Siddhartha Vaidhyanathan looks at another overlooked aspect of India's batting this tour: a lineup that is focussed, some would say obsessed, with personal landmarks has batted like a unit; the scores have come as cumulative efforts, and not as the result of any one player's brilliance.This has been a series for hard-nosed cameos. Since they landed in Ireland, India have played ten matches, both first-class and international. It's produced 31 half-centuries and just two hundreds - Sachin Tendulkar's 171 at Chelmsford and Kumble's 110 here.There's been lazy elegance (Wasim Jaffer's 62 at Nottingham and VVS Laxman's 51 here) and youthful exuberance (Dinesh Karthik's three fifties); controlled assertion (Dravid's 55 here, Ganguly's 79 at Nottingham) and single-minded accumulation (Tendulkar's 91 at Nottingham and his 82 here); guarded run-gathering (Jaffer's 53 at Lord's, Laxman's 54 at Nottingham); uncharacteristic stodginess (Mahendra Singh Dhoni's fifty at Lord's) and clinical destruction (Dhoni's 92 today).
Partnerships have been crucial. Batsmen have clung on to each other dearly with a staggering 16 50-plus stands. Unlike in Australia, where they rattled off one masterpiece after another, none of these innings will be termed 'great'. Yet they've made a collective statement. Like a swarm of bees, they've combined to make life hell for the opposition.
Andrew Miller writes of what England has to do now; it is a simple prescription that, I suspect, will be impossible to put into practice:
"We've got to dust ourselves down and fight really hard to stay in the game," said Moores, repeating his sentiments of the previous evening. "As a sportsman if you say that you can't win a game, then that's not a good mental place to put yourself. With three days left, of course all three are possible. Obviously it's stacked in India's favour but there are six sessions gone and still nine to go. If we win all nine sessions, we're in with a chance, but to get anywhere near India we've got to bat for two days."
Moving away from the Oval, Sharad Pawar is hilarious on the subject of the ICL:
"You are right in saying the players should be free to 'opt and play as per their own wish'," Pawar wrote. "It is most certainly up to the players to choose whether they wish to play under the banner of the BCCI or ICL. If they choose to play for the ICL, it is only fair that they should not expect benefits and privileges from the BCCI."Pawar said the board's earnings were spent on financing cricketing activities of various state associations and in augmenting infrastructural facilities. The ICL, he said, was "an out and out commercial venture", which had no track record yet to prove otherwise.
Talk of pots questioning the kettle's complexion: for the BCCI, which under its present administration has screwed up on so many issues we've lost count, while remaining focussed on milking making money out of the game, to call the ICL a commercial venture is almost too rich for sensitive stomachs to take. To cite the most recent example, the Indian cricket team still waits for a coach because the BCCI, in its own words, doesn't know where to advertise ("We don't have a website), for whom to advertise, or how to advertise -- but when it comes to inviting bids for ODIs, Tests, and even Twenty20 games it is yet to factor into its schedule, it has all its ducks lined up in a neat row. All of which clearly indicates that cricket, not money, is priority -- not.
On another level, it is no surprise that the BCCI believes it is some sort of feudal landlord, doling out benefits to hapless peasants, but for Pawar to say that those who participate in the ICL cannot look for benefits from the BCCI is the outside of enough: A player who works at his game and develops the capabilities to play at the highest level (no thanks incidentally to the BCCI, which in theory has an academy, but in practice has the sort of false facade that you see at Ramoji Rao's film city in Hyderabad) is not being given any benefits by the BCCI when it picks him for the team and pays him for those services -- those are rights, earned through hard work, not largesse the board is doling out.
And finally, for Pawar to say that the ICL has no track record is disingenuous -- of course it doesn't, it is new. So what? If we are going into track records now, what track record did a sugar baron and career politician have to run, first, the Bombay cricket association, then the BCCI, and in about a year from now, the ICC?
It's this kind of 'answerable to none' mindset that gets the BCCI universal opprobrium; it is also what the Bharatiya Janata Party is pointing at when, in a rare foray from religion into cricket (okay, maybe the saffron party considers cricket an off shoot of Hindutva, who knows?) , it suggests that the ICL is useful as a means to break the BCCI's monopoly.
India in the United Kingdom 2007
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