CB Series: India On The Brink In A Bowler's Game

India are on the brink in the CB Series. They managed to stay in the series due to a blistering batting performance that broke many records and elevated Virat Kohli from the ranks of one of India's up and coming batsmen, to the A-list of contemporary Indian batsmanship. It moved him from being in competition for a spot in the ODI XI with the likes of Suresh Raina to claiming a spot besides Yuvraj Singh as one of the world's pre-eminent middle order men (see this as an alternative) in the shorter format of the contemporary game. Kohli's Test runs at Perth and Adelaide in addition to his ODI heroics make this a triumphant Australian tour for at least one Indian player.



But as I said, India are on the brink. Diagnoses of India's situation abound. The most common one blames the "seniors". Another one that is nearly as widely held blames the batting. This, regular readers of this blog will know, is a view that I disagree with. I think the extent to which the batting gets blamed, and the extent to which the bowling gets away with criticism in India reflects two things.

First, it confuses the idea of a critique,  which involves a diagnosis of why certain results are coming about, with a blame game involving specific individuals . Because of this confusion, we get to hear the repeated defense of "inexperienced" bowlers, and the repeated bashing of "experienced", or more commonly, "superstar" batsmen.

Second, and this runs far deeper - it suggests a basic misunderstanding of how cricket works (which is why it is not able to process the above mentioned critique). By "how cricket works" I mean, how batting, bowling and fielding are deeply and irrevocably connected to each other in the 50 over and Test Match form of the game (I do not extend this point to the 20 over game for reasons I have discussed elsewhere). The way these three things are discussed - and the readiness with which expectations are placed on "experienced" players, suggests that these three aspects of the game are seen as being largely independent of each other.

Batting, bowling and fielding are connected to each other. What this means is that the possibilities of consequential individual brilliance in batting, bowling or fielding, are limited substantially by the connections between batting bowling and fielding.

The bowler is allowed to perform the only independent act in cricket. As the individual who starts each play, there is nothing (other than the bowler's ability) standing in the way of the ball being delivered exactly where the bowler wants to deliver it. This is the central, first fact of cricket. Now, there are rare occasions where a batsman has been taking chances, or has shown a tendency to premeditate, which dictates to some extent where the bowler ought to bowl, but even in these instances, there is always a place on the pitch where the bowler can land the ball (and nothing but his ability stops him from doing this) and win the mini-contest. But these instances are rare - they require specific match situations, a rare kind of batsman and a rare kind of pitch.

So the bowler gets the begin the play. The advantage doesn't end there. The fielding captain gets to set the field according to the plans that the bowler is going to execute. If the bowler bowls where he is supposed to bowl, and if the field is set to support the bowler's line and length (a packed off side field is not set for the short and wide long hop), then the bowler would be bowling to his field. What this means, is that the batsman, when playing in a conventional risk free way, will almost always hit the ball in a direction or a general area of the field where there are fielders positioned. Hence, in a Test Match, when a bowler is bowling to three slips, a gully, a point, a cover, a mid-off, a mid-on and a fine-leg, and pitches a ball on middle-and-leg, it is often said that he is not bowling to his field.

Bowling to one's field has even greater benefits. With accurate bowlers, teams can produce better all-round team fielding efforts with fewer high quality fielders. This is because accurate bowlers can allow captains to predict where the batsman will hit the ball with greater accuracy (or higher probability), and hence ensure that the team's best fielders field the most number of deliveries.

It is often argued that great fielding teams can prop up an ordinary bowling side. This is true to the extent that an accurate bowler (without any great guile or pace or skill with the seam) will produce better results with a better fielding unit than he will with a lesser fielding unit. However, this does not follow when the bowling is inaccurate. Yes, there may be some marginal returns. Especially for teams like India, finding high quality batsmen and bowlers who are also brilliant fielders is not easy. If all bowlers and batsmen are not brilliant fielders, it follows that a trade off will have to be made. Selecting a less skilled bowler just because he is a better fielder is a bad idea, precisely because while good bowling can mask bad fielders to a large extent, the reverse is less true. For example, fielding at fine leg when Glenn McGrath bowled must have been like taking a vacation, especially when he was bowling without a mid-wicket, thereby indicating a tactic of keeping it around off stump. It would not, if you think about it, be too difficult to "hide" a modest fielder at fine leg while Glenn McGrath was bowling - the ball would rarely be hit there. Given a bowler with lesser control, it becomes more difficult to "hide" a modest fielder, or more realistically, to use the few high quality fielders you have in important positions, because you (as the fielding captain) have very little control over where the batsman is going to hit the ball. Not only does it put extra pressure on your best fielders, it also puts extra pressure on your worst fielders. There aren't enough fielders in cricket to defend both sides of the wicket effectively.

So it is not true to say that high quality fielding can prop up an inaccurate bowling line up to the same extent that an accurate bowling line up can improve the effectiveness of a modest fielding team with a couple of top quality fielders, a few decent fielders and two or three bad fielders (which India are at the moment). Accurate bowling is a far more important thing for a cricket team than top quality fielding. Now, of course, in an ideal world, every player in a team would field like Ricky Ponting, but in actual cricket selectors have to make trade offs.

It is often very tempting to pick a modest batsman or bowler who is a brilliant fielder (Ravindra Jadeja would be the prime example), because he's going to make a side look good. But if Jadeja at cover point has to field 30 full blooded square cuts in every innings, then even if he stops about 2/3rds of those shots, India will still concede 40 runs off bad balls. With better bowlers playing, and a more modest fielder at point who stops only 1/3rd of 15 square cuts in an innings, India will concede only 20 extra runs.

What we tend to see - not just look at, but see - is the stray brilliant fielding effort and slew of half stops. We don't count, all the free hit four balls that he bowls on a regular basis in our ledger of Jadeja's performance.

All this should serve to point to one realization - that an accurate bowling attack - not one accurate bowler and three erratic bowlers, but an attack comprising of 4 accurate bowlers - bowlers who can bowl to their field all the time, is the single most important thing that a cricket team can have. It should also lead to the realization that a really good bowler should always play, regardless of how he fields. Therefore, Zaheer Khan should always play, provided he is fit enough to bowl.

At this point, you could be forgiven for thinking that I hold the view that batsmen have no agency in cricket. They do. They have the ability to take risks (the extent of this risk depends on their skill and their familiarity with a set of conditions - both within a single innings - a set batsman is more likely to pull off a big risky shot than one who is new to the crease - and in a more long term sense - an Indian batsman is likely to play better in India than overseas. An accurate bowler forces batsmen to take greater risks to score runs, compared to an inaccurate bowler. Therefore, it is more likely that a batsman will score more runs, more quickly against an inaccurate bowler, than he might against an accurate bowler. Occasionally, a batsman in great form, or a batsman of rare ability will have a very good day and hit everything off the middle of the bat, into the gaps (as Sehwag does from time to time), and transcend these rules - this is the exception rather than the rule. I would go even further and say that it is the exception that proves the rule.

So if a batting side is scoring at 6 an over, and doing it easily, with plenty of free hit square cuts and pull shots and sumptuous drives to half volleys, then that is a totally different contest between bat and ball, than a side which is scoring at 6 an over, and in order to do so, has to constantly improvise. Batsmen have to walk across their stumps, they have to back away to leg - do each of these things on a regular basis in the hope of converting a good line and length into a bad one, and also disturbing the bowler's line and length. Most specialist bowlers who can bowl a good line and length to start with, are very difficult to distract in this way. The ones who get distracted, are unlikely to sustain a good line and length for a full spell anyway. The first way of scoring 6 an over is an ordinary contest - bat dominates ball all the way - the bowler is not even able to stay in the contest by doing the basics right. The second way of scoring 6 an over is a contest of a different quality. It is far far easier, and therefore, far more likely that a batting side will score at 6 runs per over or better for a sustained length of time against the first kind of bowling, than it will against the second kind of (more accurate) bowling.

India's CB series has been marked by inaccurate bowling. In the first couple of games, their bowling did well - well enough for the batting to overhaul targets. Then, the bowling began to fall apart. Ravichandran Ashwin is unable to bowl over the wicket to the right handers in Australia in ODI cricket without getting square cut at least twice an over. You could argue that maybe Dhoni should give him extra fielders square on the off side. This is something Dhoni cannot afford, for then he would have to open up gaps in the outfield in front of square on the leg side, which is where the majority of balls bowled by an off spinner to the right hander are hit. Umesh Yadav has been wildly erratic. He has genuine pace, but very control. It is nearly impossible to set a field to. The fifth bowler has been a disaster. Irfan Pathan has also been remarkably inaccurate for a bowler of his modest pace. The standard for accuracy by a bowler of Irfan's style has been set by Chaminda Vaas and Nathan Bracken. The weak, erratic bowling makes a modest fielding side look far worse than it is.

It has been remarked time and again, that India have struggled to bowl at the death. This is not about the lack of a specific skill - such as the skill to bowl yorkers, but a more general lack of control. The problem is not that they lack the theory, it is that they cannot put it into practice because they are not good enough to do so.

In the CB series, especially at Brisbane and Sydney, India kept conceding 280-290 where 225-230 was par. Brisbane was by no means a flat wicket - this fact has a huge impact on the types of risks that a batsman can take against accurate bowling. India's run chases kept coming up short, mainly because their batsmen had to look for runs and take those extra risks against far better bowling, instead of playing more carefully - something that the conditions merited, and a par run chase would have permitted.

Even after this detailed explanation of how batting, bowling and fielding are limited, you might still argue that it is India's batsmen who have under performed. This may be true depending on what you expect from India's batsmen. If you expect each Indian batsman to have scored a century, and for India to have chased down whatever they were asked, irrespective of what the conditions were like, or what the opposition bowling was like, or what a par score was, then yes, the batsmen have under performed. But it is not why India find themselves at Australia's mercy in this tournament right now. You may well say, that the batsmen are more experienced, and should be able to make up for the shortcomings for the bowling.

To a large extent, they have overcome the shortcomings of the bowling. Hobart would be the perfect example. M S Dhoni's decision to field first after winning the toss, given that India needed to win with a bonus point, suggested that he had greater faith in India's batsmen's ability to score in 40 overs whatever Sri Lanka set them in 50, than he did in India's bowlers' ability to limit Sri Lanka to 80% of whatever India might have scored in 50 overs. He also wanted to keep for his own team, keeping in mind the above formulation, the ability to take risks (which batting permits). You could well say here that bowlers can also take risks. Yes they can. Yes fielding sides can bring fielders in, and not allow singles, and try to force the batsman into an error by forcing the batsman to hit the ball just that little bit harder to pierce the in-field. But for this, fielding captains have to be confident of the fact that their bowlers can in fact bowl to their field. With the exception of Zaheer Khan, none of India's bowlers can do this reliably.

What worked in India's favor at Hobart was the fact that it was a flat wicket. Sri Lanka chased 280 fairly easily at Hobart on February 24.

It has often been argued that India prefer to play on flat wickets because their batsmen are more comfortable on flat wickets. This is true, in so far as any batsmen are happier on flat wickets than they might be on wickets with a little bit of life in them - simply because flatter wickets permit batsmen to take greater liberties. But the secret of India's success on flat wickets has been the fact that flat wickets equalize the rival bowling attacks. It is a truism in Test Cricket that having a bad bowling attack is far worse on helpful wickets than having a bad bowling attack on a flat wicket - on a flat wicket, batsmen can save a Test by scoring big in the first innings, on a pitch with some life in it, it is much harder. This is also true in ODI cricket.

It is reasonable to expect India's batsmen to develop a better batting technique to cope with foreign pitches. But this is a post-graduate level problem. It is a question of asking batsmen who have mastered a large variety of conditions, to master one additional set of conditions - conditions which they don't typically face in their formative years in India. The bowlers face, by comparison, a high school level problem - to bowl to their field by bowling a precise, prescribed line and length.

India's batsmen have been struggling with a post-graduate level problem, while its bowlers have been struggling with a high-school level problem. You may say, well, all the more reason for the batsmen make up for the bowler's shortcomings. There is a problem with this line of argument. You see, international cricket is a post-graduate level contest, not a high school level one.

India's current position in the CB series is similar to their position in the Test series. The difference has been, that in ODI Cricket, batsmen can actually realistically win games, unlike in Test Cricket. Hence, India's batsmen have kept India in the series despite India's bowlers. The nature of ODI cricket is such that India may yet go on to win this tournament on a basis of 2 good days at Adelaide - a pitch which they will like.

But that will not make India's deepest, most troubling problem any more palatable - the lack of accurate bowlers who can bowl to their field. Ravichandran Ashwin, Irfan Pathan and Umesh Yadav have all failed at this basic task.

If we consider (rightly in my view) Rohit Sharma to have failed in this series, then Vinay Kumar, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and Irfan Pathan - all charged with bowling the majority of India's overs, have failed even more starkly. Economy rates of nearly 5 (or in some cases over 5 or even 6!) and bowling averages in the late 30s and 40s against two batting lineups which are far from explosive, on wickets which have not been flat, is far worse than averaging 15 with the bat.

Batsmen are allowed one mistake per innings. Bowlers get to make mistakes that are often hidden in clear sight. If we are going to be critical of batsmen who average 15 of 20 (one good innings of 60 or 70 will push that average up to 33-35 in a tournament of this length), then we must be equally, if not more, critical of bowlers who average 35-40, especially when matches are being played in conditions where 230-240 is a par score.

This is why I think the batsmen and the bowlers are not equally to blame for India's situation in the CB Series. It cannot be an excuse that the bowlers are inexperienced, because there is nothing in the score-book that permits this. Cricket does not allow India to say - "Umesh Yadav is still learning, could you please count 10 runs taken off his bowling as only 7", any more than it allows Sri Lanka to say, "Tendulkar has played so many games and scored so many runs against us! Please count 20 runs from him as only 10 in India's total.".


It is a convenient and popular myth that cricket is a batsman's game. In fact, it is very much a bowler's game. Think about it. Bowlers have to produce only 10 wicket taking balls to dismiss the entire opposition team. Bowlers make mistakes which often get blamed on fielders! How often have you heard fans complain about a fast bowler fielding on the deep square leg boundary, who fails to make a difficult stop off a sizzling, full blooded pull shot off one of his fellow medium pacers? The fielder gets blamed for conceding two extra runs, but the bowler never gets blamed for conceding 4 free runs by bowling a bad ball - committing an unforced error. Are our memories really so short that we can only see the latest, most recent part of a delivery - the fielding on the boundary?

Cricket may be a batsman's game in the popular imagination, but it is bowlers who win it. The only time this is not true, is when they are taken out of the game by a very flat pitch. In such circumstances, India's batting is incomparable. As a rule, such circumstances are not to be found in the CB Series. As an India fan, if you are Ok with the quality of the bowling, then don't expect the results to be better.

How do you determine the quality of the bowling?

A simple thumb rule will suffice. Next time India bowl, see how often opposing batsmen are able to play off the back foot. If they do it 2-3 times an over, it is highly likely that they will be scoring at a healthy rate, that partnerships will be developing, that they will be heading towards a position where they can take the powerplay with two set batsmen playing. If opposing batsmen are being drawn forward, ball after ball after ball, then it is highly likely that they will be scoring much slower, or, taking enormous risks trying to score faster - risks, which by definition increase their chance of dismissal.

Try this out, and see what you find.

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