When India needed 45 to get from 8 overs and when all of us by our working positions on the boundary line were getting increasingly animated, the photographer Pradeep Mandhani suddenly said to me,``Look at this, you'll find it interesting!'' He had focussed his camera, with a very long lens, on the Indian dressing room. And I could not believe what I saw there.The faces were glum, sad, depressed, so long that they would not fit into a passport size photograph. It was unreal because at that stage Nayan Mongia and Robin Singh had the match in their pockets and it looked like India would win with two overs left. That was when we were convinced that India could not win and Michael Holding's words came chillingly back to me. ``If India believe in themselves, they can win it,'' he had said and sadly, it must be said, my countrymen did not believe in themselves.I don't know if it is part of our culture and upbringing that we need to be reassured of our abilities all the time; that we forever seem to be in needof injections of confidence. I have seen that in my little career as a presenter of live telecasts. If at the end of the programme my producer or director hadn't told me that I had done well, seeds of doubt used to start erupting in me. I got over that after a chat with my producer who, for a long time, used to speak two words to me into my ear-piece just before we went on air. ``Relax. Breathe,'' he used to say and there is a huge lesson there.When a performer is tense, he wants to finish the job as quickly as possible and when you are in a hurry you don't pause to dip into reason, to listen to what your mind is really telling you. When your grandmother told you to count to ten when you were angry or excitable, she was giving you the best advice you will get because encounters are won by cool and confident minds, not diffident and excitable ones.Patience is a great partner of confidence and I'm afraid there was a bit of a divorce there yesterday. That is why India played death or glory cricket. Butbefore you start to throw them to the lions, if you haven't already, ask yourself if they are indeed such terrible people (which they are not) or if they are merely visible representatives of a culture that is yours and mine as well.We are, in many ways, an indisciplined nation. If we look at the way our governments function maybe we can understand the wides and no-balls. And because of the competition we have to face before succeeding, we tend to be selfish as well. And maybe that will explain the death-or-glory cricket.Geoffrey Boycott was telling us on television that India's cricketers are lovely boys, they are very talented but when it comes to playing cricket under pressure they are `useless'. That is a strong word but sometimes it is necessary to wake people up to the reality surrounding them. In the next two weeks, India don't need a cricket coach as much as they need a mind coach. They don't need a cricket captain as much as they need a leader of men.
