Another day, another defeat, same old reasons

India have always played better when the middle order has been shielded against the new ball. It is not a happy situation but we have to live with an errant child till it sees reason. All great teams have been built around a fine opening partnership and while India have rarely allowed themselves to be called great, they played their best cricket in recent times when the top order stayed in; Bangar at Leeds, Sehwag and Chopra in Australia and Pakistan.

It would be easy, therefore, to say that Rahul Dravid should not have opened in the third Test. But the moment he got two hundreds that was a fait accompli, it was not a debatable point anymore. It was a compromise but not a greater one than some of the names that Manmohan Singh has to live with.

The issue, therefore, was not about who should have opened in the third Test, it was what the team should have done in the first. Theories abound but rumour, even if it is the flavour of the month in our cricket, rarely helps in arriving at the truth. It would help, though, if we knew what it was, for organisations that seek to withhold the truth rarely achieve excellence.

Having said that, Dravid has the qualities to open the batting but we need to ask ourselves two questions. The lesser one is: Is he comfortable with the idea. The larger one is: Is it in the best interests of Indian cricket.

If the middle order is resilient enough to live with the loss of an early wicket, there is no reason why Dravid cannot see out his career as an opener. But I suspect that the loss of Dravid has the same effect on this team as the loss of Sachin Tendulkar did in the recent past.

If that is the case, and that means our middle order isn’t what we think it is, then he must bat at number three and we must find a pair of openers. The complete waste of Wasim Jaffer’s time cannot help anybody.

Part of the reason the middle order isn’t resilient enough is that Tendulkar is now in decline; indeed, has been for a while. It must cause nobody any surprise for the mind and the body have withstood much — the mind even more than an increasingly injury-hit body.

It happens to everybody and he has coped with dignity. It will be interesting to see what it does to him and his confidence and indeed, what it does to those who believe Tendulkar cannot struggle. That includes his team-mates and us!

He has carried the batting for many years and now we need to hold his hand till such time as everyone is convinced that his era is over. That is what good teams do. Tendulkar is now one of six, not the exalted one and I suspect he will find it easier to come to terms with that than we can!

Over the next seven Test matches, an average in the early forties should be well within grasp and, unless something dramatic happens in the interim, that would be a good time for stocktaking. But with Tendulkar inconsistent, Laxman insecure and Ganguly uncertain, it does not bode well. India’s middle order has the smell of anxiety about it.

Bowlers win Test matches more often than batsmen do and India are once again a side that can bowl well only in certain conditions. For a while it seemed that era might go but with Balaji and Nehra, two of India’s first three, gone, that past has been embraced again. India needs someone to hit the deck, to bowl alongside the swing of Irfan Pathan. It might be that Munaf Patel is that man but we will never know unless we experiment.

But the search for such a bowler, for many such bowlers, must begin in earnest. That is not the job of a privately run fast bowling academy or indeed of talent hunts. That would be passing the buck.

The BCCI must do it but they do not seem to have the time for it at the moment. Marketing is the buzz word and indeed the rights to show cricket for five years are going to cost almost as much as Jet Airways paid for Air Sahara. It is scary, both the price and the increasing neglect of the product.