Like a tug-of-war team unable to stop the slide, India have hurtled towards defeat in South Africa. Most teams that come here do but that should be little consolation. There has only been one team in this series and that hasn’t been India. It was expected but not quite as devastatingly so.

Good tug-of-war teams have good anchors; solid, immovable fellows and this Indian team needed them more it did the flashy front-liners. On good surfaces, of average bounce the ordinary player is king but it is when the tide starts to turn, when the conditions, the pitches and the food are different that the anchors become invaluable. It is like in football where you cry out for the defender when the going gets tough but generally ignore him till the next real battle comes along.

Rahul Dravid should have played that role for India and it looked like he would till he broke his finger. It was a deeper blow than that, more like the spine. Rarely has fifty overs seemed such a forbidding distance away, especially since Sachin Tendulkar grew inconsistent. The whispers about the great man grow but when the time came to buckle down, to play towards the otherwise innocuous target of fifty overs, he put his hand up.

It was painful and admirable. The emperor was bereft of his robes and was walking the streets like a common man; playing and missing, getting hit on the pads, carrying a bat without a middle when once it only had that; unable to play shots with his eyes open that he otherwise would have with his eyes shut.

But he didn’t throw it away, didn’t attempt the tempting but fatal upper cut to third man. Instead he dug in and tried to get behind the line. He was like a writer with writer’s block, where three metaphors would have presented themselves he was looking into the thesaurus for words. But he still wrote his essay. There was a message there for younger, flashier players who, unable to complete even a limerick exited with just a “There was a young man from India” on their sheet.

It was here that India’s reserve strength let them down, or maybe it just doesn’t exist. Virender Sehwag grows increasingly uni-dimensional, the ‘V’ from cover to mid-on replaced by the one from third man to point. He should have been playing a leadership role by now,

the tough man standing up first to the conditions and the opposition. Maybe he should get the benefit of the doubt for the injury at Durban, maybe, but not much else. He needs to find a solution to playing one-day cricket.

Two bright young men struggled and another fine cricketer dipped. There is now only one way ahead for Mohammad Kaif and that is to score big hundreds for Uttar Pradesh. He only has seven in first class cricket and that does his case no favours. He is young and can still return a better cricketer. But life has a way of forcing you to do the hard yards.

That is what it is doing to Irfan Pathan who is looks increasingly lost. He has got much from life in the last two years and now some tough questions are being asked of him. The beautiful curving inswinger has, like all those wonderful dreams, vanished; like Ashish Nehra’s did. Many reasons can be ascribed to it; the speed of his run-up, the lower delivery point but I suspect they are all by-products of a troubled mind. It is a downward spiral. Loss of form leads to self-doubt that prevents further learning. He will break out of it but time is running out. These are important ten days for him.

Meanwhile India’s best one-day bowler in the last twelve months, Harbhajan Singh, has arrived to do battle without his most potent arrow. The doosra has gone and doubtlessly will reappear in the Tests and that will straightaway make him a better player. With different people watching the game, maybe his confidence will reappear!!

Sadly then India only had three players who emerged with their reputations enhanced. When you are a giant like Anil Kumble it is tough to make that claim but he showed that he must be in India’s one-day squad and so too must Zaheer Khan whose topsy turvy one-day career seems on track at the moment. Both though have little to offer other than their primary skill and while that is not the best state of affairs, it is something India have to accept in their current plight.

And in Mahendra Singh Dhoni India have found a player with the stomach for a fight. If I say ‘found’ after so much adulation it is only because this was his first real test as an international cricketer. He had never played outside the sub-continent, Zimbabwe and Kenya and showed that he didn’t mind the bounce; if he did fail, it was in countering it rather than shying away from it. Now there is a quality India can do with.