Decency demands that the Indian cricket team set aside a few precious minutes and accord gratitude where it is due. To BCCI Secretary J.Y. Lele and the other grey eminences presiding over a sprawling cricketing empire. To the hopelessly biased umpires Down Under who bestowed them with an appealingly tragic aura. To their jittery seniors who indulged them with such a self-defeating game of musical chairs.Thanks to them, they are likely to emerge unscathed when India's most humiliating cricketing debacle since the Summer of 42 (when in 1974 the entire team was bundled out by England for a mere 42 runs) is subjected to a post-mortem. Thanks to them, their own lack of professionalism will be brushed under the carpet. A 3-0 wipeout in Australia is bad enough, but the fact that at no point did Sachin Tendulkar and him men seem to be even aspiring for a draw, let alone a win, makes it all the more unforgiveable.If the past is any guide, the same old dance of defeat will be choreographed yet again. The systemwill be lambasted for the repeated failure to produce bouncy tracks at home and to nurture talent, for countenancing oddballs like Lele who in the service of the game let their wards know exactly what is expected of them, a comprehensive defeat. Rightly so. A board that is more focussed on packing as many lucrative fixtures into an already cramped schedule than on evolving a rational, medium-term strategy to rebuild a formidable team cannot shrug off blame.A thinktank that believes formulating match strategy simply amounts to juggling with the batting order too has some answering to do. And, mind you, it is this establishment that has failed its players yet again by meekly succumbing to blatantly biased umpiring by Darrell Hair and company. This was a team entirely dependent on Tendulkar. Hence, the spectacle of him falling victim to one dubious lbw call after another surely cannot have been the most heartening of developments. And if the Indians were walking around the field with their shouldersdecidedly slumped, intervention by the match referee to lump a stringent fine and probation on Venkatesh Prasad, while ignoring more aggressive gestures by Ricky Ponting and Glenn McGrath, would definitely have precluded any attempts at cheerleading.And yet. And yet, make no mistake, ultimately it was not the BCCI, not the umpires who landed the visitors in this humiliating spotlight. The batsmen simply did not perform. That the openers were not up to the task was clear, but the Deadly Trio, hailed not a few times as the most dangerous batting combination in the world, cut a pathetic picture. Rahul Dravid merely retreated into his shell, plodding away defensively, quivering at the very sight of Shane Warne. Saurav Ganguly, to paraphrase Ian Chappell, had his mind elsewhere. And Tendulkar, barring a brilliant century, never quite seemed convinced that he could dictate the course of a match, never mind the dubious dismissals. Much has been made of the innocuous bowling attack, but it was the batsmen whowere exposed on a sad, sad Tuesday when V.V.S. Laxman, never the most aggressive of men, dealt with Brett Lee's pace so confidently. Any wonder then that optimism for the forthcoming triangular series is somewhat hard to muster?
