Having won the last Test at Bombay, England will be pretty buoyed as they take on India in seven One-Day Internationals over the next three weeks or so.
To win a Test after the loss of major players due to injury, is truly an achievement to be proud of, for the players that were injured were not fringe players but those who have been a vital part of England’s winning Ashes series as well as successes against other teams in recent years. To lose the captain, vice-captain and the No. 1 strike bowler is never easy to recover from, but under Andrew Flintoff, the team raised the level of their game and put it across an Indian team that had just a few days earlier won the second Test and was thus high on confidence.
The one-day series will be an opportunity to get even for India, and their recent record in the limited overs version has been pretty impressive. Perhaps it’s the one-day effect on the Test team that has not been able to bring itself to play more overs or to bat in a lower gear in trying to save a game. The carefree approach may work in one-dayers, but in the more serious business of Test cricket, it has simply not worked, and so India have either lost series or drawn them and thus undone all the good work earlier in the series or a tour.
The absence of one of the most destructive batsmen in limited-overs cricket, Sachin Tendulkar, will definitely hamper India, for his absence will also mean that a new opener will have to partner Sehwag in the series. Gautam Gambhir gets another crack at establishing himself in the team and he will have only himself to blame if he doesn’t, for more than anything it will be due to lack of temperament. He has all the shots in the book but that often is a problem if the shot-selection itself isn’t good, and that’s where the young man has let himself down in recent times. To press for a place in the team on a regular basis, he will have to score consistently in this series or else he will find that others will be given the opportunity, as the Indians look to get their squad for next year’s World Cup.
The series provides a wonderful chance for the selectors to look at some of the talent that’s done well in the domestic competitions if they decide to remove their blinkers and look at these performers and not keep giving chance after chance to their favorites.
Some players are getting “hicked” as in Graeme Hick, who the then English selectors once even picked as an off-spinner to bat at No. 7, so desperate were they for him to somehow succeed and prove to be “the great white hope” that he was tom-tommed as. That Hick never quite lived up to that hope inspite of several chances is now an established fact of cricket history and hopefully that won’t be the case with some of the Indians in this squad.
England seem to have flowered well under Andrew Flintoff and his easy, laidback style has given the players enough room to play in their own way, yet make a significant contribution to the team’s success. Of course, its early days yet and nobody in his right mind will suggest that he get the job on a permanent basis, but if one goes by the ringing endorsements of the premier bowlers of how wisely and thoughtfully he used them, then he is not too far away from getting it on his own.
Kevin Pietersen also will be looking to make up for not getting a century in the Test series inspite of getting set and then throwing it away. On the last trip, England came back well to level the one-day series, so they know that India can be put under pressure and they have also seen that at least in Tests they crack under that strain. Still, India’s recent outings suggest it won’t be easy for the visitors, who will have to stop counting the days to return home and focus totally on the game if they want to win the series.
