched one just outside off and fullish on a length, Dravid would (in the days before all the criticism about his being a slow-scorer got to him) have sneered at that one and let it go, but here again he pushed at it and the keeper celebrated his 100th dismissal in ODIs.

Ajay Jadeja coming after the ball has lost a bit of its shine is one heck of a tough customer. The same Jadeja coming to the wicket in the first 10 overs looks a different player altogether, more unsure of his footwork, more prone to push away from his body. Glenn McGrath, on the day not as incisive as he normally is, pushed one through quicker and fuller in length, Jadeja was tentative moving onto the front foot and ended up taking it on the pad bang in front of the stumps.

Having made a cake of himself in the field (the Sri Lankan spectators had taken to rousing cheers each time he actually fielded the ball), Kambli had a good chance here to prove a point or three with the bat. He didn't take it.

The best that could be said about his batting is that he appeared to have cut out that huge flourish outside off as he addressed the ball, and that he got behind the line to the quick men (and by this time, Gillespie in particular was bowling real quick). Having said that, Kambli at no point during his 17-ball stay at the wicket showed any sign that he was in prime touch, his sole aim being apparently to push the ball away from him. One such push at a quicker one, seaming away, from Gillespie found the edge and for Gilchrist, it was Christmas come early.

There is, here, a huge problem for India. Khurasiya and Kambli are the middle-order batsmen here. One seems incapable of translating quick starts into innings of reasonable length. The other is a huge liability in the field, and shows no sign of form with the bat. In other words, India has a gaping hole in the middle of its batting -- and needs to find the right remedy in the heck of a hurry, considering that the side is going to be playing pretty much non-stop from here on.

After Kambli's departure came the only part of the Indian batting that was worth watching, as Robin Singh and Sadagopan Ramesh put on 123 for the sixth wicket -- the highest partnership of the day for both teams, as it turned out.

I remember during a home series against Pakistan, criticising Ramesh for a completely irresponsible shot at a time when he seemed to have had the measure of his bowling. Sunny Gavaskar had said at the time that the secret of good batting was, if you are out there and well set, then just bat on and look to do the job yourself, don't leave it to the next guy. The way he played here today, Ramesh appeared to have learnt that lesson very well -- while the carnage continued at one end, he batted with admirable calm at the other, handling McGrath and Gillespie without too much bother and, noticeably, not relaxing in concentration once the lesser batsmen came on. One thing for sure -- the way he played the two Aussie quicks today indicates that at least one of India's opening worries could be solved, come the time to travel Down Under for the Millennium Tour.

As for Robin, for all his faults he is the coolest head in the side -- and the one player who can size up a situation and produce the kind of innings needed at the time. Here, coming in in the 14th over, he promptly settled down to bat through, checking his shots, concentrating on staying there and keeping the runs ticking over. In fact, his only burst of exuberance came when he saw Shane Warne ambling in to bowl -- an invitation these days for Robin to go down on one knee and whack the bowler (whose face, each time this happens, is an interesting study) over long on for six.

Ramesh finally fell against the run of play in the 42nd over when Symonds pitched one on a goodish length and, without any apparent effort, made it climb and climb. Ramesh -- who by that time was dehydrated enough to need a runner -- first shaped to drive, then changed to a short-arm pull, finally settled for fending the ball away and managed only to play it off the splice to midwicket. Symonds then turned in a brilliant running catch out on the square leg boundary to get rid of Robin -- the batsman had clubbed Lehmann flat and hard out on the on side, but Symonds raced around for a good 12, 15 feet, then flung himself headlong to hold a blinder.

As is the story when the Indian tail is in action, the rest of the lower order hardly did anything to deserve special mention.

It is when you sit back and look at the scoreboard that those first 7 overs come back to haunt you. McGrath took out two, sure -- but one wicket, that of Ganguly, owed to a complete misreading of the ball. And he was expensive, going for 55 in his 10 overs. Gillespie was brilliantly incisive, certainly -- easily the best bowler on view today. But then what? Moody turned in a scrooge-like spell, but only because he bowled after India had lost 5 wickets for nothing, and the sixth-wicket pair focussed on simply staying there. Symonds looked ordinary, Bevan even more so, Warne was if anything less effective than Kumble, and Lehmann, well... never mind.

Which means this -- if India had planned to see off the first 10 overs, and batted with some application at the top of the order, this game could well have been won, for Australia after McGrath and Gillespie just didn't have the bowling to break through. Look at another set of statistics -- the first 50 of the Indian innings came off 104 balls. Considering that five wickets fell in the process, you would expect run scoring to become slower from that point on. But as it happened, the second 50 took 79 balls, the third took 60 balls, the fourth just 49 balls. Clearly, once the Ramesh-Robin partnership had settled down, averted the threat of a complete collapse, they found batting easier as the day went on (a vindication, incidentally, of Jadeja's decision to bowl first).

If a judge sat in judgement over the Indian performance on the day, then, what would he say? "Team dismissed, no due application of thought."

They have one game to go, against Sri Lanka. And they need to win and win big to get into the final. Can they find within themselves the grit and commitment to shrug off three bad defeats and turn it around? That is a question even Nostradamus, with his famed predictive powers, would have left alone outside off.

Sufficient unto the day, as they say, is the evil thereof.

PS: I couldn't help remembering a comment Allan Border made, when we met here in Bombay. That was on the day Azharuddin announced that he was making himself unavailable for this tour on grounds of injury. 'Very smart', was the immediate reaction of 'AB'. 'If he hadn't done it, he would have had the selectors thinking of whether or not to drop him. This way, he has taken the decision away. And now if India goes to Lanka and does badly, which you can expect at the start of a season, the fans will be clamouring for him to be brought back.'

'AB' will be delighted to learn that he's batting 100 here -- that clamour, judging by what I saw on our chat site and from some phone calls I got during the course of today's game, is already gaining momentum.

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