Cricket lessons from South Africa tour

The disappointing end to the Indian cricket
team’s tour of South Africa was an outcome of
flawed decision-making, poor tactics, and a
defensive mindset when it came to the endgame.
On an India-friendly pitch , Rahul
Dravid’s men dominated the match for three full
days and more. But when the prize seemed within
grasp, on the fourth afternoon, the visiting team shied
away, as if afraid of a famous first, a series win in South
Africa. The defensive mentality — exemplified by the
rut that Sachin Tendulkar (69 deliveries for his 14) got
his team into in the second innings after a winning
platform had been constructed — was quite inexplicable.
On the other side, the home team displayed impressive
tactical flexibility and courage in the face of
adversity. The contrast in mental approach between
the aggressive Smith-Pollock partnership and the stagnant
Tendulkar-Dravid pairing proved, in the end, to
be the qualitative difference between the two teams.
There were, of course, some bright features amidst
the gloom of the series loss. Rarely has India travelled
overseas with a bowling attack capable of destroying
the opposition’s batting. It unearthed a man for that
task in Sreesanth (18 wickets at 21.94), who forged a
fine pace alliance with a resurgent Zaheer Khan. The
young man from Kerala showed the kind of disciplined
aggression that pays on the big stage, a quality Team
India displayed in good measure under Sourav Ganguly
not long ago. For Ganguly himself, the tour marked a
creditable comeback while young Dinesh Karthik displayed
impressive character and skills both behind the
stumps and in front. Surely, it would be hard to leave
him out of the reckoning in India’s Test eleven. If the
chief lesson for Team India was the need to discard the
defensive mindset, the International Cricket Council
urgently needs to address the issue of declining umpiring
standards. The quality of officiating in the Castle
Test series was decidedly unsatisfactory, even though
it must not be allowed to become an excuse for India’s
series loss. In a sense, it was just as well that Team
India managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
in South Africa. Victory might have helped paper over
the serious weaknesses of Indian cricket, notably the
decline in the top order batting (once, arguably, the
best in the world) and a strange loss of team management
confidence in spin, evidenced by the otherwise
inexplicable preference of an out-of-sorts Munaf Patel
to Harbhajan Singh at Newlands. The time to tackle
these serious weaknesses is now and neither reputation
nor seniority should be allowed to come in the way.