Small total, big challenge

Ask West Indies, who lost to India by 16 runs while chasing 162. Now ask India, who choked against Australia8217;s 213. Now compare these two games at the Kinrara Oval to the famous runfest at the Wanderers earlier this year between Australia 434 and South Africa 438 and a complex conclusion can be drawn. While chasing 434 was difficult, but not exactly impossible, the West Indies found out that even a target of 161 can turn out to be insurmountable.

Batting legend Sunil Gavaskar in his column for this newspaper talks about this high-risk factor: 8220;Chasing a small total is never easy as there is a tendency to take it easy. And with the West Indian side packed with batsmen, the old problem of 8216;even if I get out, there8217;s a long batting line-up to follow8217; can lead to disaster as it eventually happened.8217;8217;

West Indian captain Brian Lara has been around for long to understand what Gavaskar is talking about. 8220;Sometimes when you have a small total to defend, you knuckle down a bit and come out harder,8217;8217; he says.

In other words, it can also be called over-confidence as former Indian skipper Dilip Vengsarkar points out. 8220;Sometimes you can owe it to overconfidence. Players are under the impression that they can finish the game in no time,8217;8217; he says. But he adds that these things happen only if the conditions are conducive to aid the bowlers. 8220;When you play in England or New Zealand, high-scoring chases are very rare. The weather does not allow batsmen to immediately open up and at the same time, bowlers can derive a lot of help,8217;8217; says Vengsarkar, who had a first-hand view of the great 1983 collapse of the West Indies and the Pakistan tumble chasing 125 in Sharjah three years later.

Giving a bowler8217;s perspective to the debate, former Test pacer Venkatesh Prasad says, 8220;Teams fail to reach easy totals by faltering even when the road is smooth. A couple of early wickets can put any team under pressure and to add to that, if conditions are a little helpful for bowlers, things can get very difficult.8217;8217;

The conditions, for instance, were helpful for Prasad8217;s tribe during the India-West Indies game last week. It was overcast and the pitch had pace and bounce, something that the Indian players don8217;t see often. And despite the unpredictability of the ridge at one end, Indian skipper Rahul Dravid came with another view while hinting that he was quite pleased to play on the 22 yards at the Kinrara Oval. 8220;As batsmen, we8217;ve got to play on pitches that do a bit, and learn to cope. When we play on dead pitches people moan about the conditions. We can8217;t always play on flat tracks all the time,8217;8217; he says.

Former Indian coach Anshuman Gaekwad, however, says even seemingly friendly pitches can do the trick. 8220;The game has gradually been transforming into a batsman8217;s domain and that8217;s why the collapse when batsmen come up against an unexpected challenge. Of course, conditions do play a role in the sense that they help either the bowler or the batsman or at least psychologically affect the mindset of a player to an extent,8217;8217; he says.

So are conditions and over-confidence the only reasons for teams folding up while chasing low scores? One man begs to differ and he has a point. Former Test pace Balwinder Singh, who with the first breakthrough at Lord8217;s in 1983 saw to it that the modest looking target of 183 proved Herculean for the West Indies, talks about individual effort too. 8220;The 1983 World Cup final was all about the way we bowled to get the mighty West Indians out for a paltry total. Conditions had been helpful but more than that, there were some incredible individual efforts that saw us home,8217;8217; he says.

One gets the impression that he is talking about his banana in-swinger to Gordon Greenidge but Sandhu recalls the magic moment when Kapil Dev took that incredible catch to dismiss Viv Richards. 8220;That almost tilted the equation in our favour. Low-scoring matches are a mix of a variety of things when conditions get helpful and good performances come by,8221; he says.

India8217;s win against the same team last Wednesday wasn8217;t of that epic dimension but it certainly brought back memories of a certain genre of cricket that the world has forgotten. In days to come with the Champions Trophy in India and the World Cup in West Indies 8212; it is believed that the pitches at both the venues wouldn8217;t be quite bowler friendly 8212; tall scores and 300 plus games are on cards. It is rare to see days when bowlers from either side sit and have a big laugh over drinks after the game and celebrate their collective day out. After their batsmen have choked.

8212;With K Shriniwas Rao

CHASING, CHOKING
Some small totals, some famous chokes:

1983 World Cup final, Lord8217;s:

India 183 bt West Indies 140. Turnaround comes with Kapil Dev8217;s great catch to dismiss Sir Viv Richards, West Indies are 57 for three and one of the biggest upsets in history is just a few wickets away

1985 Rothmans Cup final, Sharjah :

India 125 bt Pakistan 85: Mudassar Nazar and Ramiz Raja take Pakistan to 40 for three but Ravi Shastri and L Sivaramakrishnan weave a web to choke rivals

1990, Rothmans Cup, Christchurch:

Australia 187/9 bt India 169. Narendra Hirwani and Kapil Dev hold Australia but Terry Alderman8217;s five-wicket haul does India in

1991, Benson 038; Hedges series, Perth:

India 126 tie West Indies. After Marshall and Ambrose attack, Azharuddin8217;s awesome catch off Tendulkar8217;s bowling to dismiss Cummins stops Windies.

1992 Benson 038; Hedges series, Sydney:

Australia 208 bt India 202. India are going steady at 146-4 until Mohd Azharuddin and Kapil Dev play suicidal shots to gift the final to Australia

1993 one-day series, Ahmedabad:

West Indies 202 bt India 100. India begin disastrously and slide to defeat with Azharuddin8217;s 23 the only bright spot

1996 World Cup match, Pune:

Kenya 166 bt West Indies 93. West Indies suffer the biggest humiliation, at 32 for two starts the beginning of their world slide

1999 World Cup semifinal, Edgbaston:

Australia 213 tie South Africa, Allan Donald runs himself out on the last ball

2001, one-day series, Colombo:

New Zealand 200 bt India 137. Nathan Astle8217;s century lifts NZ from 160-5, then Dion Nash and Chris Harris run through the Indian middle order