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Runs by the ton for India on day one

India 311/3 in 90 overs at stumps, Tendulkar batting 104, Ganguly batting 51

The pitch for the third Test, at the Sardar Patel Stadium, Motera, Ahmedabad, presented a picture that should surprise you only if you are just back from an extended trip to the moon.

Three days ago, this was a greentop. By the morning of the Test, every blade of grass had been surgically excised -- if Gillette wants to cash in on a good promo opportunity, they would advertise this one as the closest shave ever.

Actually, this is no laughing matter. Every single time the Indian team goes abroad -- and, inevitably, loses -- we hear talk of how the only way to turn it round is to prepare quicker tracks at home and allow the batsmen to play on seaming tracks. To this end, two years ago, the BCCI even announced with much fanfare the formation of a pitches committee, originally headed by Kapil Dev himself. The committee has a budget running into a few million, it meets regularly, it travels round the country, it imports soil experts at considerable expense to analyse the Indian pitches and put together an "action plan" for preparing bouncier tracks -- and at the end of it all, what do we get?

What is especially ironic is that this pitch at the Motera is prepared by none other than Dhiraj Parsana, a member of the aforesaid committee.

Shortly, India will go to Australia. Find itself all at sea on the seaming, bouncing wickets of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne. And on its return, the likes of Lele, Kapil Dev, Muthiah et al will talk of how Indian batsmen need practise against good seam bowling on quickish tracks, and the pitches committee will probably go on a round the cricketing world tour to 'study the problem' and produce an 'action plan'.

How much longer will this farce go on? How much longer before someone says it like it is -- 'Guys, we are content to earn results by creating turning tracks at home and if, in the process, we get the reputation of being lions at home and lambs abroad, the hell with it!'?

As if this wasn't enough, the Indian team management managed to surprise even people like us who have been inured to surprises. On a track where bowlers are going to struggle to contain, much less bowl out the opposition, the team 'think tank' went in for an extra batsman, rather than a bowler. The signal is pretty clear -- if New Zealand goes out of its way to play badly, we don't mind winning; but we aren't going to go out of our way to look for a result.

The change is especially intriguing -- Ajay Jadeja in, Vijay Bharadwaj out. In other words, a good middle order batsman who has the added advantage of being able to bowl ("I consider him a regular bowler capable of bowling 20 overs or more in an innings, and adding to the attack" -- thus spake Kapil Dev a week ago) replaced by a batsman who last played a Test at home way back in November 1995, at Cuttack, coincidentally against the same opposition.

Maybe there is some sense in there somewhere, but it escapes us.

The morning session alone was enough to indicate the probable course of this game. At the end of two hours in sweltering, 40+ degree temperatures, India had put on 93 for the loss of Gandhi. The runs had come in 28 overs, at a rate of 3.22 - which, for the first morning of a Test, qualifies as very rapid indeed.

In these 28 overs, Fleming tried seam (Cairns and Nash), dibbly-dob defensive stuff (Astle and Harris) and spin (Vettori, introduced in the 10th over and hastily removed, then brought back before lunch with the same lack of results, and Wiseman). Neither spin nor seam produced any sort of impact at all, on a track that is a batsman's paradise, and will stay that way at least for the first two, probably three, days.

Gandhi was a victim not of pitch or bowlers, but of the demons of his own imagination. The opener played as if he expected the track to do something alarming by way of seam and bounce -- in other words, he nailed his feet to the line of leg stump, and pushed with bat a long way away from his body. As at Kanpur, so too here, Gandhi's early-inning nerves saw him push a tame chance to the slip cordon when his personal score was four. As at Kanpur, so too here, he was reprieved -- Craig Spearman grassing as simple a slip chance as you could wish for. This time round, though, Gandhi didn't ride his early luck to a big score -- a tame push at a three quarter length in-cutter from Cairns got the inner edge, the ball going through the enormous gap between bat and body for Parore to hold with ease.

Rahul Dravid took 17 deliveries to settle down, then began stroking with alarming fluency on both sides of the wicket. At the other end, Ramesh got off the blocks in his usual languid fashion, and had raced away to yet another Test 50 well before lunch. The critics -- including this one -- can say what they like about his lazy feet movement and almost casual air at the crease, but thus far in his Test career, Ramesh has been a model for sheer consistency of run-scoring.

Dravid, who has been the Kiwis' public enemy number one in recent times, seemed set to continue his run-spree against a bowling lineup he must fancy enormously, when his wicket fell against the run of play immediately after lunch.

Generally a batsman who, at the start of every session, likes to work himself back into the game, Dravid seemed seduced by the benign nature of this track into playing shots immediately on resumption. Thus, in the second over after the break, he rocked back, falling away towards leg stump, to cut Vettori from just outside off. The length was a touch too full for the shot, Dravid compounded his problem by hitting too hard at the ball in his eagerness to send it to the fence, and the top edge found Parore first fumbling, then -- keeping his eye on the ball as it bounced out of his gloves -- clutching at the second attempt.

Tendulkar began with a flashing square cut off Cairns, taking the ball well outside off, which seemed to indicate that he was in stroke-playing mood. However, he unaccountably sobered down immediately thereafter, and seemed content to watch Ramesh on song at the other end.

For his part, Ramesh seemed in a mood to oblige -- on a track where he could go either forward or back decisively, without the pitch posing any problems, the left-handed opener flashed into strokes all round the wicket, all characterised by the impeccable timing and easy elegance associated with his batting.

No nervous nineties for him, either -- three fours, two on the trot off Wiseman and then a lovely little waltz down the wicket to lift Vettori over long off, took him to the verge of his second century in his seventh Test, and a brisk single got him to the landmark.

An interesting statistic, and illuminative of the kind of innings Ramesh played, was when he got to his century off 155 deliveries, there were as many as 106 dot balls, the century coming off just 49 scoring shots. The theorist might tend to suggest that he should have been looking more actively for singles, rotating the strike a lot more -- but the bottomline is that this century, coming when the team score was 165, was a major contributor to the rapid rate of run-scoring.

His biggest failing -- a concentration graph that ebbs and flows in mercurial fashion -- caused his demise ten runs later when he drove rather lackadaisically at a straight ball from Chris Harris, outside his off stump, for Spearman at slip to take a simple catch low down.

The session between lunch and tea produced a further 96 off 29 overs.

The final session of the day found the Kiwis in a bit of a time hole, needing to bowl 33 overs in two hours thanks to their slack over-rates in the first two sessions.

This, in turn, meant using Vettori, Wiseman and even Harris to a considerable extent, to speed up the over rate. In a sense, the ploy succeeded, with the Kiwis sending down 17 hours in the first hour after tea -- but looked at another way, the cost was huge as Tendulkar in particular began stroking with far greater freedom than before the break.

It wasn't the kind of blistering knock he played in the second innings at Kanpur, not by a long chalk. In fact, his attitude at the crease was of someone settling down for a very long haul. But every so often, the bowlers would err fractionally, and unlike before tea when Tendulkar seemed to be pulling his punches somewhat, during this session he began putting meat into those punches, and finding the gaps with greater ease.

There was an aberration when, on 93, he seemed to lose both patience and concentration. Cairns had just come back, with Fleming in desperation opting to take the new ball (unlike both Mohali and Kanpur, where the Kiwi skipper persisted with balls that were in danger of becoming museum pieces) and, at a ball short outside off, Sachin shaped to drag to leg, then changed his mind and shaped to play what you can only describe as an upper-cut, got himself in one heck of a tangle and only managed a thick top edge, which Astle at slip, running back, got to and grassed. Tendulkar in fact seemed unusually nervy around this period -- shortly thereafter, he drove at Nash outside off, got the edge and Parore grassed a sitter. Tendulkar added insult to that particular injury by smashing the next ball square through point to bring up his 100.

His 21st Test century (to add to 21 half centuries in his 71st Test, 56.49 average) came off 157 deliveries, with 16 boundaries. Not his best knock by a long way, this -- especially forgettable being his progress from 90 to the century. But seen in context, the Indian skipper came out to the middle to do a job -- and by curbing his impatience and settling down to play the waiting game, did exactly what his team needed.

An idea of the pattern of this Tendulkar innings can be got from this statistic -- when he got to 84 with a fierce pull of Vettori, he had faced 135 balls. Exactly 100 of them had been unscored of. There were 17 singles, 7 twos, and 14 fours. Tells a tale, that.

That pattern -- of batsmen biding their time, and going for the maximum at the slightest sign of error on the part of the bowlers -- was in fact reflected through the entire day's play. Consider this -- India got to 275/3 in 486 balls. 363 were unscored off. There were 56 singles, 27 twos, 1 three, and as many as 39 boundaries, an indication of just how often the Kiwi bowlers erred in line and length.

Ganguly, who had begun his innings with a few impatient dances down the track against the spinners, quickly settled down to judicious shot selection, got his timing on song and, by close of play (he in fact got his 50 with a flowing off driven four off the final over of the day), was stroking with a freedom that the Kiwis, already wilting, must find ominous. In fact, this has been a feature of the batsmen on view thus far -- it is as if very shortly after coming to the crease, they realise that the track is full of runs for the plundering, and promptly 'book themselves in for bed and breakfast', to quote Geoffrey Boycott's oft-used phrase.

The story of the Indian innings has been the story of partnerships -- 82 for the second wicket, 80 for the third, an unbeaten 129 for the fourth. This has meant that the pressure has consistently been on the bowlers and fielders.

The post tea session produced 122 runs off 33 overs, the final hour producing as many as 20 fours as the bowling side gave up the struggle.

The story of the Kiwi bowling is one best left untold -- on a track that gave them little help, it was a long, hot, hard grind. The Kiwis are famed as one of the best fielding sides in the business. Maybe so -- but this particular series has seen them at their very worst, and it is costing them dearly, taking away whatever edge the bowling has.

India has pretty much ensured that barring miracles, they can't lose the Test from here. For the Kiwis, the only hope is to separate this pair early in the morning on day two. Failing that, the tourists are staring down the barrel of a mammoth total -- and benign though the pitch is, a huge total will bring with it enormous pressure, on a batting lineup that hasn't exactly distinguished itself thus far in the series.

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