The Hindu : Reality bites

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Dec 15, 2002

Sport

Sport - Cricket

Reality bites

Losing is acceptable, but not going down in such a fashion. It was easily one of the worst Indian batting displays I have seen in a long time. There just was no fight.

To lose a Test inside three days is abysmal. And it clearly reveals that one of the sides had failed to put up any resistance.

Still, I can understand a scenario when one side makes 400 plus and the other collapses, but here was a Test when New Zealand was dismissed for 247, and India scored 161 and 121 to be crushed by ten wickets.

This was an atrocious batting performance, and I still cannot believe that we batted so poorly. Just goes to prove that we are extremely vulnerable when the ball seams and bounces.

From the Indian display it becomes obvious that we have only two world-class batsmen, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, who are capable of adapting to such pitches. There is far too much hype about the others.

What's happening now is that, for purely commercial interests, the Indian side is being hyped up, and the expectation among the people becomes ridiculously high.

All these ratings, there are so many of them now, have no meaning unless they are backed by matching performances by our cricketers when it counts.

We tend to get carried away by performances at home; easily forgetting that the real test for any batsman is how he fares in conditions like that prevailed in Wellington.

As a former Indian cricketer I can tell you that if we need to be respected as a team, then we will have to perform well abroad on a consistent basis, Otherwise, we will be called tigers at home and minnows abroad.

It was a Test where the Indian bowlers performed exceedingly well to give us a definite chance. Zaheer was superb, while Harbhajan showed he is a world-class spinner who could hold his own on any pitch.

To get humiliated in this fashion will hardly do the image of the country as a Test playing nation any good. We have to get our act together fast in this series, but I doubt whether this would be possible.

www.kris-srikkanth.com

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