Season’s greetings
Dear all:
Last official day at work @ Rediff. The obligatory Christmas-related festivities follow immediately after, and the mandatory dismantling of a 20-year life in Mumbai, and the shift to Bangalore, immediately after that. Off blog, therefore, for the duration — and will be back on air around January 4 or so. [Will be around, though infrequently, on Twitter]
Best wishes for the Christmas-New Year season — and here’s wishing you, in 2010, the very best Life has to offer.
Extended break
The usual, guys — busy winding up 20 years of life in Mumbai, and 14 years in Rediff. A bit stretched for mind space, hence off blog for another day. Back Wednesday — with thoughts on the first ODI and much else.
A tale of two number threes
Two captains, both batting at number three, showcased the two ends of the spectrum of playing pivot.
Kumar Sangakkara was brilliant in the way he seized on the momentum the openers had created, escalated it, and took the game away from the bowlers. And what I particularly liked is that for the most part, he did not need to go beyond classical cricket strokes — even the inventive shots, like a breathtaking late paddle that played a delicate angle between keeper and short fine, was a thing of beauty.
At the other end of the spectrum, I am personally no fan of MS Dhoni’s self-prescribed anchoring from the number three position. The mindset of pushing singles along and leaving the charge as late as possible works more often than not in the ODI format, but equally, it is as counter productive in the shortest form of the game.
Consider the arithmetic. Start with the basic assumption that scoring a run a ball is mandatory in any T20 game. The challenge before the Indians yesterday was therefore to score run a ball, and to somehow squeeze in 86 additional runs from somewhere. The only way you win that kind of game is by biting chunks off that differential, especially during the power plays — something Viru briefly, and Gambhir in a brilliant explosion, did to such good effect [those two got 81 from 40 deliveries; that is, between them they knocked the differential back by41, that is, almost half the original ask].
If Dhoni, during that phase, sets his sights on going run a ball, the effect is to push his team further behind, because each delivery where you score just one will actually push the asking rate up. None of this is to suggest that MS lost us the game yesterday — we accomplished that in the field, even before we came out to bat. The point is, MS does not need to play that game; in fact, to do so is actually counter-productive given the lineup he has.
A far better lineup, IMHO, would be for either Raina or Rohit to come in at three [it also allows the team to maintain the left-right combo it seems so hung up on]. Both are good stroke players and can benefit from the little breathing space that position provides; Yuvraj at four, and Raina/Rohit at five with MS at six [with the option of coming in after Yuvraj if circumstances warrant a more cautious approach] and Pathan in the finishing slot at seven [again, with the option of being sent up as a floater if the game situation demands it] is, IMHO, a far better way of optimizing available resources. And MS, with his ability to keep the board ticking over and also of playing the big shots when his mind is free of self-imposed restraints, would be far more useful in that lower middle position.
The positive for me in yesterday’s game was the bowling of Ishant Sharma, particularly that first spell of 3-0-7-0. Oh yes, before you point it out, one spell is too small a peg to hang hopes of a real comeback on — but what there was of it was good.
In recent times, Ishant on his run up has looked like a tired marathoner hitting a heavy head wind as he nears the finish — a sense of pushing himself through those final few paces. When he is feeling good, however, he accelerates smoothly through the early and middle part of the run up and literally hurtles through the final paces, in the process creating a momentum that translates smoothly into his delivery. That is how he bowled yesterday, and the difference was most marked in the way he regularly hit the high 130s while looking like he had plenty left in the tank.
Equally, Ishant when not on song is particularly exposed when bowling to left handers — but yesterday, he was immaculate against Sanath Jayasuriya. He used varying lengths on the short ball to keep Sanath pegged back; he had both deliveries — the one leaving the left hander off the seam and the one jagging back in — going to confuse the batsman and inhibit strokeplay, and neither Sanath nor Dilshan looked remotely at ease during the 18 deliveries they faced off him, to score a sum total of 7 runs while benefiting from one let off apiece.
Now to see if he his recent enforced rest has helped Ishant rediscover his mojo — if he has, then with Zaheer back and Sreesanth “turning into a new leaf” as a friend once said, our opening worries with the ball could be in a fair way to being resolved.
On an unrelated note, here’s just what we needed: another commentator to interpret the Indian team’s recent rise to number one position. Do you get the feeling as you read this that Simon Briggs wrote it to paper over the earlier, and even more ridiculous, piece authored by Simon Wilde? Let’s see: the message seems to be, India [sorry, Wilde] actually “deserves” the number one placing, but cannot “justify” it because it does not have a superstar bowler or bowlers. Err — okay, so which team deserves that ranking because it can “justify” it, then? There is also some unintended hilarity about how Bradman could line up 300-in-a-day efforts because the bowlers then, like the ones enabling Sehwag today, are “subservient”. Harold Larwood and Maurice Tate, who suffered the most during the Don’s onslaught that fetched him 300 in course of one day’s play at Headingley in 1930, will love hearing that one.
Right, so who’s got the next bizarre theory? Step right up, ladies and gentlemen: the comedy club is now officially open.
PS: Voted yet?
Wilde thoughts
Dear Simon Wilde:
In a cheerless world — you would have noticed this morning another example of India’s lack of self-belief; Virender Sehwag was four boundary hits from being the only batsman in the world to have scored three triple hundreds, but couldn’t make it — thank you for providing something to laugh at.
It takes a mind operating at its best to tie in the ICC ranking system, India’s lack of fibre, Lalit Modi and the IPL millions, all into one “article”.
Quick note: The ICC devised the points/ranking system. The ICC decides the FTP. Together, these two things decide who tops the table. If India does not “deserve” the number one spot earned through such ratings, then by definition no team that ever made the number one slot deserves it — they all got there through the same means [SA beating Bangladesh to become world number one, remember?] except Australia.
So — suck it up.
Thank you
Me
Viru, redux
When Viru Sehwag got to a typically rambunctious run-a-ball century (101 off 101), Murali Vijay was batting 81 (108 balls) at the other end.
That statistic defines the partnership and, more importantly, the self-belief of the Chennai youngster. It is a year and a month since Vijay played his first – and thus far, only – test. He has spent those 13th months in the team’s boot, as the spare tire waiting for a puncture.
Gautam Gambhir’s affection for his sister gave Vijay the opportunity – a dubious gift, since he would have known going in that Gambhir merely has to announce his availability to be picked. Yet he played with a freedom that was refreshing to watch, making the most of opportunity when it presented itself.
Sehwag’s reaction when Vijay got to his 50 by dancing down to loft Murali for a six over long on said it all: the fist bump damn near crippled Vijay for life; the hug drove what little breath was left out of the youngster. Sehwag loves combative players as much as he hates overly defensive partners; in Vijay he revelled in the perfect accomplice for his patented brand of calculated mayhem and likely saw, in a youngster willing to take on the highest wicket taker in Tests, a player after his own heart.
In Kanpur, Gambhir had provided him the cover while he reined in his more destructive impulses early on, and Sehwag went on record to voice his appreciation. Here, Vijay – with all the aplomb, if not a hundredth of Gambhir’s experience – performed the exact same function, stroking smoothly in the early overs while Sehwag was getting over his frets and setting himself for ritual butchery.
Besides those broad points, what impressed about Vijay was the quality of shot selection and execution. Vijay’s driving through covers is classical [there was one bended knee effort of Welegedara that made you forget you were supposed to be working, and stand to applaud]; he plays with felicity off his pads; and he is clearly aware of the importance of singles as a weapon of attack [between them, the two openers had 59 singles (Vijay 27) in course of the 221 run opening partnership, that also had 26 fours and six sixes.]
So impressive was the youngster that it seemed almost tragic when he missed a sweep at a Herath flipper on middle stump, and with it the century that he so fully deserved. As he walked off the field, the question that occurred was: what now? What can the team do with this kid? Clearly it would be folly to split the VS-GG combination. But as clearly, you want to blood promising young talent at that precise moment when ability and confidence are in perfect lock-step. Facilitating that is the conundrum the management will now have to crack – before the fizz goes off and he becomes another careworn journeyman.
About Sehwag, what is there to say that hasn’t been said before? When he bats at his best the man defies superlatives. Today was one such.
Having paid ritual obeisance to the trope of “getting his eye in”, Sehwag saw the advent of spin, in the form of Herath, as the start of a prolonged batting power play [and the use of one-day idiom is justified – during one frenzied ten over spell between lunch and tea, the scoring rate accelerated through the 6 rpo mark without check, and hit an almost obscene 7.3 over the course of ten overs].
But it was one passage of play between Muralitharan and Sehwag that would get top billing in any highlights package I curate. It began in the 4th over; Murali had been hit for boundaries in each of his first three overs, and seemed to be working on some tactic involving the space near Sehwag’s off stump. The batsman on that occasion waited an eternity, then played a cut so impossibly late it almost defied geometry.
Cue the 5th over. Murali increased his length; Sehwag skipped down the track and contemptuously wafted him high over long on. You saw the bowler pause, wonder what there was left to try – and then he sent down an arm ball angling across the stumps towards leg. A ploy, perhaps, to have Sehwag stranded if he tried another little dance? No matter – Sehwag danced out again; by way of increasing the degree of difficulty, he opted to simultaneously run around the line of the ball, get it on his off side, and then used wrists and timing to pick the four – to a ball that at this point was already outside leg stump line – between the bowler and mid off.
What is a bowler – even one with 788 Test wickets bowling on a responsive track – to do?
As always when Sehwag is front and center, adjectives fail and you are forced to lean on the crutch of statistics to describe both his innings and his impact on the side’s fortunes: 92 runs in the session before lunch in just 18 overs (Sehwag 53); 168 runs in 27 overs between lunch and tea (Sehwag 98); at that point [shortly before tea, Sehwag developed problems with his back, so the second interval of the day seems a good point to assess his stats at their best –he had taken 42 runs off 38 balls from Murali and an astonishing 50 off just 32 balls from the highly rated Herath, preferred for the second time ahead of one-time mystery spinner Ajantha Mendis.
Most importantly, even at tea time India had already raced to 260 off just 45 overs – brilliant in an ODI context but in Tests, of incalculable value. Today is just the second day. 270 overs remain to be played in this Test. And with 13 more overs left to play in the final session, India had already – after taking out the two remaining Lankan wickets in the morning – knocked off the Lankan first innings score of 393 and gone into the lead, with three full days of play remaining.
The problem with appraising Viru in terms of stats is that the stats are so startling you begin hunting for the very adjectives you ran out of in the first place. Consider this: the man has six double hundreds, more than any other Indian batsman ever. And of those six, five are in the list of the fastest doubles of all time; in fact, he owns three of the top four slots, and is the only batsman to have more than one entry in that list.
Here’s why: his progression from the 180s to the double ton, in the 57th over of the innings bowled by Nuwan Kulasekhara, was dot, 4, 4, 4, 2, 4. With every other batsman currently active, you talk of the nervous nineties – with Viru, as someone pointed out to me on Twitter, it is the hapless bowlers who get nervous when the man approaches some landmark. With every other batsman -- including the great Sachin -- the rival captain brings the field in to add pressure; with Viru, they send the fielders out on the fence and he pierces or clears them anyway.
The point though is not so much his propensity to score big; the real key to Sehwag is that he scores those big runs at a pace that sets it up for his team, even as he creates a slipstream for his colleagues to coast along in.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Rahul Dravid – batting in the form of his life – got another 50, but no one noticed [When the 200 run partnership for the second wicket – the second successive double century stand of the Indian innings – came up, Dravid had made 53; Viru contributed 146]. No one notices you, when Sehwag is going nuts at the other end – in fact, that is precisely why, at the end of a day of Virender Sehwag, you still remember and acknowledge the little gem played by Murali Vijay at the top of the order. To be able, years later, to say to whoever will listen that he almost matched Viru Sehwag, batting at his incandescent best, stroke for stroke is given to few; Vijay is one of the select band that can use that story to pay for quite a few dinners.
The final session, truncated by three overs, was when Sehwag repeatedly showed signs of a bad back; in the final ten overs of that session the run rate slipped to a pedestrian – at least by the standards of what had gone before – 4.3. And yet, it produced 183 runs in 34 overs, and saw India not just overhaul Lanka’s first innings total in under a day, but actually go 50 runs into the lead. [On another note: Sehwag ended the day 16 shy of a triple century; 16 shy of becoming only the second batsman, after the Don, to score 300 in a day. He probably doesn’t regret the missing three overs or the missed record; those of us watching haven’t stopped cursing, though].
At a broader level, what the Indian response underscores is the criminal folly of the Lankan approach to their own first innings. Well though Harbhajan in particular, and the Indians in general, bowled for the most part, 393 is under-achievement of a very high order on this track, by this Lankan line-up, and even more so when one batsman gets a hundred and another narrowly misses a ton.
One final snapshot of Sehwag’s dominance/Sri Lanka’s helplessness on the day: this player versus player chart. When was the last time you’ve seen a bowling attack dominated to such an extent by one player, that every one of the front line bowlers is going at 100 runs or better strike rate?
“I only hit the bad balls,” Sehwag said at the end of it all. In any one else, it would be considered arrogance, a gratuitous piling on of insult to injury. Somehow, when Sehwag says it, you tend to nod along in agreement — he is, after all, the one contemporary batsman for whom any ball that leaves the bowler’s hand is by his yardstick a bad ball.
Test 3, Day 2
Nice start to the morning: SL ends sub-400. Immediately, what this means for the Indians is that they are faced with a modest follow-on target of 194 [absurd to think of 'follow on'? Not really -- when a team goes out confronting say 500+, that is the prospect that weighs on their minds and creates pressure].
For once, we have a wicket with everything: seam and decent bounce for bowlers with the skills to extract those qualities; spin not negated by an absurdly slow track; good value for shots. Almost the definition of a ‘Test wicket’.
Should be an engrossing day; will do a roundup at close. Oh btw, thanks for the feedback on the Test post and the Open review; will get back in here to respond to your comments, in a bit.
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