Sunday Snippets
By Venkatesh Raghavan
As the current World Cup Test culminated into a placid win for New Zealand despite almost two days of play getting washed out in their encounter with India in the final, congratulatory messages poured in for the Kiwi team from cricketing nations all over the world. Cricketing greats Viv Richards and Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar were also among those who took to the Twitter handle to congratulate the blackcaps.
The outcome being that New Zealand won the match by eight wickets was hailed by many veteran cricket personalities as a well-deserved win. Legendary former Indian opener Sunil Gavaskar however, preferred to focus on how the Indian team should boldly experiment with the choice of their opening pair in the forthcoming 5 match Test series on English soil. He suggested that Mayank Agarwal be given a chance along with Shubham Gill and felt Rohit Sharma can be rested for a while before a clear picture emerges on the best opening pair for our country.
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As the blackcaps are out to celebrate their well-deserved win in the World Cup final, it would be good for the Indian players to take their upcoming practice matches ahead of the Test series in England seriously. For one thing, performance of the Indian Test side in seaming English conditions has for a long time been inconsistent, if examined over the decades. Having won a 3-Test series 1-0 in 1971, in their next English tour, they were trounced 3-0 under the captaincy of Ajit Wadekar. Much later, under the captaincy of Srinivas Venkataraghavan, they witnessed a patch of purple, when Sunny Gavaskar scored an epic 221 to bring the Indian team close to victory on English soil. India however, lost the series and continued losing in English conditions till all rounder Kapil Dev managed to help the team score a narrow 1-0 victory.
As was the case with one-day internationals, so is it with the Test format of cricket with the finals between the teams playing out in England. Indians’ show on English soil when it comes to one-day cricket too has exhibited the same inconsistency. In the first World Cup in 1975, India managed to defeat East Africa by a margin of 10 wickets. They lost by a mile in their other two encounters, including their match with England. In the 1979 World Cup, they lost all the matches they played. It was in 1983, they achieved the first flash in their pan by defeating the mighty West Indies. Subsequently too, when the World Cup was conducted in England in the late nineties, their performance was below par.
In wake of this, Sunny Gavaskar’s advice on choice of openers assumes significance. This is so because, for the most part of Gavaskar’s tenure in Indian cricket, his opening partnership with partners ranging from Farokh Engineer, Anshuman Gaikwad, Chetan Chauhan and finally Krishnamachari Srikanth accounted for the bulk of the score piled by the Indian team. After the departure of Sunny, the Indian team had quite a few batting collapses till the arrival of Sachin Tendulkar and other batting greats like the wall, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman. The current Indian team is much stronger and stable compared to previous ones that had to be content with flashes in the pan.
Consequently, the expectations from the team runs high as was the case after India won the World Cup final way back in 1983. While expectations running high might serve well for the enthusiasts of the game, it’s crucial for the Indian eleven to retain their winning ways in recent times.
