World champs win in a canter

Prem Panicker

There's no half measures where India is concerned - win or lose, they do it by a mile!

Thus, if the Indian cricket team was devastating in its win over New Zealand the other day at Bangalore, then it swung to the other extreme, and looked lost and out of sorts against World Cup holders Sri Lanka on Saturday.

Ian Chappell, at one point, said in the commentary box that the team looked like it was suffering from jet lag. Nice enough as an excuse had India lost against New Zealand - but if jet lag caused the defeat here, then this must surely be the first case of that syndrome operating in delayed action mode.

No - the reason why the team's performance flucutates with metronomic regularity between the sublime and the ridiculous must, I fear, remain one of those great unsolved mysteries - like the riddle of the Sphinx, or some such.

Suffice to say that the result of this game has created - as far as the teams, the fans and, yes, that dirty word, bookies, are concerned, an ideal situation - two league games to go and in each, the winner goes through to the final. In other words, we've got a couple of virtual semifinals coming up when, on May 20, Sri Lanka takes on New Zealand and, a day later, India goes up against Pakistan.

Meanwhile, back to the game...

The pitch, and the teams

The pitch for the game was, by any yardstick, a good one day track. Hard, firm, with a top covering of virgin soil rolled hard to give a bouncy, pacy wicket on which the bowlers and batsmen could both parade their skills without either having an undue edge over the other. Which, when you come to think of it, is just what one day wickets are meant to be anyway.

I was reading the other day about this computer called Deep Blue - which, I believe, can compute many millions of moves per second. One of these days, when that thingy is free, I would love to have a loan of it - though frankly, I doubt if the machine that beat Kasparov would have much luck figuring out the mental processes of that alleged entity, the Indian think tank.

Think back, if you will, to the start of the West Indies tour. What was the big controversy about? The lack of an off spinner in a side playing against a lineup including four left-handers. In fact, Sachin Tendulkar specifically groused about this as soon as the team was announced - then Srinath obligingly clutched his shoulder and left the arena, and the much maligned (here I must admit that sight unseen, I too had my share in said maligning) Noel David entered the ranks. By the end of the tour, he had done enough to not only justify his inclusion, but also to allow one to indulge the cautious optimism that he might be a prospect for the future.

So tell me, how many left-handers do the Sri Lankans have? Three front-liners. And if you recognise Chaminda Vaas' ability to strike the odd lusty blow, then four. And who sits out from the Indian lineup for this match? Why, a certain Noel David.

Am I saying that David's inclusion would have turned the game around? Heck, no - for all I know, India could well have lost by an even bigger margin. All I am saying is, it pays to get your thinking cap on right - not with peak to the back, like Jim Courier wears it. Then, if you make all the logical moves and still lose, fair enough. Here, though, we were in the position of yet again forgetting the dictum that there are horses for specific courses.

Both India and Sri Lanka, thus, went into the game with lineups that were identical to the ones they fielded in the previous outing. And Sachin Tendulkar won the toss, and promptly figured on batting first.

There is every chance that he is going to get slammed for that. SRT should have known, it will be said at least in some quarters, that a new pitch would give extra bounce and make batting in the first 15 overs difficult. That, frankly, is so much hot air - of the three wickets that went in the first 15 overs, one went to a yorker (and when the ball lands an inch in front of the stumps, what has the bounce got to do with it?), the second and third to injudicious shots. And you can play silly cricket batting first, or last - so as far as it goes, SRT's decision was fair enough.

The Indian innings

India was quickly 0/1, then 5/2, and 29/3 - the third wicket falling in the 12th over. And of the three, I would absolve Saurav Ganguly, alone, of any real blame. Chaminda Vaas' first ball of the match was a beaut of a yorker, swinging in late, and pitching about a foot inside the batting crease to make a mess of the stumps the umpire had so meticulously aligned a minute before. True, Ganguly does tend to be a shade prone to be slow in coming down on the ball very early in his innings, even more prone to the first ball yorker. Remember how Allan Donald did him with a similar delivery in South Africa? Fast bowlers these days watch videos of opposing batsmen - and tend to remember these things - Vaas, for one, appears to be a quick study.

Tendulkar's dismissal was, perhaps, equally inevitable. Superb technician though he undoubtedly is, he does have a penchant to overestimate his own skills on a wicket where the bounce is a shade more than normal. Early in his innings, he loves going for the short ball outside off, rising on his toes to slam over point - and on wickets of steady bounce, that is pretty much his bread and butter shot for with this, he forces the bowler to change the line, to bowl on his stumps which, in turn, lets him play straight back over the top or through the onside field. When the wicket bounces more than normal, though, Tendulkar has the tendency to try the shot anyway - and the extra lift makes the difference between his keeping it down. Again, South Africa provides classic instances, and the Wankhede provided a repeat as he chased after one from Sajeewa D'Silva and ended up putting it straight in the hands of Kumara Dharmasena at wide third man - or, more accurately, backward point on the line.

Not quite the best of times for Vinod Kambli to play his comeback innings (that brief appearance against New Zealand the other day, when his only stroke was the match-winning four, doesn't count, does it?) - and not quite the best venue either, given that his home crowd would expect miracles. Kambli has been in good touch on the domestic circuit, and shows obvious signs of having worked out some of the flaws in his backlift and shuffle. His problem here was that he tried too hard to produce that miracle, repeatedly going for the pull and being beaten for both pace and bounce. Two failures while playing the shot should have taught him the lesson. Taught him, more importantly, to rein himself in, settle down, and play the long innings - after all, when he came to the wicket, the game was just 5 overs old. But no, he went for the pull again, off a short rising ball from D'Silva, the extra bounce and the fact that the ball came on quicker to the bat meant that he got the bottom, instead of the middle, to the ball - and Hashan Tillekeratne at a wide mid on position had no problems whatsoever.

India 29/3 in 11.3 overs, and out came the much-maligned Ajay Jadeja. I, for one, am not among his votaries when it comes to Test cricket - but in the shortened version of the game, I will go the extra mile to rank him one of the most effective middle-order batsmen in the game today. Almost inevitably, Jadeja comes in to bat when the innings is 30+ overs old - and on such occasions, the innovative shotmaker in him comes to the fore. But here - as on earlier occasions - he found himself at the crease with the ball new and the innings in its nascent stages, and promptly tailored his game to the occasion, taking his time to get off the mark, using his gift for placement and his footspeed between wickets to keep the score moving, and played in a calm, unhurried fashion that marks the man who is supremely confident of his ability in a particular situation.

Rahul Dravid is easily the classiest all-round player in India today, and that was further underlined here. Coming to the wicket to play the second ball of the innings, Dravid was for a brief while rather tentative. It appeared that he hadn't quite come to grips with what the wicket was doing, as he repeatedly played late - obviously, the pace and, more importantly, bounce was more than he anticipated. The mark of a good batsman is not that he is never in trouble, but that he tends to work out his problems quickly - and Dravid showed how fast he had adjusted when he played two fluent drives through the off, off D'Silva, to leave the field standing. And from then, there really was no point at which he looked in trouble - calm as ever, controlling the pace of the innings well, he played shots when occasion offered, eschewed all forms of risk and, like Jadeja, used placement and quick running to keep the score moving along.

The 95 run partnership for the fourth wicket ranks as one of the better recovery efforts I've seen from India in recent times - most especially because it came after India were 29/3, and Vaas and Muralitharan in particular were bowling magnificiently. But then again, the trouble with Dravid has been that after having got the bowling at his mercy, he tends to give it all away with in a moment of uncharacteristic slackness - the lazy late cut he tried at one from Muralitharan that was just outside off and cutting in sharply was a prescription for disaster, the ball being too far up to the bat, and too close to the stumps, for the shot to have much chance of success. In the event, Dravid (61 off 103 with eight fours) managed only to drag the ball on to the stumps, and India from 29/3 were 124 for four.

Jadeja was playing an equal role when Dravid was at the wicket, but the advent of Robin Singh saw Jadeja take on the mantle of senior partner. Robin's run of failures in the West Indies must have dampened his confidence a shade - and the result was evident as, early on, he kept trying too hard to get going, and ended up in knots. But then again, Robin in the Caribbean failed because the wickets there, where the ball was never really coming on to the bat, are not meant for his brand of strokeplay, and also because Robin, unlike Jadeja, is not the kind of player who can change his natural game to suit altered conditions. Here at the Wankhede, though, everything fell into place. The ball was coming on, the bounce was good, and Robin's natural eye, timing and power meant that if he got over that initial fidgets, he would come good.

To Jadeja goes the credit for shepherding his partner through the early hesitancy - and to Robin himself, the credit for capitalising with an innings of grit and power. In fact, going into the slog overs, with both Robin and Jadeja timing the ball superbly, it began to look as though India just might race away to a score of around the 240, 245 mark. Then Jadeja attempted to square drive a fuller length ball from Jayasuriya, missed, and was yorked for 72 superbly made runs off 102 balls with four fours and one six, and India in the 44th over was 182/5.

At which point, Robin took over the onus of strokeplay. And with Mongia using his trademark flick off the hips to good effect - one stroke, where he took a ball from D'Silva from outside off and shovelled it, there really is no other word for it, over square leg for six was, well, the kind of shot only a Mongia would play outside a lacrosse field.

Robin's cameo of 51 off 52 balls with four fours and a six came to an end in predictable fashion as he drew away to play on the off and Sajeewa D'Silva's straight, full length ball took the edge and crashed into the stumps. Anil Kumble, for his part, belied his reputation as a person of cricketing intelligence in the last over, repeatedly drawing away from the stumps and trying to hit Chaminda Vaas over the off side - commonsense being that to a left hander, you go across to off and hit through the line on the leg side. Kumble finally got his thinking cap on straight off the last ball of the innings - only, however, to mistime and give Muralitharan a fine running catch at midwicket, the Indian innings ending on 225/7 in 50 overs.

The Sri Lankans fielded with their trademark brilliance - Mahanama and Muralitharan being outstanding even in a side where everyone, even the portly Ranatunga, throws themselves around with vim and vigour. But the real key to the Lankan performance thus far was Chaminda Vaas. Slammed for 71 runs in his outing against Pakistan, Vaas on a wicket of pace and bounce bowled with magnificient control, using the conditions with the skill of a world class bowler and producing a spell of 10-3-13-2 - easily the best ever bowling analysis by a Lankan in international cricket.

One day cricket is a strange game - though it is supposed to be decided over 100 overs, quite often the match swings one way, or the other, in the space of just 10 overs, or less. And in this particular instance, the key to the Lankan win came in the first seven overs - four of them bowled by Venkatesh Prasad.

The first over he bowled, to Sanath Jayasuriya, is a perfect example - twice, he angled the ball across the left hander, keeping it up and moving it away late off the seam. Both times, Jayasuriya came dangerously close to edging to the keeper or the slips. On two other occasions, Prasad pitched short and wide of off stump. On both occasions, the batsman rose on his toes and slammed it over point to the boundary.

Having this personal example to guide him - having, too, seen Abey Kuruvilla keep the rampaging Jayasuriya tucked up and in constant trouble by angling the ball, pitching outside off and alternating the one seaming in with the one going out, it is surprising that Prasad, from then on, reverted to pitching far too short. And Jayasuriya made merry, slamming fours and sixes to all parts of the ground with such authority that at the end of ten over, Sri Lanka were rocketing away at 63/1 - and when you are chasing 226 and have got over a quarter of the way there in ten overs, it takes total ineptness to lose the game from there.

There was talk of demoting Kaluwitharana and opening with Mahanama - the fact that the little keeper is badly out of form and confidence was only underscored here when off the first ball of the second over, he slashed at a loosener from Kuruvilla that was outside off, to give the lone slip, Tendulkar, a good catch to hold and reduce Lanka to 8/1.

Another breakthrough, and Lanka could well have been forced on the backfoot. But for every good over that Kuruvilla bowled, Prasad - normally a bowler who uses his head to make up for defeciencies in pace - bowled an awful one, and the game was well and truly over as a contest even before the field restrictions went off.

Atappatu is no Gurusinghe - in the sense that he does not have the bearded left-hander's enormous experience and ability to rotate strike. But he is a comer, developing quite nicely, and on the day, he had the skills he needed to stay at the wicket while his partner took a firm grip on his bat and went bang-bang. His innings of 39 off 64 balls with four fours, terminated by a direct throw from Sunil Joshi at mid on when the Lankan score was 146, was just enough to ensure that Jayasuriya at the other end could bat freely.

Anil Kumble and Sunil Joshi bowled as well as they could, given that even before their advent, Lanka had a strangelhold on the match and the two batsmen could play with total freedom. But again, India missed a bowler who could make the ball turn away from the left-hander, and the question comes up again about why David was sitting this one out.

A bit of artificial excitement was created when Kumble, in the 26th over, first saw the departure of Atapattu via the run out and then dismissed the dangerous Aravinda D'Silva off the very first ball he faced - a flipper bowled full length, which the batsman attempted to play to leg, missed, and was caught plumb in front.

But when you have a lineup where a class player like Mahanama comes in at number 7 and, moreoever, when you have all but got the match in your pocket at that stage (D'Silva fell with the score at 151), a minor hiccup matters very little. Ranatunga came in to score a quick 17 runs with a four and a six, Tillekeratne was uncharacteristically out of sorts and edged Kuruvilla to Mongia, but when Mahanama walked out, the curtain was already coming down anyway, and he had little to do but watch Jayasuriya take it home.

Which necessitates a word about Jayasuriya's batting. It is easy to dismiss him as a slogger - but that is to do the man a gross injustice. Jayasuriya's forearms would be the envy of a Schwarzenegger, he does hold his bat with a low grip, club-like - but the shots he hits are authentic cricketing shots, the only difference being that he hits them with blinding power. And, as Sanjay Manjrekar once was telling me, he has a very limited zone of defence - in the sense that there are very few lines to which he responds with a defensive stroke, his initial frame of mind to almost every delivery being one of total aggression. Let a batsman like that get his eye in and, more, get a few good shots rattling off the middle and you might as well go home - more so because Jayasuriya is one of those strokemakers who, when the field restrictions are off and hitting over the top becomes dicey, has the patience to wait and push the runs, knowing that the bad ball will come along sooner or later. At no time after the first 15 overs was he in a hurry to hit - and yet, when he walked off, undefeated, at the end of the match - having become the first Lankan batsman to score 150+ in a one day game - his strike rate (151/120 balls with 117 fours and four sixes) was well above the 100 mark - a tribute to his ability to keep his scoring rate intact without blind slogging.

Jayasuriya's pyrotechnics earned him the man of the match award - but to my mind, it should have been shared with Chaminda Vaas. That spell of his, of 10 overs for 13 runs, was a match-winner any day, and yet again one is forced to regret the mindset of adjudicators which holds that they would rather give the palm to a batsman than a bowler, any day.

One interesting sidelight - Prasad, in his second and third spells, bowled with much better control to finish up with 10-1-57-0 - after going for 36 in his first four. Take your mind back to the Firozeshah Kotla - and an Indian medium pacer who was similarly slammed, for 34 runs in his first four overs, by Jayasuriya in tandem with Kalu during the World Cup. For that one bad over, Manoj Prabhakar was eased out of the team, and in effect out of the international stage. Wherever he is, he must be laughing to himself right now, mustn't he?

Scoreboard: