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India wins again

The real point of interest in today's game was to see how severly India would be tested. The team seems on a good streak now, and the last thing it needs is an easy game, as that takes the keen edge off.

It was moot whether Kenya had what it took to provide that stiff test -- but then, the conditions weighed in with a contribution, to make things difficult for what the experts are rating the 'form team' in this contest.

The ground staff have for the last few days been trying to alter the condition of the pitch, with some heavy watering every evening. With the result that in the morning, the pitch is damp, there are patches where the wet spots are more pronounced and which provide assistance to seam bowlers and today, the sky was heavily overcast -- taken all in all, the perfect seamer's wicket. What made the equation more interesting was that it was expected to clear up by afternoon, which meant that when Kenya won the toss and opted, quite rightly, to insert, it got the best of conditions coming and going -- good for bowling, and good for batting second. Sort of like handicapping a strong player going up against a weaker one.

India kept the same team that won handily against South Africa. There are two ways of looking at this -- the conventional one being to say that it makes no sense to change a winning outfit. However, a sensible ploy would have been to bring in Mohammad Khaif and Laxmi Ratan Shukla, give them a feel of being out there in the middle and, equally importantly, give the selectors and the management a feel for how good they are. "Bench strength" doesn't come on its own -- you actually have to work to develop it. For instance, had Srinath and Kumble and Sachin and even Azhar been playing right through, it is highly likely that the abilities of Mohanty, Chopra, Bharadwaj, Joshi etc would have been revealed.

Anyway, that is hypothetical. India went in with Ramesh and Ganguly at the top, and Kenya's opening bowlers, Thomas Odoyo and Martin Suji, produced a lovely spell of seam bowling in conditions very conducive to that branch of the cricketing art.

The openers struggled. Especially Ramesh, who had looked so fluid the other day. Here, he seemed to be unsure of what the ball would do, and spend much of his tortured tenure tentatively feeling for the ball outside his off stump. That argues, among other things, the lack of a technically equipped coach. A good coach shows players how to go about coping with various conditions, and Ramesh ideally would have been told that when the ball was seaming around, the trick would be to deliberately, at the start of the innings, let as many go outside off as possible. When a bowler, in good conditions, finds that the batsman is letting them through safe, he is forced to shift his line and come closer to the sticks, and that is when Ramesh's brand of strokeplay works best.

What happened here though was that Ramesh kept pushing and poking, and in the process, passed the pressure on to Ganguly. It took the former 29 balls to get off the mark. And India had managed just 17/0 in 10 overs, 6 of those runs coming through wides.

Ganguly decided the onus was on him, and out of the blue, went dancing down to lift Suji over long off for a flowing six, then slammed a couple of boundaries, each time using his feet to come down the track to the seam bowlers.

With the score at 35/1, just five of those runs coming from Ramesh, Ganguly went down the track once too often, failed to get enough carry on the lofted shot and the ball went very very high in the air to give Thomas Odoyo a chance to show his catching prowess at square leg, running backwards and judging the swirling skier to perfection.

India's progression rate is interesting: 6/0 in 5, 17/0 in 10, 42/1 in 15, 52/1 in 20; 71/1 in 25; 97/1 in 30, 116/2 in 35...

At that point, it looked like India had been played right out of the game. Credit for it goes to the four Kenyan seamers, Martin and Tony Suji, Josephat Ababu and Thomas Odoyo, backed up by the most electric fielding seen in the tournament thus far (which, come to think of it, is saying something, really, since the Zimbabweans, South Africans and Indians have all turned it on here in previous outings). The only area where Kenya lacked was in discipline -- when the score was 46/1 in 17 overs, there were 10 wides. Remove those, and you can imagine how much more pressure there would have been on the Indians.

Ramesh laboured his way to 50 off 116 balls and promptly got himself out, which was a double blow. For one thing, having taken 116 deliveries in 34 overs -- which is over half the number of balls bowled at that point -- Ramesh was well behind the rate he needed to be going at. And by giving Sheikh a wild charge and being stumped quite easily, he failed to redeem himself the only way he could, by batting through, and translating his start into a big innings.

Dravid left soon after, trying to chip over long on and finding Alpesh Vader, right on the line, lean way backward to hold a lovely catch -- Dravid's mistake being that having lined up the ball for the hit and picked the right shot, he opted to chip rather than hit through the line, and thus failed to clear the fielder.

That brought Chopra to the wicket for a quick cameo -- this young lad appears increasingly to take his batting seriously, and that is good news for the Indians. But it was when Bharadwaj and Jadeja got together that the Indian innings finally changed gears, the score going from 136/4 in 40 to 181/4 in 45 to provide the much needed acceleration.

Bharadwaj in particular was a revelation. As mentioned in the previous match report, it is early days yet and you don't want to judge him, one way or the other, without seeing him play at least three, four games against varying bowling standards. But one thing comes through nice and clear -- if temperament is the criterion, this lad has it in spades. You would expect a young man playing his second ODI to be in a bit of a flap given the pressures on the batting side at this point. Bharadwaj in fact thrived -- there were lovely flicks and drives, clean footwork down the wicket to the spinners, very fine examples of hitting on the up and through the line to clear the field -- so much so that Jadeja, the end overs specialist, took to taking quick singles and letting his junior partner have his head.

I'd still like to see Bharadwaj play quality seam bowlers, like the South Africans, on a track giving them some help before trying a final analysis, but one thing's for sure -- this is a lad to be nurtured, he has the potential and if the Indian selectors, the board and the management can do the right thing, then this boy could have a long run at the top level ahead of him.

Jadeja fell to a rather unfortunate run out, backing up too far after Bharadwaj had hit straight to a fielder, but the interesting thing was that as he left, he was heard clearly yelling to his partner, in Hindi, "Hang on, be there till the end".

Bharadwaj did just that, while Robin and Joshi fell to the demands of the situation and got out to across the line heaves. However, the runs kept coming, India -- normally known for making a mess of the end overs -- putting up 84 in the last ten to produce a respectable 220/7 in the allotted overs, a score you would have bet against when India were at 116/2 in 35.

The Kenyan bowlers bowled well, but the spinners had nothing much in their arsenal to challenge a side that thrives on the slow stuff. Maurice Odumbe also made the mistake of keeping himself on during the slog, even though there were overs of seam left to call on, and this at least in part (together with the large proportion of wides) helped the Indian cause.

The conditions were definitely better for batting by the time the second innings began -- the sun had dried the pitch, the overcast had been burnt away, the pitch had eased and Kenya had the right conditions to try and mount a viable challenge.

Inside the first ten overs, that hope was dead, with the two seamers knocking back four wickets to reduce Kenya to 42/4 and put them out of the game right there.

Prasad began it by producing a lovely leg cutter, off the very first ball of the innings, the ball landing on length, drawing Otieno into the push and leaving late to take the edge through to the keeper.

From then on, it was all Mohanty, who produced an outstanding display of seam bowling. The more I see of this lad in recent times, the more it strikes me that if he loses his place in the playing eleven when Srinath returns, it will be a travesty of justice. On form, it is Mohanty, not Prasad, who deserves to partner Srinath with the new ball.

The second and third wickets were symptomatic of what I am talking about. In the second over, Mohanty produced a lovely delivery on line of middle, on a very full length, swinging in incredibly late to leg. Steve Tikolo tried to swing to leg, the movement beat the shot and all the batsman could do was tap it gently to mid on for the easiest of catches.

Mohanty then produced 10 balls of pure beauty to get Maurice Odumbe in one hell of a tangle -- at one point, the Kenyan captain played and missed five successive deliveries around the line of off, three of them leaving him late, two jagging back in sharply by way of variety (the second of these hit Odumbe in the groin and had him crumpling to the ground in pain). Odumbe was completely shot in confidence and Prasad administered the coup de grace when he got Odumbe pushing at a leg cutter, and got the faintest of edges through to the keeper. The scoreboard credits Prasad with that wicket, but it actually belonged to Mohanty. And the latter then rounded things off quite nicely when Vadher, who was stroking effortlessly against Prasad, was foxed by one that seamed away late, the batsman was drawn into driving on the up and the late movement had the ball flaring off the outer edge to gully -- Jadeja's confidence in Mohanty in fact indicated by the field he gave him, two slips, gully and a short square right through his first spell of 7 overs.

That was more or less that -- and Nikhil Chopra hammered probably the final nail into the Kenyan coffin when he took out Hitesh Modi in the 23rd over. Off the first ball of the over, Chopra had produced a lovely arm ball to get Modi plumb in front, but the umpire turned that one down for no reason any one could see. A ball later, came the wicket, thanks to superb glovework by M S K Prasad. Modi lunged forward to try and swing a flighted ball to leg, and missed completely. The ball kicked, Prasad had a problem getting his glove to it, and the ball fell out of his gloves and landed near the stumps. Prasad kept his eye on the batsman's foot, lunged forward, grasped the ball and in a flash, took off the bails -- superb reflexive work, and yet another sign that Prasad, with an extended run in the team, is now on a confidence high and playing to his natural ability.

From then on, a detailed review of the game is pointless -- Kenya was 77/6 by the 30 over mark and despite some very late order heroics by Thomas Odoyo and Martin Suji -- who, incidentally, hold the world record of 117 for the 8th wicket -- there was only one result possible.

So instead, let's take a quick look at the spinners. Joshi, on the drying wicket, found the turn missing that he was getting earlier, and promptly changed his gameplan, bowling a tighter line and length, forcing the batsmen to defend, keeping the pressure on at one end. Chopra choose to attack, and did very well, having most batsmen in trouble most especially with his knack of producing a very quick arm ball on a length with no visible change of action, mixed in with his off breaks to keep the batsmen tentative. But again, the revelation was Bharadwaj (named man of the match for his all round performance), who after his batting stint seemed to have gained in confidence and bowled very well in the conditions -- he used his height well to slam the ball down on a length, gave the ball a real tweak and thus added turn to the bounce he was extracting. All this was backed up by fielding which retained the high standard set in the game against South Africa.

But the game was won and lost in the first ten overs of seam, and India now are through to the final. Ajay Jadeja in the post match briefing made an interesting comment: "We did very well today, but we are a good team, we keep pulling off fine wins. Our problem is a habit of suddenly dropping a game or two for no reason, and losing our momentum, we have to see that we don't do it here."

Precisely. India may be through to the final -- but they will need to keep the adrenalin flowing in the last league game, the day after, if they want to maintain the happy momentum they've found.

Meanwhile, a thought for the four coaches here. When Vadher clipped a ball outside off back for Bharadwaj to hold well on the follow through, that made 7 caught and bowleds in 3 games -- an unusually high number.

And what it tells you is that this wicket is sticking in parts, the ball is stopping before coming on, causing the batsmen to play early. This being the age of computer-assisted coaches, be interesting to know if any of the four teams on view is actually making the effort to plot the ends from where such dismissals are most frequent, with a view to alerting its batsmen and also telling the bowlers about a good wicket taking ploy.

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