India took on Australia at Brisbane today on a lively, fastish wicket offering some seam movement, with a middle order which read - Gambhir, Sharma, Tiwary, Utthappa, Dhoni. Sachin Tendulkar got into the spirit of the new, by treading on his wicket as he played one backward of square off Brett Lee, finding a brand new way of getting out after 634 international innings. Australia played four fast bowlers and left out the worlds most effective ODI spin bowler after Muralitharan, thats how they see the wicket.
Brett Lee proceeded to demonstrate his mastery, but a look at his wickets suggests that he was helped a great deal by the freak Tendulkar dismissal and Manoj Tiwary's inexperience. The ball that got him was the oldest two card trick, and it wasn't even perfectly executed by Lee. The full delivery which got Tiwary was more half volley than yorker, and Tiwary as a specialist batsman ought to be disappointed by that dismissal. Utthappa and Sharma were both defeated by the bounce and Gautam Gambhir, for the umpteenth time looked accomplished for 39 before falling to his old problem of trying to play around his front pad, falling over to the off side. It was the best ball of the day which got him. Sehwag had fallen earlier trying to cut one too close to his body. But the on field cricket has been secondary and whatever happens from here (the news is that at 128/6, India have 9 more overs to play after the rain, before the run chase begins), India have today turned a page and this is possibly the new generation of the Indian middle order in embryo.
Rohit Sharma looked phenomenally gifted in his short stint at the wicket. As Wasim Akram astutely pointed out, he might have done well to let that Brett Lee delivery go given that it was Lee's 7th over, possibly the last of his second spell. Sharma has had a peculiar rise. He is a product of the BCCI's age group teams and made his first class debut at Darwin, playing for New Zealand A against India A. In that game, he batted at 7 and made 57 coming in a 100/5. He made 52 against Pakistan at Jaipur. Batting number 4 for India in ODI cricket, in Yuvraj Singh's absence, he gave a good account of himself. The big change over all in the running between the wickets was already apparent. Every batsman in the batting order has been quite superb at it, starting with Tendulkar at the top.
Here's an interesting juxtaposition though. The story goes that Sunil Gavaskar, on returning from a long overseas tour in the early hours of the morning in the early 80's, made himself available at 10 am the same morning for a game for his club on the maidan in Bombay. South Zone are playing East Zone today in the Duleep Trophy. If VVS Laxman, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid are serious about making a comeback to the ODI side, you would think that they would be hungry for as much cricket as they can get, for more than the obvious reason of wanting to put the runs on the board so that they have a case to make when the time comes, but also because they must show that they are able to withstand the grind of playing continuous cricket. There is plenty of noise being made about "too much cricket", but these are professional cricketers and this is the cricket season. They are still members of the Test team, and if one of the new players has a dream series with the bat in Australia, then he will threaten the South Africa series. Without runs to their name, and with the selectors keening on blooding new players to prepare the next generation, we might just see further surprises for the selection of the Test team.
This Indian ODI side will not win by pretty individual brilliance. There won't be the sumptuous Laxman hundred. But the hope is that they will concede less in the field, and win more in the field than just with the bat. If you consider the last ODI tournament India played in Australia, they began in red hot form with the bat, but were always ordinary in the field. The batting won them 1 game out of 3 against Australia, before they began to fall away at Perth, and in the finals, where they were hammered.
The result this time may be the same, but one hopes that the Australians are made to really earn their runs. The selectors have got their selection exactly right and Ganguly, Laxman and Dravid are making it easy for them.