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Aravinda versus India

Prem Panicker

It's funny how, some of the most heroic of stories are about one man against the odds.

The boy on the burning deck. Horatio, on that bridge of his. The Dutch boy who poked his finger into a hole in the dyke. Spartacus, against the legions.

Should we add Aravinda D'Silva to that list?

His unbeaten 110, off 263 deliveries, deserves to rank among the truly great Test innings. Because it was a knock that had it all. Courage. Character. Focus. Thought. And an implacable determination to grind on and on and on.

The hardest thing to do, when wickets are falling all around you and bowlers are beating your edge with alarming regularity, is to ignore the previous ball, to focus on the next one, and to stake your skill and ability on the task of just staying there.

And the most unlikely person to do it, you would have thought, was Aravinda. The batsman known to the international cricketing fraternity as 'Mad Max', for his reckless adventurism. And it is perhaps this -- the fact that his innings on the day was so totally against his natural instinct to dominate the bowling -- that elevates this knock into the realm of the 'greats'.

Try seeing it from his specially contoured shoes (For trivia buffs, Aravinda has one foot shorter than the other. The effort of batting for long periods used to give him, among other things, back problems until Alex Kontouri took over as team physio. Alex designed a special shoe for the batsman, to cancel out the physical defect, and Aravinda reckons that this has not only given his back a new lease of life, but maybe added a good four, five years to his international career -- a strong case, incidentally, for teams to have physios that know their business).

So there Aravinda stood, both feet on the ground, and watched as his colleagues at the other end, all top flight batsmen, succumbed. The atmosphere on day five was cloudy, the bowlers had their tails up, the field placing was as aggressive as it can get. And the pressure began to tell.

While Srinath fired on all cylinders from one end, Abey Kuruvilla was a bit nervy to start with. He kept bowling down the off side, letting the batsmen leave the ball alone, and that sort of thing does not help when you are looking to bowl a side out. Finally, after yet another exercise in running in and bowling a foot outside off, Kuruvilla was spotted standing in mid pitch, gesticulating to himself, making motions of the hand that showed, clearly, that he was telling himself, 'make the batsmen play'. Arjuna Ranatunga is credited with the slowest pulse rate in cricket, but the sheer nerve-wracking pressure of the situation proved too much even for him. While he, like Aravinda and indeed all other batsmen, preferred to play Srinath with the initial movement of the foot being back and across, against the slower Kuruvilla he kept committing himself to the front foot. One from Kuruvilla stopped on him, Ranatunga was way on the front foot with bat hanging futilely in front of body, the ball came on slower off the pitch, took the edge onto pad and forward short leg did the rest.

Tillekeratne, returning to the Sri Lankan Test side, has looked all at sea in this Test. And on the day, his poor run continued -- beaten repeatedly by Srinath, Kuruvilla, Mohanty and Ganguly whenever the ball moved off the seam, Tillekeratne must have looked for relief when the spinners came on. However, Kumble, today, found the conditions to his liking and began making the ball fizz off the track, getting turn and bounce and, in one over, beating the left hander five times on the trot.

With Chauhan, too, getting turn, it began to look like the Indian attack had finally found all its dentures. A superb piece of bowling by the off spinner ended Tillekeratne's vigil when, after pinning the left hander onto the back foot with a stream of deliveries bowled round the wicket and angled into middle and off stump, he tossed one up just outside off. The temptation was too much for Tillekeratne, who launched into the drive for the ball to turn away, take the edge, and put slip in business. Thus, Sri Lanka went in to lunch at 106/5, 40 runs behind India with four hours of play left in the day.

Ranatunga's captaincy skills have been lauded time and again, and here he earns further applause for his decision to send Kumara Dharmasena ahead of Lanka D'Silva in the order. Dharmasena is a compact, competent batsman of impeccable temperament. And he displayed all those qualities during the afternoon session, keeping Aravinda company and denying India the one thing it needed -- a breakthrough.

When the tea interval came, both players were still unseperated. The question is going to be asked, did India try everything it could? Did Tendulkar get his act right? Did the bowlers do what they were supposed to?

The answer to that, I suspect, is 'yes and no'. The field setting was aggressive, the spinners bowling with slip, silly point, leg slip and short square. The bowling changes were made quick and fast. The bowlers, during this session, bowled the right line and length for the most part, and batting was a testing, arduous job. All these, the Indians got right.

However, to my mind, Tendulkar again missed a bet when he failed to bowl Ganguly. There is no real mystery to why Ganguly breaks partnerships -- as a bowler, his forte is accuracy of line and length, an ability to keep it there or thereabouts for over after over, and to extract movement both in the air and off the track. But the real key to Ganguly's bowling is that his line is a teaser. It comes at you just outside off, drawing you naturally into the drive. And you tend to think that at his gentle pace, he can in fact be easily driven -- only to find one ball doing that bit too much as the bowler rolls his fingers over the seam and makes it dart away, to take the edge to slips.

Chauhan, for his part, missed a little trick when he, for several overs, kept bowling over the wicket to Dharmasena. The all rounder was obviously flustered by the turn and bounce, and preferred to just poke his pad at everything that came his way, with bat well out of harm's way. Since his pad was pushed outside line of off, there was no danger of the LBW. The classic off spinner's counter to that is to go round the wicket, angle the ball across the batsman, pitching on off and darting back in. Think of it, and you realise that any attempt to pad away that line makes you a sucker for the LBW, since your pad, to cover the angle, has to come in front of the wicket and not across it to outside off. Chauhan finally got it right and began going round -- but surprisingly, only to the last ball or two of each over, rather than throughout the over. Rather surprising, I thought that.

When play resumed after tea, Srinath was given the old ball, then into the 86th over. The intention was clearly to help him get warmed up, so that the new ball could be taken when due and see him fired up and steaming in.

Which was when luck intervened, in the form of fading light. The light meters indicated that the visibility was not good enough for pace, the umpires asked the Indian captain to use only spinners -- the rule says that any bowling that could endanger the batsman is not permitted, and fast to fast medium bowlers do come in that category, so no complaints there.

Interestingly, Srinath was bowling well within himself till the light meters came out, saving himself for the new ball. When the light was first checked, it was as if he realised that he may not be bowling much longer. And so he unexpectedly slipped his leash, and slipped in a yorker length delivery at his very fastest. Dharmasena, his concentration already disrupted by the interruptions, poked blindly at it and back went off stump.

That was India's last success of the day, as Aravinda stepped up a gear and, despite another interruption when the umpires waved the players off the field for bad light (Aravinda was 98 at the time) and then back on when the light marginally improved, raced to his century.

The Indian fielders all went up to congratulate him on the landmark -- and never, to my mind, was kudos better deserved. It was like his bat just got broader as the day wore on -- and shut India right out of the game.

Sachin Tendulkar did everything he could. Including, at one point, argue with the umpires that the light was better at the end away from the pavilion because the shadow of the stadium was not blocking that end, and therefore he could bowl Srinath from there.

At this point, the Indian spinners got a shade desperate. Knowing that the onus was fully on them, they tried too hard, Kumble in particular slamming the ball halfway down the track instead of pitching it up -- and Aravinda took full toll with a series of pulls and cuts that raced to the fence.

Tendulkar decided that he had had enough, and asked for the new ball. An instant later, light was offered to the batsmen, who promptly accepted. End of story.

As one sits back to review the game, two thoughts are uppermost. The first is a positive -- it was not so long ago that the same batting lineup got runs by the trouble hundred against India. Yet the same batsmen, with the honourable exception of Aravinda D'Silva, were totally at sea here -- which is a good augury for the Tests to come. Add to this the fact that the Lankan bowling looks incapable of containing the Indians, let alone bowling them out twice in a game, and a strong case can be made for preparing quick pitches for the Tests in Nagpur and Bombay, and for India to rely on its bowling to force the wins there.

The final thought, or rather memory, is a negative. Remember the 202 runs that were scored on day three? Against the same attack that, when lower order players like Kumble and Kuruvilla decided to step on it, yielded, at one stage, 66 runs in just 8.3 overs? Ganguly, Kumble and Kuruvilla showed in the afternoon of day four that negative line or no, runs could be made rapidly if the batsmen were in the mind to do it. And that is why I find myself wondering what shape the game would have taken, if India had only batted with sense on day three.

That dawdle pushed the declaration well into the evening of the fourth day, and consumed time. And finally, it was time that the Indians ran short of, in their drive to force a win.

All of which, to my mind, is why India lost its chance to win, not on day five but on day three. Not with the ball, but with the bat.

Sobering thought, that.