India Whipped !

India vs South Africa: Day Three, Second Test at Ahmedabad


Scorecard




If you were a compulsive India cricket fan, prone to clutching at straws, you might have woken up to day three of this test mismatch at Ahmedabad with a simple prayer on your lips, which might have gone something like this -

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give Smith today an ounce of greed.
Forgive us our score
as we forgive those who score against us.
Save us from the trial of time
and deliver us from evil.

The key line of your prayer might have been "Give Smith today an ounce of greed," hoping that he, Gareme Smith, may be swayed from common sense and yesterday's brief shower, and be tempted to allow AB de Villiers to bat on a while to add to his jingling pouch of runs. In a charitable vein you might have prayed AB would go beyond emulating Sehwag in this series. You might have perhaps fervently promised to open the bowling with Jaffer and Dravid to allow him that comfort....

Not that it was needed, for the regular bowlers did a fair job of being hospitable with their own flair and enthusiasm. But one of the straws you clutched at might have been that Smith would use up at least two sessions of the nine he could easily burden you with.

Of course, somewhere in the back of your mind, based upon the body language of the Indian players, you perhaps knew that a session or two were more than enough and Smith was unlikely to bat another seven sessions to oblige you. But you were clutching at straws and the prayer was undermined by the motive beneath it. Smithy did what every lay cricket player with an ounce of commonsense might have done - he declared first thing in the morning and left the Indian team without a place to hide and the fans without any more prayers to send up or straws to clutch at.

Veeru began well and left as if suddenly unwell. Then the pitch which was dead as a dodo for 141.2 overs of the South African innings sprang to life as if by oriental magic.

Dravid fended into the slips, Jaffer did something he usually does in such conditions, and was soon easing his hard-working tired self in the dressing room, and Laxman forgot he was in a cricket match for the second time in this test match.

This was karma catching up....India penalized for every bit of casualness they came into this series with. For every bit of thought poverty that infects them like a ticking time-bomb. For every bit of hangover from the past they were still hanging on to.

It was time for some batting practice hereon...a long session of nets to prepare for the next match. Saurav had his stint and left when he felt he had found the right touch.

Dhoni pretended he was batting out three days, but one knew better...Some say, he ensured himself another test match and perhaps ten test series with that 132-ball effort.

At the time of writing this blog, India isn't lasting three sessions, they have played this match in a fog, and it showed starkly as if in bright sunshine.

One will try and understand if the Indian thinktank had any sort of plan for this game at any stage. Lest some one feels one is being too harsh with the wonderful Indian cricket team, and to be fair to them and their strategists, one will have to pore over the replays over the next few days to pick out a speck of the supposed gameplan.

As far as I can see, they came in to this match ( and series ) with plenty of masochistic selections and attitudes...they craved a whipping and they got it nice and proper.

Well done South Africa, for you have drawn the blinds, sunlight streams in. It's quite another matter that the men huddled inside are quite blind to it.


Soon we will have the stats...how often has India been thrashed inside three days at home, and the like? One worries the fall-out of this will be to rush in the likes of Yuvrajs and Rohits rather than the correct men, or worse, do nothing at all.