Pop goes the champagne.
Prem Panicker
The delicious irony of India winning the last ever CB Series and keeping permanent hold on the trophy will not be lost on a few.
On Andrew Symonds, who has made much of how India, as a country, celebrated its T10 triumph, suggested it was way over the top, and suggested too that when push came to shove, India would find that ODIs against the world champions were a totally different cup of tea. India did find out, but not the way he meant it.
On Ricky Ponting, who suggested that the loss in the final league game against Sri Lanka was just one of those days, and prophesied that a third final wouldn’t be required. It wasn’t, but not the way he meant it.
On Tim Nielsen who, with his team in the finals ahead of schedule and sighing for fresh worlds to conquer, suggested that India should stop worrying about Australia’s gamesmanship, real or imagined, and concentrate on its own game instead. India did, with effects Nielsen did not anticipate – while his own team went on to lose three straights. Lesson one: getting to the final does not mean winning the final; it just means the work is actually ahead of you.
On the Australian team, which was so focused on its time honored strategy of ‘disintegrating’ chosen members of the opposition that it forgot the prime purpose of playing: to get across the finish line ahead of the other bloke. In more than one media outlet in recent days, there has been the suggestion that the captain and the team was wearying a bit of all the controversy – how delicious, to think that for the second time (the first was at home, when Steve Waugh and his men cut loose in a bid to conquer the Last Frontier, and found themselves outplayed at that same game by Sourav Ganguly and his team), the Aussies find their own tactics backfiring to their cost.
At the end of the T20 series, Ricky Ponting suggested that his team was guilty of not taking the format too seriously, of not giving it enough respect. Ironically, the same was equally true of these ODIs – apparently the only game plan the Aussies had was to come out swinging and keep swinging – with the result that they went down swinging. How strange, that it was the young Indian team that sussed out the right way to play in a series dominated by low to middling scores – keep wickets in tact at the start, and look to consolidate, even accelerate if possible, towards the end. Against that, the Australian tactic was to try and finish the game off as a contest inside the first 15 overs – with the result that time and again, during that period, it was two, three or more wickets down and in deepest doo-doo.
Australia, to repeat a point already made, was not so much on winning games as on proving points, leaving their mark on select members of the opposition. Harbhajan Singh has been the main stalking horse (and while on that, he deserves enormous credit, not only for drawing the collective fire and managing to withstand it, but to come back and play a stellar role when it mattered most), and the off spinner will love that he ended up with the wicket of Symonds in both finals, Hayden in one, and a joint effort to dismiss the burly opener in the other. Similarly, the Aussies apparently could not take the sight – and slight – of Pravin Kumar, with his bewildered smile and gentle medium pace, knocking them over at Sydney, so of course today he just had to go, even if that meant Gilchrist had a waft outside his off stump, Ponting parodied a pull and his successor in waiting Michael Clarke played another. Such targeting has worked in the past (ask Zaheer Khan, who tends to lose the plot when confronted by the Aussie openers), but failed this time against youngsters who had no memories, no baggage, and hence no fear.
It wasn’t all bad – the Australian bowling was almost uniformly superb; the fielding oftentimes out of this world. In the former, Nathan Bracken and Brett Lee were the cynosure – Bracken steady as you like and always on target; Lee fast, furious, and almost unstoppable, all of that with the gentlest of smiles and a total absence of lip. On the fielding side, the team performed as one, but if you had to pick one player who was most inspirational on the field it had to be Andrew Symonds – uncanny anticipation, the agility of a – monkey, I almost said in all innocence, but in these fraught times, I’ll revise and just say, blob of mercury, and a positional sense that made you wonder if he had somehow smuggled a mini radar onto the ground under those dreadlocks of his.
For India, the storylines were almost entirely to the good. Sachin Tendulkar, universally pilloried (and questioned by, among others, yours truly) for “not delivering when it mattered”, delivered when it mattered – an unbeaten century that saw India home in a tough chase, followed by an immaculate 91 batting first.
Dhoni picked team with a finely honed strategic awareness (and an equal unconcern for the second-guessers in the media and the records and reputations of those he had to bench or, in the pre-series selection meeting, speak against), led with vision and courage, and showed in his bowling changes and field positions, as also in his choice of when to attack or defend, that he was his own man, unwilling to follow the time honored templates of the past.
Various batsmen took turns to put their hands up; the bowlers for once bowled as a unit with very few off days and certainly none that saw more than one bowler under the hammer. But the storyline here that I found most fascinating was how, each time a lead bowler was knocked out, an unheralded alternative took up the responsibility. It all started with Zaheer Khan’s injury – a potentially crippling blow to the team’s prospects, but India weathered that and went on to a 1-2 series result in the Tests, a result universally admitted to having flattered Australia.
In the one dayers, just when you were wondering where the next strike bowler was coming from after Munaf Patel turned in an indifferent performance, Ishant Sharma smiled his way to a man of the match; when Ishant got injured just when India could have least afforded it, Pravin Kumar teased his way to an award winning performance in his turn.
India has won ODIs, even series, in the recent past, but always such wins have raised more questions than answers. For once, that is not the case – the toughest tour in recent memory is over, the team is in fine shape, and if the BCCI could now spend some time and energy on players benched with some injury or other, assisting in their recovery and rehabilitation, India could actually be looking at previously unimagined cricketing riches – and for once, you can use the word ‘riches’ without dollar signs on either side of the word.
Celebrate – and while you do, leave comments behind: your thoughts on how the series went, your picks of the best moments, your views on where the team goes from here. This win is an opportunity—for the selectors, the captain, the players, the team; how do we ensure that opportunity is built on, not frittered away as so often in the past?
AuthorTopic: Ind vs Aus CB Series 2nd final.. Pre/post-Match discussion and match thread (Read 9930 times)
