MUMBAI, 4 April 2008 — After the commendable intensity of battle Down Under, Team India’s performance in the first of the three Tests against South Africa at Chennai was rather casual, to say the least.
The rider that came with the Proteas’ present visit was that it was to be a fight between the two teams for the second spot on the ICC Test ranking. Graeme Smith’s boys appeared quite prepared for it, but not quite so the Indians. The reasons for it were not far to seek.
For one, there were too many felicitation functions on the team’s homecoming. Then the players got headlong involved in ad-shoots and promos of their respective teams in the Indian Premier League (IPL). But what was most inexcusable was the reluctance to overcome fitness problems.
The report of team physio John Gloster, in which he had declared Tendulkar, Harbhajan Singh, R.P. Singh and Anil Kumble below match-fitness was ignored by the selectors. Only M.S. Dhoni, a borderline case, took a stern test and passed fully fit. But the others are reported to have made a mockery of the fitness test and were included in the playing eleven.
R.P. Singh was exposed in the very first over of the match when he ran in ever so gingerly for a pace bowler. He was a passenger throughout. Harbhajan Singh left the field on three occasions on the first day itself and when he came on to bowl, the umpires objected as he had not spent sufficient time on the field. That a main strike bowler should have had to wait to bowl is shocking. Similar was the case with Kumble, who aggravated his sore right shoulder and hardly bowled in the second innings. It must be said to the credit of Harbhajan that he carried on gamely.
Tendulkar must have had probably his poorest Test match at home, being dismissed for a duck and then being reduced to taking no further part in the match with a recurrence of groin problem.
Kumble put all the blame on the deadpan Chepauk pitch for being unable to push for victory. But it was India that threw away the tremendous initiative given them by the fabulous knock played by Virendra Sehwag. The rest of the batsmen were not even up to scratch in run-rate, including Dravid who dawdled on to a laborious century. While Sehwag scored at the rate of 6.54 runs an over, the overall rate of the rest of the batsmen was just 2.8 an over.
It just goes to show how important is Sehwag’s presence in the team. There is no more destructive batsmen in world cricket today than Sehwag. His triple century, off 278 balls, was the fastest in the history of Test cricket. Can you ever think of keeping a batsman like him out of the team?
