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Rahul Dravid: A Relieved Man amidst a Boring Test

rahul-dravidOnly a week ago I wrote about the need for Rahul Dravid to take a break and I am taking back all that imagination right now! In a boring Mohali test that seems to be heading towards a draw, Rahul Dravid’s century had a lot of depth, determination and a statement underneath that he’s still the only WALL in Indian cricket.

Unlike his recent outings with the bat, this one was exceptional. He blocked, drove, pulled, cut and stood tall with grace and confidence! It never looked like he was out of form until yesterday. The amount of pressure the man was going through from his compatriots and media was too much. He has now silenced his critics but the man – one of the best diplomatic persons of the game – kept low profile but seemed to be brimming with a lot of emotions.

Now that he has scored close to 800 runs (including two centuries and two to three fifty’s) in this calendar year, I guess his career can be stretched to another year or so. It will be really good for the new Indian side, if he continues his newly discovered form. Right now, the youngsters should take a leaf from his patience and fighting spirits when going through bad times. The man played domestic cricket, worked hard in the National Cricket Academy and consulted experts to check and cross check if he is doing anything wrong and continuosly strived to improve. An amazingly committed and exceptionally decent cricketer!

The Mohali Test

The weather gods have not been very kind to the beautiful Mohali stadium and pitch. If all five days of play was possible, it would have been an exciting match. But now, Day 3 into the match the second inning has not started yet. Talking about that, I must say that Mr.Dhoni played some negative cricket by not declaring leaving at leat twenty overs to the English side on Day 2. Let’s wait for the rest of the match but I am more interested in what is happening in Perth right now and will write soon about it with a lot of excitement soon (if SA gets to win, that is)

Test Cricket Rocks Again!

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Chennai: December 15 2008 – A day to remember in Test Cricket

What a test match it was! I have not seen such a run chase in test matches in my whole life, that too in a Day 5 sub-continental pitch that’s damaged and causing uneven bounce. Yes, we are talking about the first test match between England and India in Chennai

As I mentioned in a previous post, Dhoni and his team at the moment looks unstoppable! Mainly due to the amount of positive energy that the captain himself brings in. And this is a super test combination despite Rahul Dravid’s failure at No.3.

Steps to a historic win!

  • Day 1: KP wins the toss and decides to bat on what looked like a super batting wicket. England puts a hundred run opening partnership in a display of controlled and patient batting. Eventually Strauss hits a century and England close day 1 at a reasonable 229/5

  • Day 2: Mat Prior takes England to 300+ and in reply the Indian top order collapses (37/3) with the debutant spinner Swann striking twice. England does exremely well to restrict India to 155/6

  • Day 3: Another day that belonged to England again! They get India all out for 241 taking a 75 runs lead. England puts another strong display in the second innings by finishing 172/3. Strauss again was the man!

  • Day 4: England progresses till lunch but collapses from 257/4 to 311/9 in a display of extremely defencive batting. KP declares with 29 overs remaining for the day and England failing to cross the psychological score of 400. India needs 387 to win with a day and 29 overs remaining! Indian openers walk in, as cool as ice! And it was calm before the storm. Even before KP realized whatever happened, India close their day 4 at 131/1 from just 29 overs! India’s fortunes changes for good! Sehwag scores 83 from just 68 balls!

  • Day 5: With just 256 runs required from 90 overs and a whole day, Sachin Tendulkar plays an innings of his life and takes India to the shore, very well helped by Gautam Gambhir and Yuvraj Singh! Nobody has ever seen Tendulkar playing such a patient and beautifully crafted innnigs in his whole career

  • India wins a historic test match with a sub-continent record run chase and fourth best run chase in the history of test cricket!

It’s unfortunate that despite back to back centuries from Andrew Strauss England ended up loosing. But nobody could have stopped a determined Sehwag who changed the course of the game in a matter of an hour and a half during the fag end of Day 4.

The BCCI Annual Contracts are out!

The BCCI’s annual contracts were announced at the right time soon after the famous test win and fittingly enough Harbhajan Singh, Ishant Sharma, Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag etc got promoted to the next respective grades. People like Sreesanth who had attitude problems on top of injury and underperformers such as Wasim Jaffer and Robin Uthappa have been downgraded. By dropping Ramesh Pawar, Akash Chopra and Ajit Agarkar the BCCI has sent out a strong message that they are looking forward to the future. At the moment Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Sachin Tendulkar are the only 30 plus players on the side.

The BCCI also showed appreciation towards some of the Under-19 world cup winners by offering them one-year contracts under Grade D.

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Rahul Dravid should take a break

It is painful to see how Dravid has been deteriorating over the past six months or so. In his 26 test innings this year Rahul Dravid scored only a single century and 4 fifties with just around 600 runs. Perhaps this has been his worst year considering the fact that he played 14 tests so far.

In fact, the year 2008 started on a great note for him with a couple of solid 50s in Australia and a very good century at Chennai against the South African pace battery. However, since then he has been getting starts but getting out in very unconvincing manners.

Dravid has been a victim of the ‘uncertainity’ (mainly from last set of national selectors) that has been prevailing over the ‘Fab 5’ of India, off which, two already called it quits. Out of the remaining, VVS and Tendulkar are at least playing in their free-flow mode where as ‘The Wall’ is not able to come to terms with his remaining career time. To make things worse and time-critical, he is getting no younger and will turn 36 next month. Looks like this is a good time for him to take a break or even hang the boots as he doesn’t seem to have anything left in him to inspire and mentor the youngsters.

Unfortunately the Indian think tank, including Mahendra Singh Dhoni, did not do a great favor to him by still sending him at #3 even at his worst times. Looking at his form and tendency to play away from the body these days, they should have sent Laxman at #3, followed by Tendulkar and Dravid should have come at #5. This would have been a great opportunity for both Dravid and Laxman. But as it looks the entire team composition is screwed up with the current batting order and that got exposed bigtime today in the first innings against England at Chennai.

Since Yuvaraj Singh not getting any clue of what test cricket is all about, the selectors now have to revert to Rohit Sharma at the earliest and groom him as a strong middle order batsman.

With Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman all set to go out soon, where is the test team heading? MS Dhoni is definitely going to have some headache soon, though in his thoughts at the moment, he wants to get rid of the oldmen.

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Weekly Tidbits: England is back, Nathan Bracken to Bowl Spin, Dhoni’s Gesture and more…

England resumes…

The England team is finally back in India to complete the tour. Looks like the ECB’s security advisor gave a go ahead to the tour after his short diplomatic visit to India last week. I am sure the cricketing fraternity and BCCI will be relieved! And the PCB must be wishing that they had enough money to buy any number of cricketers and cricket boards around the world!

Are the English players really happy?

Bracken to bowl spin???

Well, that is quite a strange news! Nathan Bracken, the ODI pacer of Australia, is working on improving his test selection chances and the opportunistic route that he is taking is via spin bowling. Everybody knows that Team Australia is in the lookout of the right composition for their test side and the main problem is lack of good spin bowlers. It seems, Nathan even unleashed his spin against Tasmanians in a domestic match and took 8 wickets!

Could it bring a positive change to Australia and Bracken?

On a lighter note, could Shaun Tait have done it as well 🙂 His injuries and fears are related to express fast bowling alone, so…

Dhoni’s gesture

India’s no-nonsense captain, known for his unorthodox ways of living life and cricket, has donated his income from two matches for the terror victims in Mumbai. Good gesture MS! I wish many others, who are after running high profile restaurants and fitness clubs, did a similar job.

PCB considering neutral venues

The Pakistan Cricket Board is seriously considering the option of a neutral venue, for the planned tour of India to Pakistan, due to the terror situation in both countries and the looming worries of a military action. At the moment this seems to be the only chance for Pakistan to play some test matches in the next four to five months or so.

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Indian Cricket: The Captain and the Coach have no more say in Selection Matters

It’s only two months since the new BCCI Selection Committee was formed. Already Kris Srikkanth and his team have made a couple of commendable things such as gracefully allowing Ganguly and Kumble to retire and being diplomatic in not criticizing senior players publicly, like his predecessor used to do.

The latest bold move from the selection committee is to keep the team captain and coach away from the selection matters. This move came in after the controversy over the selection of Irfan Pathan over RP Singh for one-dayers against England, a couple of weeks ago.

India is a country where cricket is a religion or even fanaticism. It is even part of politics and plays a role in uniting the country as well as dividing it sometimes. We have a region based selection policy still prevailing here and hence once in a while controversies are bound to happen. Now, de-coupling the captain and the coach from selection responsibilities can keep some selection controversies and partiality away, that was prevailing during some of the previous captains and coaches’ tenure. However, they have to still tackle the following issues:

  • Avoid regional bias as much as possible. One could argue how suddenly some of the Mumbai players are out and more Tamil Nadu players are coming in now!

  • Avoid making controversial public statements that put the captain, coach or team members into a state of confusion or embarrassment

  • Do not interfere with the players too much and avoid frequent dressing room visits

  • Come up with a succession plan for the current batting heroes of the test side

  • Most importantly ‘avoid the leak out confidential selection meeting proceedings,minutes or any classified secrets’

The good thing about the current captain and coach is that they both have high level of commitment and professionalism built into them that they can make the best out of the team that is handed over to them. Hope the cause of taking Indian cricket to the #1 spot will still remain focused!

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International Test Teams For the Forthcoming Series

Champions League is gone and so are some one-dayers… So what? Some exciting test match series is in the offing – that too between the closest possible competitors in the current ICC rankings – i.e. No.1 Australia v/s No.2 South Africa, No.3 India v/s No.5 England and No.7 West Indies v/s No.8 New Zealand. It cannot be any better match, right?

Team Selection

Australia: Since it is a home affair for the Australians, they haven’t announced their squads yet. I doubt if they will think anything different in the batting department, especially the top order. In all probabilities Matthew Hayden will be still around. Since there is no match in Adelaide, I feel that Shane Watson might a chance in place of Nathan Hauritz, at least for the Perth encounter. And I hope to see Andrew Symonds fully recovered in this series.

South Africa: No surprises but as usual the spin department – that neither the South African selectors nor the captain himself ever cared about – is weak. They have two of them but both Paul Harris and Peterson are slow left arm orthodox spinners and hence no variety. And moreover, they may not have the skills that bowlers like Nikki Boje had. No changes in the batting department but where is Andre Nel in their famous pace battery? Did he get injured or something?? Nel and his aggression could have been handy in Australia.

The pre-series press encounters have started already and this time, for a change, between the coaches.

India: Yuvraj Singh coming back to the test side is the big news and RP Singh, who seems to be captain’s favorite, is out. The spin department looks versatile and with a lot of options. Pragyan Ojha gets a chance and Amit Mishra is retained as well. But I thought Piyush Chawla would have been a better choice with his batting abilities as well. Batting line up has not been changed except for the retired Ganguly. Rahul Dravid has been given more time and it is a sensible act. Another good decision is not to drop M. Vijay who showcased exceptional temperament in the series against Australia. If it was for the old selection panel, they would have probably dropped him by now. Badarinath, though not so convincing yet in the international arena, gets blessings from the selection committee chairman! The pace team looks good as well without any change. However, I wonder whatever happened to S.Sreesanth? Is he permanently out of the team due to his on and off field heroics or is it genuine injury and lack of match fitness? India’s test team looks really strong and versatile right now!

England: I doubt if England will do anything good in this test series mainly because of their batting line up. Except for Kevin Pietersen, Ian Bell and Alistair Cook, their batting line up looks very weak. As for bowling, Panesar should add the required punch especially under the Indian conditions. Pace bowling would have been great if Ryan Sidebottom was in and Harmison was doing a good job. So Indian, especially under the Indian conditions, should be going for a kill in this series.

West Indies & New Zealand: Unfortunately both New Zealand and West Indies do not have quality batting line up to excel in test matches. The New Zealand team can be a good one day side but they need to figure out what it takes to build a test team. With some experienced players still around, the West Indian team may look better in the batting. But in the bowling department the New Zealand pacemen and Vettori together may do a better job than WI. This series still can be a close encounter – that between two under-prepared teams.

Looking forward to an exciting test season!