Victory to the valorous
There were only a countable few, and I must admit, extremely optimistic ones, to have augured such a result in the Indian Cricket Team’s favour.
Inspired team led by an inspired captain
An inspired captain, a resilient team, and a belief in the dressing room is all it took to decimate “the best touring test team” and presently the No.1 Test Team in a Test Series which was watched world over (while there was a revolution in the form of a Day-Night Cricket match taking place in another part of the world) for reasons beyond the more routine aspects of the game.
There were tweets that did rounds about how Indian pitches were denigrating the levels of Test Cricket across the globe, and I personally feel this was substantiated by the Nagpur pitch in more ways than one. But that aside, was it the pitches which won India the series, or was it the brand of cricket they played?
A quick flashback to Mohali (yes that seems so long back in time) – a captain short of runs, a bowling attack which was coming at the back of some real hard bashing by the South African ODI batting line up and a few players who were making a comeback to the side.
There’s a common thread that runs across these groups – all of them had a point to prove, and boy did they prove it! Indian spinners led by Ravichandran Ashwin and ably supported by the comeback man, Ravindra Jadeja and Amit Mishra bowled South Africa out of the game in Mohali, quite literally.
Indian bowlers made the best use of the conditions
On a pitch that wasn’t really the regular “Mohali Belter”, the Indian bowlers who had the back of their captain, always, did something that a lot of Indians had almost forgotten an Indian lineup could do – bring the team back into the game.
Every time Virat Kohli wanted a wicket and made a bowling change to effectuate that, almost every time, his bowlers delivered, and that’s a big plus for any captain. Be it Mohali or the lone day at Bengaluru or the venomous Nagpur wicket or the final test at Kotla, you could literally sniff a wicket any moment, just something seemed to be happening in the middle, always.
To read the pitch into the equation and attribute a team’s success/failure to the tracks has been a long-standing method of analysing a victory or a defeat, especially in Test Cricket. But, what such attribution mustn’t take away is the due credit to the players who perform on such tracks and ensure that the other side is outclassed.