1. Pick the bowlers that suit the conditions

Pitches in the subcontinent, contrary to general perception, are not all slow, dry and low. Different grounds across the stretch of the region tend to produce surfaces that are varied in subtle yet vital ways and therefore, part of M.S. Dhoni’s job will be to rotate his bowlers to suit the playing conditions. Where possible though – except on pitches that have a clear propensity to aid the quicker bowlers – Dhoni must try and incorporate two frontline spinners in his line-up, for spin is clearly India’s biggest weapon. With Harbhajan Singh’s position in the Eleven considered unassailable, Piyush Chawla and Ravichandran Ashwin will vie for the second spinner’s spot. Chawla’s exemplary form in India’s two warm-up games coupled with the fact that Ashwin like Harbhajan is an off spinner, could see the leggie make the cut. If Chawla is preferred, a case may also be made for Suresh Raina to be included in place of Yuvraj Singh, considering that India will have a full-time spinner who can turn the ball away from the right-handed batsmen. Some believe, rightly in my opinion, that Raina should play ahead of Yuvraj, in any event, based on his superior batting record in the subcontinent in recent times and his excellent fielding skills. But that said, Dhoni seems to view Yuvraj’s bowling as a key cog in the present set-up and he is unlikely to drop him unless his performances are monumentally poor.

Additionally, the opponent’s team composition must also be considered before choosing between Chawla and Ashwin. Against teams littered with left-handed batsmen, Ashwin should be the preferred option. And if Ashwin is picked, Yuvraj, perhaps, irrespective of his batting form should be fielded to lend variety to the bowling attack.

2. Use Yusuf Pathan as a Floater

It is crucial that Yusuf Pathan’s destructive ability as a batsman is used to its maximum potential. Pathan looks to be at his most dangerous when batting at number seven, but India mustn’t fall into the trap of pigeonholing batsmen into set positions. He should be used as a floater in the order and must be accorded enough time to inflict the most severe damage upon the opponent. Pathan, perhaps, doesn’t need the aid of a power-play to do his thing, but it wouldn’t hurt to ensure that the batting power-play is used, if possible, when he is in the middle.

3. Use the Third Power-Play with Purpose

The third power-play – a stretch of five consecutive overs to be selected by the batting team when not more than three fielders can be placed outside the 30 yard circle – has rarely been used with ingenuity. Very often we see teams waiting until at least the 40^th over, and in some cases even until the 45^th over, before calling for the power-play. This may be sensible in some cases, but when a team is seven or eight wickets down, the batsmen at the crease are ill-equipped to make the most of the situation. If India can use the option creatively, even between the 15^th and 20^th over where the situation so demands, it can add exponentially to its batting totals.

4. Endeavour to pick wickets in the middle overs

India got many of its strategies wrong in the disastrous 2007 World Cup where it crashed out in the group stages, of which the bowling tactics in the middle overs, particularly, bordered on the ludicrous. The spinners were sought to be used as mere containing acts and the middle overs were seen as a time to check the flow of runs, with the team rarely looking at wicket-taking options. What ensued, though, were neither wickets nor an improved economy rate. (Here is a table which shows that the economy rate in the middle overs during the 2007 World Cup was directly proportional to the number of wickets picked) The spinners, therefore, need to be utilised as attacking weapons and as we saw in the practice games, nothing works like wickets in containing the run flow.

5. Place the right fielders in the right positions

In a recent address at Calcutta, Sir Vivian Richards and Steve Waugh both opined that the best fielding side will win the World Cup. For India’s sake, one hopes that their prophecies don’t come true. Virat Kohli and Suresh Raina – who may not feature in the Eleven – are the only world class fielders in the Indian squad and it is quite improbable that the team would be among the better fielding sides in the competition. That being the case, Dhoni needs to ensure, perhaps more than most other captains, that he gets the right fielders in the right positions. The likes of Munaf Patel, Ashish Nehra, Zaheer Khan, Yusuf Pathan and even Sachin Tendulkar, are poor ground-fielders, which means that Dhoni will have a great deal of hiding to attempt. But unless an effort is made towards that end, India can wave its chances of lifting the Cup, a big goodbye!

That is perhaps the only appropriate way to describe the recent Ashes series in Australia where England won 3-1 inflicting a record-breaking 3 “innings defeats” on Australia. Used to bossing world cricket, this is causing much pain among Australian fans and supporters, and calls for the sackcloth to weep and tear their hair in frustration at their fallen zeroes.

Personally, I am enjoying every moment of Australia’s misery. To have the Australians turn up at your doorstep, beat the living daylights out of you, kill your cat and trash your house is a feeling many international cricket teams have unfortunately been familiar with for many decades, and to see the English do the same to the Australians… well, let’s say we’ve been there.

Nothing, however, illustrates how far Australia has fallen than the simple fact that the English haven’t gone completely bonkers and celebrated their victory by pissing in the Prime Minister’s garden. (There’s still time for that I guess, but I doubt if any one of the present well drilled and efficiently skill-executing members of the team possess Andrew Flintoff’s testicular fortitude for the same.) No, they’ve sort of been dismissive of the fact that they just beat Australia in Australia and are in fact, looking forward to really test their mettle by beating India when the latter tour England in June.

Let’s allow that fact to sink in for a moment. Facing India in England a Bigger Challenge than Australia in Australia.

This is the appropriate time for all of us to get out our old Warne jokes, failed McGrath sledges [NSFW] and make a trip to Australia to dance on Don Bradman’s grave and generally point and laugh.

Except of course, I can’t bring myself to do the last because of my dear departed granddad’s disapproving glare.

“You never even saw him play!” I shout at the apparition. He glares back at me, probably because he’s still an apparition or just a figment of my imagination, but proceeds to say only one thing “99.94”.

“Oh right” and I step back from the gravesite.

How did this come to be? How did we go from enjoying every one of Australia’s merciless beatings of England in the Ashes to now pouring scorn and contempt on the rag tag bunch of semi-club cricketers posing as Australians?

It is somewhat strange, but I do distinctly remember sitting with my cricket-mad grandfather and enjoying every one of England’s Ashes humiliations. This, during 14 years of indoctrination in the greatness of Bradman and a visual description of every one of the Great One’s innings by someone who did not see a single ball of it live.

Granddad wasn’t even the exception. The mere prospect of seeing Bradman in the flesh and blood, not even in his cricket whites, saw a multitude turning up at the Bombay docks to hope to catch a glimpse of him in transit only to be denied by a claimed sickness on the part of Bradman. So much so that when India toured Australia for the first, they did so to see Bradman bat. He naturally obliged scoring 715 runs off them in five matches in 1947-48.

The England team, apart from being the old colonial enemy, was also an object of hate cricket-wise. For a start, tours to India were seen as a winter-holiday, a minor indulgence for second string players against a country not to be taken seriously at the international level. Only in the 70s did England start sending their first team to tour India. Even then, the cricket they played was turgid at best, and outright boring of the paint drying variety. Draw after bore draw with England is still remembered with a shudder by Indian fans as the nadir of Test Cricket, not even comparable with the (usually) drawn India-Pakistan series, where a draw, for very explicable and obvious reasons, was considered a win for both sides.

Australia, on the other hand, always sent their first teams on India tours (rare as they were) and played hard, competitive cricket. Even the weakest Australian teams to tour India played to win every Test Match, and when all else was lost, fought to keep a draw, or in the one memorable case, a tie. Australians never complained about the conditions either. Compare Graham Gooch blaming “dodgy prawns” for a 3-0 whitewash to Dean Jones battling 40 degree heat, exhaustion, an open sewer near the stadium, and dehydration to get a double hundred in Chennai. Australians always held the respect of Indian fans, if not their open admiration and affection.

How did this change?

Those with short memories and no sense of perspective would point to Sydney 2008. They would be wrong.

The truth is no one likes a winner who doesn’t stop winning. As much fun as it was to watch the great Australian teams of the nineties and noughties ritually humiliate England in the Ashes, it got a little less bearable when this sort of behaviour was carried over to other cricketing contests. Those with cricketing memories of the 70s and 80s would no doubt nod and agree with me regarding the great West Indian teams. 5-0 blackwashes of England were fun only the first three times or so, especially when the washers carried on the form to the other teams. When you’re so awesomely brilliant at what you do, after a while, everyone hates you, and you want to retreat into a Randian fantasy and convince yourself of your inherent superiority in all walks of life.

My reaction to Australia’s recent humiliation reminds, though, of another infamous humiliation.

The 1996 World Cup featured, among many such hilarious mismatches, West Indies v Kenya. Realize, this was the Ambrose-Bishop-Lara-Richardson-Walsh West Indies and not the rabble presently turning out in maroon, and it was against a team few in India could genuinely place on a cricketing map. A slaughter was expected.

I came back from school awaiting granddad’s report of records broken and hopefully, noses smashed. He greeted me with what can only be called barely concealed glee, and what, in retrospect, I should have known was schadenfreude.

“Kenya”, he began slowly, “166 all out in 50 overs.”

“Oh…” Nothing record breaking then.

“West Indies”, and here his shoulders began to quake with barely held back laughter, “93 all out. Hahahahahaha”.

We shared a good long laugh that was probably a lot more cathartic to him than I could imagine.

Vijay’s first innings century was probably valuable. Zaheer and Sreesanth’s reverse swing in the second possibly useful, as were the spells of spin bowled by Harbhajan and Ojha. Pujara’s second innings fifty was also significant I guess, but as far as the bigger picture is considered, I was responsible for India’s win in the Second Test.

Ok… me and God himself who scored the double century and the fifty.

Fine… God, me and the sixty thousand odd Bangaloreans who turned up to watch this Test Match over five days.

I’m not being immodest here! Captain Dhoni himself acknowledged my efforts at turning up for the game! I humbly accept the thanks of a grateful nation..

Today’s game wasn’t as close as the Mohali Test, and the match as a contest virtually ended with those two identical strokes by Tendulkar off two consecutive balls from Hauritz. These were no Sehwag-esque slogs and there was no element of brutality in them whatsoever. It was just Tendulkar in such imperious form that he could got down on one knee and send the ball sailing over the deep midwicket boundary with a graceful arc of the bat. Those shots killed whatever hopes Australia had of creating some pressure with a wicket or two as their shoulders dropped when they realized the impossibility of getting past Tendulkar’s blade on this day. The rest of the day after that was basically a formality.

A fifteen year jinx was finally broken. For fifteen years, Bangalore/Bengaluru hosted Test matches without giving the Indian team a taste of success. In each of these Test Matches, Bangaloreans turned out in their thousands on all the days and cheered their team on to little or no avail. The closest India came to a victory at Bengaluru in the last fifteen years was when an unlikely combination of cloudy weather and Anil Kumble bowling seam up nearly dismantled the Pakistani batting, only to be stopped by bad light.

The reports of Test Cricket’s demise are greatly exaggerated of course. At least in India. Sure, the smaller cities like Mohali, Nagpur and Kanpur have struggled to fill up their vast stadia for Tests there, but recent games at Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Chennai have seen packed houses on most days of the match. It’s probably no co-incidence India has won the latter matches in thrilling encounters. A 30,000 strong crowd getting behind the players is probably the difference between winning and losing (or drawing) the match in such tight games.

Not that the following for Test cricket has diminished in India.

Take a walk through any market or crowded place on a Test Match day and you will find dozens crowding around TVs and radios eagerly following the scores. Go to offices with internet connections and you will find workers surreptitiously following the score on cricinfo while pretending to be deeply engaged in work. Should God himself be batting or the chase get exciting the numbers multiply manifold and all productive activity seems to come to an end.

For sheer drama, Test cricket is unrivalled by any sport and the Indian cricket fan knows it. Test cricket fans aren’t restricted to any one demographic and any region. Nothing demonstrated this better than sitting in the stands at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium. One saw retirees with binoculars and grim expressions who can possibly verbatim recall the commentary on the day Gavaskar made his debut. One saw families with children in tow, fathers patiently explaining to the children (boys and girls, mind you) the intricacies of the game and the significance of proceedings. One saw young men (and no small number of young women), taking a break from work or college to relax and enjoy themselves in the stadium, rooting for their heroes and providing the atmosphere so necessary for the game. It being Bangalore, one heard a smattering of different languages in all directions, Kannada dominating of course, but excited commentary in chaste Tamil and loud cheering in Hindi making their presence felt!

Much as the luminaries of other sports complain, cricket continues to be a national obsession, and on the evidence of the last few days, probably a good one at that.

A Coda:

A young man who’d just finished college and gotten an offer from a top IT firm wanted to watch the game in Bengaluru with his friends to celebrate. On the day before the Test, he bought his tickets from the stadium counter, and headed home on his two wheeler. Minutes from home he met with a terrible accident and passed away on the spot, the tickets still in his pocket and unstained.

His family was (and probably continues to be) in great shock at the loss of someone so young. To console himself and cherish his son’s memory, his father wrote a letter to his son’s hero, Sachin Tendulkar, explaining what had happened and asking for a small memento; a photograph of his son, autographed by Sachin.

The match had already begun and tight security meant it was going to be difficult to get the letter and the photo to Tendulkar. Fortunately, the brother of the bereaved father was an ex-Ranji trophy player and he happened to be in Bengaluru. The letter and the photo were handed to him with instructions to get it to Sachin in any way possible before he left Bengaluru. Eventually, the letter found its way to Ravi Shastri and on the fourth morning of the match, with Tendulkar 9 runs from a double century, Shastri managed to catch hold of Sachin and hand over the letter and the photo, briefly explaining the situation.

Sachin nodded, briefly looked at the letter and went up into the dressing room.

At around lunch time, the ex-Ranji player got a call to come up to the India dressing room. There, Sachin handed over the autographed photo, with a message to the family expressing his condolence at their loss, and also handed him an autographed India cap that he wore during the match.

He kept the letter.

All four results are possible. It is going to be a great day for Test Cricket tomorrow. The team which holds their nerve will win. It is never easy chasing a total on a fifth day pitch. There’ll be something in it for the bowlers…

There. Much better.

I missed most of today’s actions thanks to a rogue muscle pull in the lower back that I attribute to the hard plastic seats in the M Chinnaswamy Stadium. Forced to catch the action from the alleged comfort of my sofa and having to listen to the banal nonsense being served up by Arun Lal and co. in the form of commentary, my Test Match viewing experience diminished drastically.(For those in a similar position, I would suggest the test match sofa to escape the drudgery of the NEO Cricket commentary team). Also, Tendulkar got out pretty quickly, and the rest of the tail folded up so my attention drifted.

Suddenly though, Australian wickets started tumbling and the match got interesting as the Australians generally contrived to give themselves a chance of losing this match. To repeat an oft repeated cliche, this is not the great Australian team of old (i.e., four years back), and their stunning propensity to indulge in very 90s style batting collapses is a bit of a shocker to those of us used to seeing hope disappear when Ponting was followed by Martyn who was followed by Waugh and then Gilchrist.

There’s still one man standing from that great middle order though. Ricky Ponting.

Ricky Ponting is not a popular man in India. Certainly he has never tried to win over the hearts and minds of the Indian fan, and his abrasive, cussed nature is not naturally endearing to most Indians. Nor has he particularly distinguished himself in India. India continues to be the place where he’s had the worst personal batting average in any country. Plus he seems to get out to Harbhajan Singh a lot, raising questions on his abilities against quality spin on turning tracks.

Captaincy wise, he had a great start with a great team. Now he’s having a tough time, with a not so great team. He has to be the best batsman, inspirational leader and most experienced player all at once. Naturally, he’s never won a single Test match in India as captain. A record he has only one more chance to erase.

With all this on his mind, Ricky Ponting played one of the best innings by an Australian batsman in this “series” so far. Marcus North’s century was a career saving (and maybe Test match saving one too) knock, but Ponting’s 72 in the second innings of the Bengaluru Test was far more important. He’s held a crumbling innings together and single handedly given his bowlers a chance to make something of this Test. On a turning, testing track, he has kept out Harbhajan and Ojha, backed by an unusually sharp fielding unit and a vociferous and vocal crowd, long enough to keep at least one more result open as a possibility for this Test.

This innings is also more poignant in the context of his own career. Toward the fag end of his long and distinguished career, Ponting is in the danger of going out on a low. No longer as prolific with the bat as he was in his heyday, he’s still the best batsman in the side, but that only goes to show how much he’s been let down by his team. Already, he’s lost the Ashes twice, and this January, for the first time in over two decades, there’s the very real prospect that he may well see it retained by the old enemy. Australia are no longer the dominant force in world cricket, and have rapidly slipped down the ranks in Test Cricket. The latter half of Ponting’s six year term of captaincy so far has been one of slow, but certain decline. Likewise, his batting.

With all this, he still has a shot at redemption tomorrow. Today’s efforts against the tide have brought him the time he needs to take one more shot at success and glory in India. A victory here will be far more cherished than any half a dozen against any other opponent anywhere else. It may not re-write the declining fortunes of the Australian team, but for Ricky Ponting, it offers an opportunity to rage, rage against the dying of the light**.

* & ** Apologies to Dylan Thomas

Apparently Marcus North scored a hundred, and Tim Paine gave him company with a fifty. Apparently Harbhajan Singh took four wickets, young Pragyan Ojha bowled his heart out for three and Virender Sehwag scored a helter-skelter 30 or so. I am taking all of this from the cricinfo bulletin because, though I was there, for the life of me, I can’t remember any of these. It’s almost as if my brain’s overwritten all of this to store, in high definition, high quality memory, Sachin Tendulkar’s 44 not out.

It’s not often that the local boy’s dismissal barely elicits disappointment from the crowd. They know who’s up next. The people in the stands opposite the pavilion see the familiar diminutive figure padded up and move down the stairs. The cheers start from that section. Soon the rest of the crowd knows and the reactions border on the delirious. It maybe one of the last two occasions He is playing in the Chinnaswamy Stadium and the 30000 odd crowd do not want to miss a minute of it. Indeed, today is probably the best day crowd wise, it being Sunday and India’s batting likely to begin.

The disappointment of Sehwag’s premature dismissal and Dravid’s poor stroke are quickly forgotten as He takes strike. As always, He begins slowly, but steadily, taking the measure of the pitch and the bowling before unfurling the best 90 minutes of the match so far.

Sachin’s shots have been described and re-described by writers far better than me and in far more evocative terms than I could hope to match. Indeed the written word can do little to describe what is simply poetry and artistry in motion, nothing more and nothing less.

The effect of seeing His straight drive, or square cut, or on drive, or even just his paddle sweep around the corner is akin to seeing, say, the Himalayas, or the Grand Canyon, or any wonder of the natural world that is such an amazing sight that it literally takes the breath away from you.

And His batting is exactly that. Entirely natural. It is not untrained brutality like Sehwag’s or almost entirely dependent on hand eye coordination like Laxman’s. It is as batting should be. It is as if He was born to bat that way. Knowing where the feet, hands, body weight and head should go seem as natural to Tendulkar as breathing to any other human being. Like his great predecessors in batting greatness, WG Grace, Victor Trumper, Don Bradman, and Sunil Gavaskar, Tendulkar’s batting is the simple employment of the technique of batting to the task of scoring runs.

It’s a ruse of of course. Batting is only natural to Tendulkar because of the hours, days and months he put into practice long after mere mortals felt they had enough. Yet, it seems unacceptable to imagine that Tendulkar’s success and brilliance is entirely the result of coaching and practice and owes no small amount to genius. Here too, Tendulkar has added sheer hard work to his innate cricketing genius and gone beyond what mortals can even dream of.

The television can only give you images of what Tendulkar’s strokes are like. In the stadium they are real. You can almost reach out and touch the moment. It is a near religious experience. With a lot of modern religion being corrupted by the thirst for money and power, Tendulkar’s batting is something pure, divine and spiritual. When that square cut is unfurled or the ball is caressed into the straight boundary, it is the closest non-believers and atheists get to understanding religious ecstasy. Grown men, who spend all day dissecting each batsman’s innings and each bowler’s spells with clinical, and almost professional detachment erupt into oohs and ahs and beam with blissful content at having seen just one of His on-drives.

Tomorrow, it continues. Monday morning, bosses across India can expect to be more than slightly short staffed as a good chunk of their employees are going to be either at the stadium or watching the game on TV. Those who turn up will have cricinfo open in a tab, and pretending to work, just as long as it takes the boss to realize what’s happening in which case they can drop the pretence ’cause the boss is also logging on to cricinfo or constantly dropping by and asking what the score is. Work lost on such days should be treated as being “lost” to another religious holiday (the only real secular religious holiday if you can wrap your head around that concept): Sachin Day.

“Why?”

It’s a recent phenomenon I guess, to be forced to offer justifications for leaving the comfort of one’s own tv, sofa, remote and cable connection to watch a Test Match in one of India’s concrete monstrosities, with amenities few, and noise, confusion and danger plenty. Before TV, I guess no one would doubt the superiority of watching a cricket match and one’s cricket heroes in the flesh and blood instead of having to depend on the fickle radio and the evocative descriptions of commentators. With tv, replays, all the information you need to follow a game at your fingertips, why subject yourself to the stadium and its filth to follow Test cricket?

I’ll tell you why.

It’s the only authentic experience as far as Test cricket is concerned.

Not that the filth, dust and crumbling stadia add any charm to it. It adds a level of challenge that one would rather not have to tackle, and one hopes that BCCI and the local associations get their act together and clean up some of our stadia, at least before the coming World Cup. No, there are other, real reasons why watching Test Cricket at the stadium is the authentic experience.

For one thing, TV does not show you everything.

Sitting high up in the stands you see things that you otherwise miss between the replays, the banal chatter of the commentators and of course, the endless, endless ads. You see the subtle changes in the field that take placed when strike changes between batsmen. How Harbhajan has an in-out field for Ponting and a much more attacking one for Hussey. Also how Harbhajan, unlike great spinners, reacts to batsmen and sets fields according to where the ball last went instead of coming with a plan and sticking to it.

You also see how the other players react to not-so-obvious things when the camera forgets to pan to them. Sreesanth’s obvious disappointment at having his spell cut short by Dhoni. Raina and Pujara egging each other on in the field, high fiving good saves and stops.

But all of these things are not trivialities. The other reason why one watches a Test at the ground is the total immersion it offers and the engagement it requires of you. Unlike the action packed adventures that are T20 and ODI cricket, Test Cricket is like a long 3 Act drama with multiple plot lines, twists and turns, and intrigue all coming together for a final denouement (or not… even that is in doubt). Enjoying a Test match requires a level of engagement with the material, so to speak, that TV somehow does not provide. TV is great for watching the action part of the Test Match, but it is the quieter bits, the less obviously action filled sections of the Test Match that make for the complete experience.

Watching Harbhajan try to play on Ponting’s mind with attacking fields; Sreesanth troubling Hussey with late swing away and try to rein in his excitement and keep it going; Ponting grafting and fighting his way through difficulty and then unfurling some glorious drives and ferocious pulls; all of these things require sustained and close viewing to truly appreciate and enjoy. And to truly appreciate and enjoy test cricket, one other thing is needed: context.

It is a much abused word these days on cricket blogs and fora across the internet. This one day series has no context, that T20 match has been thrown in only for money, etc. Context is not just “what-does-this-matter-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things” type context. With Test cricket’s emphasis on drama as much as action, each ball has its context in each over; each over in that spell; each spell for that hour’s play; each hour adds context to the session’s play; each session in that day and so on. Seen merely as a discrete collection of overs and fours, Test cricket loses its meaning and becomes… boring. Watching the game with an understanding of the context is what makes test cricket so compelling and unlike any other sport anywhere else.

Finally, watching Test Cricket in the stadium gives one the sheer aesthetic pleasure of a three dimensional view of cricket. The rhythmic and smooth run up of Sreesanth; the sound of the bat hitting the ball as Ponting drives as being noticeably different from the crack that resounds across the stadium when he pulls it; understanding what 140 kmph is as you watch the bowling from behind the batsman.

All of these make you forget the cramped seat, the deafening noise, the heat and the dust omnipresent in the Indian stadium. Even among the better maintained ones like the Chinnaswamy Stadium. Like the adventurer climbing up a steep, dangerous hill for the view, in the end, it is all worth it.

For the (boring but mostly accurate) report of the day’s play see here.

For a (possibly inaccurate, but greatly funny) version of the same, read this.