After Taunton magic, Super Six berth a must

But till that happens, let us look back and relive this most amazing Indian batting performance. It came from two young men who have looked at nightmares in the eye and have emerged stronger for it. As 1991 drew to an end, Sourav Ganguly played his first One-day international at Brisbane. He looked like a hare caught in the headlights and that traumatic debut set him back four years. And it was exactly a year ago that the throats that now cheer Rahul Dravid were booing him.

A diamond was being treated like coal.

Today Dravid and Ganguly are strong personalities and that isbecause they looked at failure in the eye and they challenged it. Their careers which bloomed so beautifully together at Lords in 1996 are still blossoming. And of all the flowers they will plant in their garden, these two will always have a special place.

The first fifty runs that Dravid scored were so majestic that he took cricket to a completely different plane altogether. They were the shots of a cultured person; the cover drive and the square cut and the shot that only a player of genuine class can play, the on-drive wide of mid-on. And Ganguly was gracious enough to admit that this explosion of elegance allowed him to time his innings the way he wanted to.

And once he got past his century, Ganguly was unstoppable. Cricket has bestowed on the left-hander a natural grace that right-handers have to work hard to match. And Taunton was ablaze with that grace as Ganguly made the boundary line look like an insignificant piece of rope, not the destination that every cricketer is in love with. Balls thatwere launched from his bat looked down at it in the manner you might look at a passing town from an aircraft.

That they put on more than three hundred runs against a major cricketing nation is something that numbs my mind. Some landmarks do that to you for the sheer magnitude they represent. Brian Lara’s 501 in a first class match did that to me and I must admit, in all honesty, that this does as well. It opens your eyes to the degree of sophistication that the One-day game has now reached and I must confess to experiencing a distinct limitation that my imagination is imposing on me. Will teams start scoring 500? Will a player one day make 250?

Now India have sent out a very strong message to the rest of the teams at the World Cup. And most certainly to England who they play on Saturday and who are a team that suggest that they are sometimes quite happy to bow to reputations. That is a game India must win, not just to go through to the Super Six with two points but to ensure that Kenya allow no favours totheir African friends, Zimbabwe.

For if England beat India and Kenya beat Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe will still go through, leaving India behind. Hopefully, that will not happen because a team that is capable of such magic must grace the Super Six.