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Cricket lessons from South Africa

The disappointing end to the Indian cricket team's tour of South Africa was an outcome of flawed decision-making, poor tactics, and a defensive mindset when it came to the endgame. On an India-friendly pitch that a curator in Kanpur or Ahmedabad would have been proud of, Rahul Dravid's men dominated the match for three full days and more. But when the prize seemed within grasp, on the fourth afternoon, the visiting team shied away, as if afraid of a famous first, a series win in South Africa. The defensive mentality — exemplified by the rut that Sachin Tendulkar (69 deliveries for his 14) got his team into in the second innings after a winning platform had been constructed — was quite inexplicable. On the other side, the home team displayed impressive tactical flexibility and courage in the face of adversity. The contrast in mental approach between the aggressive Smith-Pollock partnership and the stagnant Tendulkar-Dravid pairing proved, in the end, to be the qualitative difference between the two teams.

There were, of course, some bright features amidst the gloom of the series loss. Rarely has India travelled overseas with a bowling attack capable of destroying the opposition's batting. It unearthed a man for that task in Sreesanth (18 wickets at 21.94), who forged a fine pace alliance with a resurgent Zaheer Khan. The young man from Kerala showed the kind of disciplined aggression that pays on the big stage, a quality Team India displayed in good measure under Sourav Ganguly not long ago. For Ganguly himself, the tour marked a creditable comeback while young Dinesh Karthik displayed impressive character and skills both behind the stumps and in front. Surely, it would be hard to leave him out of the reckoning in India's Test eleven. If the chief lesson for Team India was the need to discard the defensive mindset, the International Cricket Council urgently needs to address the issue of declining umpiring standards. The quality of officiating in the Castle Test series was decidedly unsatisfactory, even though it must not be allowed to become an excuse for India's series loss. In a sense, it was just as well that Team India managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in South Africa. Victory might have helped paper over the serious weaknesses of Indian cricket, notably the decline in the top order batting (once, arguably, the best in the world) and a strange loss of team management confidence in spin, evidenced by the otherwise inexplicable preference of an out-of-sorts Munaf Patel to Harbhajan Singh at Newlands. The time to tackle these serious weaknesses is now and neither reputation nor seniority should be allowed to come in the way.

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