India At MCG 2011-12, Day 2

India 214/3 plays Australia 333 all out.

This is what the scorecard tells us after the first two days at the MCG. Two days in which India's best players have reasserted themselves. Two days which give us a glimpse of what might have been had India's best players been fit in England. Two days which possibly also tell us the difference between England and Australia.

Test Cricket, it appears has gone crazy. A look at some of the shots batsmen have played in the last few months would suggest an epidemic of loose batsmanship. The early performances of a number of debutants - R Ashwin, James Pattinson, Vernon Philander, Pat Cummins, Umesh Yadav, Doug Bracewell and Marchant de Lange, have all played less than 5 Tests each. Yet, their returns have been spectacular - 106 wickets at 18.1, with a strike rate of 34. To be fair, the wickets have not been flat. But the old method of defending for an hour and seeing off a spell seems to have been abandoned.



Umesh Yadav is perhaps the most conventional of these bowlers. A young tearaway, he has the ability to produce the unplayable ball, but lack the control to keep the runs down. What seems to me to be common to all these fast bowlers is the tendency to attack the stumps by pitching the ball up. This has the added advantage of making the batsman drive - making him play away from his pads, out in front of the body. The dismissals of Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar, and the near dismissal of Rahul Dravid provide good illustrations of this.

Contrast this with a bowler like Ishant Sharma. His last 5 Test Match (not counting the MCG Test) have brought him 6 Test wickets. He rarely attacks the right handers stumps, and can't attack the left handers stumps from over the wicket.

If Australia's bowlers have relied on a classical attacking strategy - the fast bowlers try to pitch the ball up to the bat at high pace, interspersed with short pitched bowling to keep the batsman from coming forward as a matter of course, then for Zaheer Khan, fast bowling is a whole other art. Zaheer is now a master of line, length, swing and seam. He can bowl from over the wicket and around the wicket. Wasim Akram would be proud of Zaheer's bowling. Zaheer's control of the seam of the cricket ball is phenomenal. He can get the same ball to swing in the air and then seam off the wicket, something which only very very few bowlers can do. He can bowl within himself, and then, when he senses that the occasion demands it, slip himself and hurry any batsman. His bouncer is arguably the best in the world - sparingly used, immaculately directed, brilliantly timed. Batsmen are never at ease against Zaheer. That is the greatest tribute a bowler can get from batsmen.

Day 2 at the MCG was sunny, and India's batsmen seemed to want to make the most of it. Virender Sehwag, is the quintessential iconoclast. If any cricketer of any seriousness from any moment in the history of the game, was to watch Virender Sehwag bat any 20 minutes spell in any of his innings, without knowing who Sehwag was, and was asked what he thought Sehwag averaged, he would in all probability say a number below 35. Yet, Sehwag averages 52 in Tests! He has the hands of a surgeon, the eye of a dead fish, and brains of a mad genius. Take an over from Nathan Lyon yesterday. It was the 20th over of India's innings.

First ball, Sehwag played off the backfoot, square of the leg side for 2.
Second ball , he drove the off spinner, inside-out, against the turn, on the up, for 2 more.
Third ball, he casually lofted over mid off for 4.
Fourth ball, he lofted over mid on for 4.

In both cases, mid on and mid-off were up, saving the single. Michael Clarke and Nathan Lyon moved mid on back. Lyon bowled the 5th ball well flighted, slighly wide of off stump.

Most batsmen (no, all sane batsmen!) would have probably played that ball out quietly, having taken 12 seemingly effortless runs of the spinner. Some clever batsmen (Colin Cowdrey tells a story about Len Hutton, where Hutton kept pretending that a certain spinner was giving him trouble, and rationed himself to a boundary every now and then, with the result that the spinner kept bowling for most of the session, and Hutton made most of his century off him) might even have offered an exaggerated defense.

Not Sehwag. Even as he saw that 5th ball tossed up outside off stump, he must have known what Lyon was trying to do. He could have hit it through the off side, along the ground. But no! He tried to whip it, in the air, wide of long-on. Long-on nearly caught it, because Sehwag could whip it wide enough.

This is batsmanship very very far away from the manual of good batting habits. I won't even mention Sehwag's outrageous batting in the morning session. India were likely to face about three overs before lunch, and Sehwag faced 9 of those deliveries. They including, and Im not overstating this one bit - one (partially successful) attempt to loft the fast bowler over mid off, two attempts to hit screaming cover drives, one screaming on drive which found mid-on, and a couple of quiet singles.

As Nitin Sundar said on Cricinfo's ball-by-ball, it was vintage Sehwag.

If Virender Sehwag played for any team other than India, I would probably hate him with a vengeance. Can you imagine Sehwag loose against India's bowling, especially without Zaheer?

His idol, Sachin Tendulkar, also batted at the MCG yesterday. Not only did he bat, he was in the mood. If the 100th 100 is bothering him, he sure is hiding it really well. He had to face Michael Hussey for one horrible over before the Tea break, thanks to Virender Sehwag, who got out 2 overs before the tea interval. But after the break, he seemed hell bent on attack. He has approach this type of innings differently in the past. He has seen off entire spells from bowlers. But given how attacking Australia's lines and lengths have tended to be, attacking batsmanship was the best way to respond. That upper cut (or, as some people call it, the upar cut) first ball after tea was not quite as dramatic as the one he played against Brett Lee during his 76 at Perth in 2008, but it seemed to be enough for him to feel well set. For most of the post tea session, Tendulkar was in blazing touch.

He will be upset by the manner of his dismissal. He will be upset that his bat left the company of his pads in the way that it did, that close to the end of the day. For Tendulkar, you see, is not Sehwag.

Rahul Dravid, the most prolific batsman in Test Cricket in 2011, with Test centuries on three different continents, is still batting. For most of this innings, he has played second fiddle to Sehwag and Tendulkar.

The game is in the balance. It is obvious that if India bat for most of tomorrow, they will find themselves well ahead. But even if they don't, I think this Indian team will be hard to beat in Australia.