The Hindu : Sport : India's batting collapse surprising

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 11, 2005

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Sport

India's batting collapse surprising

By Inzamam-ul Haq

Already half way into the series and my theory — "Win the toss, win the match", has held good. In conditions like these, the toss does play a big role, but it hardly guarantees a victory.

For that you have to bat first and put runs on the board — a big total. For, these are all featherbeds where any score can be chased. Also you need to bowl well. The bowlers have been under tremendous pressure in this series as runs have flowed like water in all three games.

The coin fell kindly for me the first time in the one-day series and we were able to make it count.

The early loss of Shahid Afridi was a bit of a setback, but Salman Butt and Shoaib Malik batted sensibly after that and ensured that we had enough wickets in hand to force the pace towards the end.

Our final tally of 319 was a pretty good score, but given the number of wickets we had at out disposal, we should have got another 20 runs or so.

Any score above 300 is difficult to chase because every dot ball hurts the batting side and increases the pressure by a notch.

Butt batted just as he had done during the BCCI Platinum Jubilee match in Kolkata last November. Ideally, he should look to bat out all 50 overs. He almost did that, which is why we found ourselves in the driver's seat.

However, there was a period during the Malik-Butt partnership where they had allowed the innings to drift a bit.

It was the time when Sachin Tendulkar was bowling. The cunning bowler that Sachin is, he was happy to give away 4-5 runs in an over at that stage.

Fifth bowler, rather the lack of it, is India's problem area and we should be looking to take full toll of these 10 overs. This is something we must keep in mind. Yousuf Youhana played a blinder and the others threw their bats around and we finally had enough.

The only way India would have got to that total was by coming at us aggressively.

But Mohammed Sami and Rana Naved-ul-Hasan bowled brilliantly and we quickly had things under control.

I was a bit surprised to see the Indian line-up cave in so easily. It was the first time during this tour, but full credit to Naved. He is a great team-man.

It feels great to pull one back at this stage. Had we lost here, it would have been difficult for me to motivate my players. They are young and at that age both success and failure are difficult to handle.

All said and done, it is lot better to be down 1-2, than 0-3. We now have a realistic chance of winning the series.

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