It is hard to look past South Africa today when one is looking for the best team in the world. The Australians have fallen apart against a disciplined if not exceptional England team. India, for all their batting strength seem unable to field a bowling attack thats both fit and in form. The Proteas on the other hand have the best new ball attack in Test Cricket, including possibly the greatest fast bowler in the last 30 years, in his prime. Their third seamer has shown the ability to be a excellent support bowler. They tend to struggle a little bit with their spin bowling option, and here, England might score over them. But in AB deVilliers South Africa possess the coming generation's Ricky Ponting - a marauding batsman of rare stroke making ability. Their captain Graeme Smith is the most underrated contemporary batsmen. Jacques Kallis has 11672 runs at 56.66 (38 Test Hundreds) and 269 wicket at 32 - a studious Gary Sobers.
The Kingsmead wicket is far from flat. India's unpredictable and erratic bowling attack makes it impossible to say anything about how the game might progress. It all depends on whether S Sreesanth is angry in a good way or a bad way. He always conveys the impression that he's trying too hard - both by trying to be too attacking and attempting too many magic balls (and then overcompensating), and by rushing his action. The speed of the run up is crucial to a bowlers rhythm. There's a famous story about Fred Trueman, who was working for Test Match Special at the time getting criticized for helping Dennis Lillee out in the 1975 Ashes. Lillee was struggling with his rhythm and Trueman advised him not to rush his run up. This, according to Trueman was causing Lillee to be unbalanced in his delivery stride. Lillee took the great fast bowler's advice to heart and proceeded to bowl England out. There's something of Dennis Lillee in Sreesanth. He has the a similarly irreverent (to put it mildly) take on things and is similarly talented. There was a story doing to rounds on twitter yesterday that Sreesanth has been trying to imitate Malcolm Marshall. The bold white head band reminded me more of Dennis Lillee. When Sreesanth gets it right, he can be as lethal as Dennis Lillee at his post-injury best. This only happens once in a blue moon.
There is also a tendency amongst the more committed observers of India's Test team to go easy on Sreesanth and Ishant Sharma, even though they deliver unmitigated rubbish most of the time. These observers are unwilling to cut the same slack to say Suresh Raina. Sreesanth is not a better bowler than Suresh Raina is a batsman. Yet, look where Raina is, and look where Sreesanth is. Given that neither Ishant nor Sreesanth is genuinely quick (a la Shaun Tait or Shoaib Akhtar or Brett Lee), they have to be accurate. Wasting 3 deliveries every over because they can't bowl it on a length just outside off stump, is a sign of mediocrity, just as having a problem against the short ball is a sign of mediocrity as a Test batsman. We have a strange situation today where we imagine non-existent problems with our batsmen, but are blind to obvious shortcomings amongst our bowlers. Consider the oft-repeated comment that "India's batsmen have a problem on bouncy pitches" - a vague observation. Which batsmen? And based on what evidence? Cricinfo has a ongoing poll which reads as follows:
"India's failure to tackle South Africa's bowling is down to..Of the 5548 people who have voted, 43% think it's the second of the three options.
- Lack of practice in match conditions
- A problem with pace
- Bad, careless batting
And don't tell me we know about these things - if we did, we wouldn't blame our batsmen for getting out in bowler friendly conditions, but not blame our bowlers for conceding 40 runs per wicket no matter where they bowl. India's fast bowlers began atrociously in the South African run chase yesterday. It was through sheer good fortune that Graeme Smith aimed a hook at a ball that was too high and too wide of off stump when he did. Until then, the bowling had been terrible.
VVS Laxman played a superb innings. On days like these the number 5 position in the batting line up looks like it was made for VVS Laxman's special strokemaking ability. But Laxman is also an unfortunate man, for he is consistently denied a place in the top tier of Indian batsmanship. This is done in a very sly underhanded way. The usual tactic is to use VVS Laxman as a stick to beat the other Indian batsmen with. To be marked as a man who "scores runs when they are needed" (as has been said many times off VVS Laxman) must be quite galling, for the men ahead of him in the Indian line up have all made more hundreds more frequently than he has. What might it imply? That VVS doesn't make runs until a situation when they are desperately needed arises? VVS has had a great year and a great decade as a classy middle-order Test player with a touch of genius in him. He deserves to be treated on his own terms, and not as a perpetual outsider. The man is a master batsman. He's ought not to be condemned for being a nice, polite guy, because it's quite irrelevant. The "he can fight even though he's a nice guy" trope is nothing more than a sticky journalistic construct that emerged under the mundane pressure of a deadline. It is testimony to the decidedly modest journalistic imagination. It has no meaning. Why consider a Test player (a Test player!) a nice guy in the same way that one might consider ones neighbor a nice guy?
And yet, even as we come to the last day of Test Cricket in the year 2010, about 15 years after the advent of the internet age of cricket journalism, in an age when India has the best team it ever had, we get published comments like these. Here's Prem Panicker on twitter
"VVS - *respect* - the man for all his gentle airs has a stomach for a fight. Unlike some of his higher rated peers."Think about this for a moment. Most of you, like me, are more likely to read and write about Test Cricket than play it. So this line is worth thinking about. It is the most singularly classless comment - a rank insult to both VVS and his colleagues. Even the 140 character limit of twitter has been unable to mask petty mediocrity. How does a person's mind have to work to conjure up something like that - to trade insults and praise like a sweaty dalaal in a shady pawn shop (my apologies to all honest traders)? It is the worst thing you can say about an individual - that he doesn't have the stomach for a fight - to imply that he either doesn't care, or lacks guts. And who is this being said about? Virender Sehwag? Sachin Tendulkar? Rahul Dravid? Murali Vijay? (maybe not Vijay, Panicker did say "higher rated") Based on what? Just how dirty and inadequate does one's warped world view have to be, to casually accuse some very accomplished people of not trying? And why? In what way is it a useful observation? This is the sort of observation that suggests that VVS will get it in the neck from Panicker at some point as well.
Panicker is not your average amateur twitter afficionado. He's something of a celebrity cricket journalist. He has 18,692 twitter followers, while he himself follows only 278. He comments on cricket, politics, journalism - the works. I fail to understand how someone who claims to like reading and writing can be so humanistically challenged.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. Cricket journalism in India is unlikely to change irrespective of what the Cricket team achieves.