Will Team India ever come out of its comfort zone?
The India Australia series has not started , and yet we have the media and Cricket Australia discussing, analysing, countering, the Indian Team’s one of the only two strategies it possesses. Either build a batting pitch where four year olds can face the likes of Brett Lee – the ball hardly bounces, loses pace and looks up to the batsman asking to be smacked – or build spinning pitches where the ball escapes the bat much like the way a seasoned housefly escapes a swatter!
What a furore an India-Australia Test series used to bring about at one point of time – loads of excitement, anticipation of matches, queuing stadiums for tickets, and a whole lot more. Now cricket viewership has been diluted to shorter versions of the game and hard-hitting, leaving no space for ‘true talent’ to express itself. What bothers me more is the defensive mind-set of the Indian Team that the media and twitterati have been broadcasting. “India will play three specialist spinners, we will play to our advantage” and Australia screaming, ‘we got your strategy mate, we’ll play batsmen good with spin’
Is that all a home-series supposed to bring forth? A well-known defensive strategy and Indians playing to the same advantage every single time? All specialist bowlers and batsmen not doing their jobs consistently enough? We not investing in our biggest weakness – of having a B-grade pace attack? When will we look beyond our obvious advantage? When will we stray off our comfort zones and be a ‘real-team’?
It has been made very clear in the England series that India does not hold the ‘spin-advantage’ anymore. We were trashed by a team like England, who by cricket standards of today are ‘mediocre’ at the best of talent. These apart, factors such as academy-oriented selection, not scouting for talent, overseeing fitness issues have made teams such as Pakistan, with no real batting depth, a threat to our team.
Investing and re-investing in our comfort zones, shying away from our obvious weaknesses, having a non-inward looking and insular approach to home series, unmindful of a consequent adverse impact it is having on the Indian team’s future, have collectively contributed to our failure at home.
Clearly, we need to look beyond. We need to scout for real talent, we need to build green pitches which will help our bowlers perform better overseas. We need to invest in real all-rounders and should stop looking for bowlers who can’t bat or field. We need to address something rotten in the heart of our systems, or we will consistently fail in the future.
Will team India strike-down competition this time ‘in its face’? I really don’t think so. One of the twitterati had remarked “the clock for Team India has started ticking”, I think he is wrong! It had started ticking a long while ago!