The Hindu : Giving the boys their due

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Mar 25, 2003

Sport

Sport - World Cup

Giving the boys their due

By Nirmal Shekar

THE CUP THAT WAS OUT OF REACH: When they heard the country's national anthem, the Indians would have hoped to put up a much better performance than they actually managed.

Euphoria to mourning is a short trip; these mood extremes are separated by a single Ricky Ponting masterpiece, as we found out on Sunday.

Through four weeks, from the time Sourav Ganguly's men outplayed England under lights at Durban, it was a magical journey for millions in this country as our cricketers galloped on the horse of dreams speeding, seemingly, to the only destination acceptable to all _ a victory in the World Cup final.

In three and a half hours, starting with a Matthew Hayden sizzler _ the first boundary of the innings _ and ending with a Ponting blast, we saw the dreams shatter into fragments at the Wanderers. Ah, this is the way dreams die: a ritual execution rather than a slow fading away.

In thousands of bars and public places in cities and towns in this country, cleaning staff might have been spotted late in the evening tidying up bar rooms and parks and beachfronts. Rather than the garbage, they might as well have been picking up discarded fragments of millions of dreams.

Such is the cruelty of sport; such is the risk in choosing to travel in the chariot of dreams.

Now, 24 hours on, we wonder if the dream really existed. Such is the nature of reality; such is the harshness of truth.

And now the shattered fragments of millions of dreams will come back to life in the form of futile half-dead questions, questions that will transform themselves into index fingers pointed at all the dream merchants, from Ganguly down to Dinesh Mongia.

Did Sourav toss the Cup out? Did he hand the match out on a platter to Ponting by asking the Australians to bat first? Did Zaheer Khan gift away the match itself in the opening over? Did Tendulkar play a reckless shot to fail yet again in a Cup final? Did the team management make a mistake in not choosing Anil Kumble in the XI?

Ah, how capricious this business of sport can be! In three and a half hours — yes, in my book, the second half of the match, the Indian innings, did not matter at all, given the target — the dream merchants had metamorphosed into merchants of death!

So, the verdict is out: these boys can never win. They are just a bunch of losers. They promise the moon and deliver a paper moon. They hint at hoisting the tricolour on the game's Everest and then crash down the steep face and come back home limping, licking their wounds.

And we love rubbing a bit of salt into those wounds, don't we? We love to send them into stratospheric orbit driven by the high-octane fuel of our own dreams and then bury them in a coffin made of the shattered fragments.

The problem with inhabiting such emotional extremes manifests itself in many ways. Torched houses, stoned vehicles, posters reduced to ashes, inane, knee-jerk reactions which are palmed off as in-depth analysis...these are negligible factors, in my mind.

For, there is a bigger victim, the only one that matters to me: TRUTH. And the truth is simple: this Australian cricket team is very much superior to Ganguly's Indians. Actually that won't do. We have to qualify that. This Australian cricket team is much better than even a much-improved and in-form Indian team.

They are better because they have performed better on the big day. They are better because they continue to display the rare ability to put it all together when the big hour arrives.

What a nerveless display of the champion stuff it was on Sunday! And what a contrast it presented to Zaheer Khan's state of mind as he pumped himself up into pulp, so to say, and fired away with his mouth rather than his bowling arm!

The truth is, Australia will beat India eight out of 10 times in neutral territory. That is the kind of chance India had going into the final. It just turned out that it was one of those eight times and not the other two. And they have beaten us every which way.

Batting first, we made 125. Bowling first four weeks later, we let them score a record 359 for two. Seldom has superiority been more clearly established than in the two India-Australia contests.

In my mind, the gap between Australia and India, in terms of pure talent, is not quite as wide as these two contests would suggest. On current form, India is the second best team in the one-day game. While the gap between No. 2 and No. 1 looks more like the distance that might separate the No. 25 from the No. 1, it would be a folly to base all assessments on these two results.

Surely, the Aussies are much better. No arguments there. But in this World Cup, in both the contests, India lost the psychological battle first and the real one on the field next, and probably the first leading to the second.

Ponting is no Napoleon. But the punter from Tasmania knows a thing or two about gambling big on the big stage. And he and his team won half the battle the moment he tossed the new ball to Brett Lee in the Group league match.

And, for his part, Ganguly lost half the battle when he tossed away the advantage of winning the spin of coin. The decision held a mirror to his mind. For, in essence, it was a defensive decision.

The Indian skipper chose to bowl first not with an eye on the dark clouds hovering in the distant horizon and with a seasoned cricketer's cultivated hatred of Messrs Duckworth and Lewis but Ganguly did so simply because he did not want to yet again expose the top order — including himself — to Messrs Lee, McGrath and Bichel.

Then Ponting played the innings of his life. And everything that could go wrong for the Indian team actually did go wrong all the way until Khan ballooned one for Lehmann to pouch.

Is there anything that could have made a difference? Perhaps Kumble? Maybe a rare gem from Tendulkar? Half dead questions making way for futile exercises. For the truth is, on the day that mattered, no Indian player — barring Sehwag perhaps — came up with anything that mattered.

And Sehwag's innings itself made no big difference. It could not have...not after 359 were put on board by the opposition.

And the more important truth is this: this Indian team, which promised so much in playing some wonderfully aggressive cricket in this World Cup, is still not as good as many of us thought — or hoped, to be precise — it was; nor is it as inept as it appeared in the face of the Aussie onslaughts.

Ganguly's men may not be worthy of the Emperor's robes but they don't deserve to walk around in rags either.

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