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Can't bat, can't bowl, can't field

Break it all down, and what have you got? This:

1. The bowlers, as a unit, have a big transition to make, from the prodigious swing they got in the Test series with the red balls to the lack thereof in the one day version with the white balls; their focus needs to shift from the attacking lines they have gotten used to, to more containing lines and lengths (a transition Anderson for one appears to have made very quickly; consider too Flintoff's excellent line, forget the pace, to MS Dhoni that produced a mere 3 off 17 balls and put the batsman under so much pressure he didn't know if he was coming or going until he gloved one and had to go).

2. The Indian batsmen performed excellently in the Tests, at least in part because the more leisured pace permitted them to dig deep, grit out the tough times and use their considerable experience to accumulate runs. Effective, yes, but too ponderous for the one day version; the six remaining games in this series will test their ability to weather the effects of age and slower reflexes and to score runs at will. The classic case for me yesterday was Sachin Tendulkar, who started out with a flowing boundary on the off and got his first 10 at a run a ball. Once Collingwood shut down the off side with a well-placed cordon, Tendulkar got becalmed; no longer able to drive on the off with careless rapture, he tried to turn his game around to cope, got into repeated trouble against Anderson during that period of mental transition, and went from 9 off 11 to 17 off 33. It's happened to him, and others, in the three Tests as well, this struggle to find runs, to-as Harsha put it in one of his columns-do well when you are not playing well, but the one day game does not permit those luxuries, and it is here the biggest vulnerability lies for the experienced, read aging, members of the batting lineup.

3. That our fielding sucks is no secret; it was the single issue everyone harped on when the team for the World Cup was picked, and Dravid tried to put a good face on it by talking of 'smart fielding' as a means to countering the problem. Nice bit of wordplay there, but it is not easy to walk that talk, when your players move and turn with all the ponderous majesty of the Titanic. When we traded youth for experience, this deficiency came with the package; while watching India field during the Tests, both Ian Chappell and Nasser Hussain remarked that this unit would have problems during the one day games (Nasser remarked on one occasion that this fielding side would be run ragged on the far larger grounds of Australia; the Rose Bowl gave us an early preview of that prospect).

Can't bat, can't bowl, can't field, Martin Johnson famously wrote of an England side that went on to win the 1986-'87 Ashes series; my assessment-and, as I pointed out at the start, one game is not enough evidence to judge by-could be as wide of the mark; somehow, though, I don't think so.

In passing, this thought: The national selectors cast a clear vote for experienced players, which is their call to make. But by way of establishing their credentials as far sighted judges of talent, they pulled in Rohit Sharma, to the accompaniment of pats on their own back. I wonder: Is Sharma in the side because he can be pointed to as the token youth, or is he there to play? The longer a kid fizzing with promise and form warms a bench, the more unsure he gets, and the more likely it becomes that when he finally gets a chance (which can only happen after some 'established' batsman mucks up so badly, for so long, that there is no alternative to dropping him), he has lost that fizz, that form.