By Kartik Kannan
The Indian cricket team continues to amaze fans with the kind of expectations people have on a bunch of overrated 11 men. Indian cricket has always been viewed as the kid that fails to get good marks consistently. Just when you thought the kid would not make the cut, the kid surprises himself and the people around by passing out with flying colours. People sit up and take notice, as equations change with mediocre expectations being surpassed by mouth watering contests.
Then again, the kid becomes headstrong and starts strutting with overconfidence and sink back down to the familiar pathetic state of abysmal performance levels. It doesn’t seem to hurt India that they are never consistent, and captains keep claiming that they are building a team. There has been improvement in the number of test matches won, but the trend of troughs and crests reminds us of previous wounded scars.
History textbooks on Indian cricket would start with the chapter on Kapil Dev’s captaincy in Test matches. His claim to fame was the lone test match series victory in England(2-0) as part of the ‘86 away series. His team faded after that from world beaters to cornered tigers without teeth. Enter Mohammad Azharrudin, who despite having a great star cast as a team, still continued to be leading a team who were tigers at home, but never managed to put up any courageous display abroad. Azhar’s claim to fame would be the ‘93 away series win against Sri Lanka and at that time we felt Azhar had done a great job, just by going by the series of victories that Azhar led India in the 1993-1996 period at home.
We, as Indians, seem to like Bollywood movies that have happy endings than movies that take a great stand in the script. We like song, dances, dreamy sequences and not reality. The same attitude percolates right down when we watch cricket. We choose to have selective amnesia when it comes to forgetting India’s disastrous moments abroad and ignore the issues under the carpet. After Azhar and Sachin Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguly took over the reins over a young team. He took India to slightly better heights by winning test matches abroad in Australia, Sri Lanka, England and West Indies, but not winning series in the early years of 2001-03. The Test match victories were celebrated with so much fan fare that people forgot that we had just won a battle, but had ultimately lost the war.
India has always been a case of a few tremendously great victories, and a lot of mediocre performances. India experience some amazingly great moments when they get the country on their feet with some stunning performances. But they go back to idling mode, and lose the fire that made them rise like the Phoenix. The 2001 home series, the 2003-04 away series against Australia seemed the ideal foil to show the world that we have arrived. But India continue to languish on past performances, as we should have concentrated on building on those victories. Instead team India went on to lose series against sides like Zimbabwe and South Africa in 2001, and similarly in 2004 against Australia after looking to reach their zenith.
The extreme vicissitudes have dominated Indian cricket like waves in a storm, and though it brings great memories of Indian cricket to discuss over tea, there aren’t too many memories to last a lunch and dinner together. This stems more from the disappointing loss against Sri Lanka, where we never waged a battle against their spinners. India seem to have that killer instinct that makes tough champions like the way South Africa, Australia, England have shown themselves to be in the recent past. We have been bitten several times, but have shied away every time an opportunity came along to prove them wrong. If this continues, the poison that reaches the heart of Indian cricket would render our cricketing body impossible to produce even the odd schizophrenic-like, maddening victories that seem to appear out of nowhere. Now is the time to weed the poison out and the country largely believes that India can get over this by putting their heads down and thinking of the better times that they combated Sri Lanka. This is a side built on the strong shoulders of Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and V.V.S. Laxman, and we need the old warhorses to fire at their best before they pass the reigns on to the younger battalion that waits to take over. Two more battles, and one full war, Over to Galle now, join you there hopefully for a discussion over a longer lunch and not just tea!
