A Test of will

Cricket fans with long memories spent the Independence Day weekend wondering when the Indian team had previously had such a humiliating series. Saurav Ganguly, the captain who gave India’s Test team a new identity, was brutal in his assessment: “Let us accept we were very ordinary… I have not seen an Indian team like this in the last 10 years.”

Perhaps the specific example Ganguly had in mind was the tour of Australia in 1999-2000. A disjointed, confused team, playing under Sachin Tendulkar in the final days of his captaincy, lost all three Tests. So complete was Australia’s domination that Rahul Dravid managed a mere 93 runs in six completed innings.
India has lost on foreign soil more often than it has won. Even so, for psychological destruction, the tour of England has few parallels. It would not be unfair to compare it with the annihilation of Sunil Gavaskar’s team by Imran Khan’s destructive bowling and Pakistan’s rampaging batsmen in the winter of 1982-83.
Yet there is a difference. In the 1980s and 1990s, as earlier, the Indian Test team was a poor tourist. Roughly since the England tour of 2002, however, India has hardly had a bad series abroad. It has fought and often won. Not once has it been the pushover of this English summer.
Obviously, Indian cricket is not used to such a drubbing anymore. For two years, India has been the world’s leading Test team. Playing its closest rival, it was supposed to deliver pulsating cricket. Instead it surrendered time after time. What went wrong?
It has become something of a cliché that the Indian XI is a slow starter when it travels outside. Indeed, Indian commentators repeated this, almost as a slogan of pride, after the thrashing in the first Test at Lord’s in the ongoing series. There was a happy certainty that India would find form in the second Test and be back to its winning ways by the third.
There are two things wrong with such an approach. First, it sets the bar low. India would have been quite happy to have returned from England with a 1-1 shared series. This is not the way the world’s top team should be thinking; it should have greater ambition and gumption.
Second, an inevitable question is being ducked. Why is India a slow starter? There is no divine rule that decrees Indian batsmen must fail in the opening match of a Test series abroad. As has been pointed out, it is generally a matter of scheduling. A tour as important as the one to England — after all it was known a big defeat would cost India its No. 1 Test team ranking — was planned in a lackadaisical and feckless manner. There was just one warm-up game before the first Test.
Players arrived in England after a long break or after playing a very different opposition in very different conditions in the Caribbean islands. Some of the members of M.S. Dhoni’s team were recovering from injury. Others had not played competitive cricket since the Twenty20 (T20) games of the Indian Premier League (IPL).
What is the solution to this? Is it to abolish the IPL and wish away T20 cricket? Is it to force cricketers to drop out of lucrative tournaments and lose income? Those who have suggested these as options are living in an unreal world. Such drastic measures are not practicable, and neither are they called for.
All it required was for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to prioritise the tour of England above the tour of the West Indies, attempt to play that series later and at any rate steer clear of limited-overs internationals in the Caribbean. If nothing else, this could have allowed Dhoni’s men to turn up in England 10-15 days earlier, and given them those crucial two or three extra practice games.
The reason the Indians didn’t bother was that they didn’t give their art — cricket — and their number one status the respect that was deserved. Nothing reflected this more than the decision to fly down Virender Sehwag straight from a shoulder injury into a Test match, with an apology of a county game as practice. This decision insulted sport and mocked the calibre of the English team. Sehwag and India paid for it.
An analogy would help here. In 2004 (as in 2000 and 2008), Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi were India’s great Olympic medal hopes. In 2004, at Athens, this writer saw them lose a tennis doubles semi-final that they were widely expected to win. They lost to an unknown pair of Germans, Nicolas Kiefer and Rainer Schuettler. A few days later Paes and Bhupathi lost the bronze medal play-off as well and came away from Greece without a podium finish.
By 2004, Paes and Bhupathi had long ceased to be doubles partners on the international circuit. Before the Athens Olympics, they came together for two tournaments — just two — and thought these would be enough to rediscover their coordination.
In contrast the Germans were both singles players who made sacrifices in preparing for the Olympics. Realising they would be representing their country at Athens, they began to partner each other six months before the Olympic Games and played nine tournaments together. They showed a work ethic, an honesty of effort and a respect for their opponents and for the Olympic arena that Paes and Bhupathi did not. The results were there for all to see.
What India’s cricketers did in the build-up to the series against England was similar. They treated their preparation period with nonchalance. No doubt the BCCI is to blame. Yet so is the captain. Dhoni is not diffident in making demands for greater reward money. It is an open secret that he did so to the then BCCI president as early as 2007, when he had just become captain and taken his team to victory in the opening T20 World Cup. Why then can’t he insist on a more sensitive itinerary and more practice games?

Ashok Malik can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com