India win toss, South Africa take the advantage

Most international cricket teams specialise in one aspect or the other of the game - Sri Lanka, for instance, makes a speciality of the blazing starts, South Africa of its fielding...

India, for its part, has patented its own speciality - namely, an ability to throw away advantages with effortless ease.

Time after time, the side finds the dice running in its favour and, with a prodigality that gives the lie to rational pre-match analysis and a regularity that has its legion of fans tearing their hair out, manages to put itself behind the eight ball.

And so it was, again, at Kanpur on the first day of the third and final Test in the McDowell series on Sunday. Having won the toss on which no sane skipper will deliberately chose to bat last, having put together its best opening partnership of the series thus far, having in fact found itself on a comfortable 160 for three at one stage, India at stumps found itself struggling on 204/6.

Here is how it all happened...

The wicket, prepared at the behest of the home side, is hard on the surface, with a soft underbelly - indicative of much watering, and very little rolling.

A mosaic of cracks on day one, coupled with the softness of the subsoil, indicates that the wicket will crumble further as play progresses in this game, aiding the spinners to a considerable extent. And this factor will be compounded by the fact that there is little, if any, bounce in the wicket - which means that batsmen will be looking to play fast bowling off their bootstraps.

Predictably, India went into the game with two changes - W V Raman coming in as opener at the expense of V V S Laxman, and off spinner Aashish Kapoor taking over from the ineffective Narendra Hirwani.

For South Africa, there was just one change - Fanie De Villiers, dropped from the squad at Calcutta, coming back in place of the injured Allan Donald. One would have thought that given the nature of the surface, the SA think tank might have preferred to rest Brian McMillan, playing Lance Klusener in the all-rounder's slot and supplementing the spin attack with Nicky Boje, but then again the SA management must have reckoned on beefing up its batting strength with McMillan, who ran into form during the three day game against the India A outfit immediately before this game.

In any event, the toss was always going to be crucial here - and Hansie Cronje, much to his obvious disappointment, called wrong.

One other factor merits mention here - given the nature of the wicket, there was always going to be a lot of close shouts for LBW. The BCCI for once got its thinking cap on straight when it nominated, as umpires for the game, S Venkatraghavan of India and David Shepherd of England - easily the two most respected adjudicators in the game today.

A career-graph of nine Tests played over seven different series, the last of them coming four years ago, does not seem to jell with chief Indian selector Ramakant Desai's assessment of W V Raman as a "genuine opener".

But give the Tamil Nadu southpaw his due - having started out in domestic cricket as a spinner who could bat a bit, he has progressed in time to the opener's slot and, during his four-year layoff from international cricket, worked on his batting technique to such an extent that on Sunday, he had people wondering why he wasn't picked earlier.

Raman took all of 27 deliveries to get off the mark - partly because the bowlers, Fanie De Villiers and Lance Klusener, misdirected their attack to wide of the stumps, and partly because the batsman himself seemed content to just push the ball away and take his time to get set. But from the time he played his first scoring stroke - an exquisite off drive for four off Klusener - the left-handed opener was all grace and timing. Stroking on the front foot and, in the manner of classy left-handers everywhere, driving through the off with silken touch, Raman was so much in control that his fourth Test 50, when it came, had as many as 11 boundaries- including two clinical pulls when first Klusener, then MacMillan attempted to bounce him on a wicket where the ball failed to get up over waist high.

Nayan Mongia opened again - rather surprisingly, for one would have thought that with just over a fortnight to go for the start of the South African leg of the tour, India would have looked instead to settle the confusion at the top of the order. Rahul Dravid had looked in calm command when he opened at Calcutta, and the sensible ploy would have been to give him one more outing at the top - if he settles into the role, then India will have its technically most competent batsman opening on South African wickets against the likes of Donald, Shaun Pollock and Craig Mathews.

In the event, however, the experiment continued. And on a wicket where the ball did not rise or move off the seam to any alarming degree, Nayan Mongia used his preferred technique of working the ball of his hips to good advantage to keep pace with Raman and take the score along to 76 before playing all over a yorker-length delivery from Brian McMillan (Nayan Mongia bowled McMillan 41 (96 balls, five fours), the first wicket falling immediately after lunch.

Saurav Ganguly, coming in at number three, looked uneasy to start with. But after a spell of scratching around and reaching for deliveries outside off that he would, when in better touch, have put away through the covers, the Bengal southpaw regained his touch with a series of elegant off and cover drives that mirrored those played by Raman at the other end - speaking of which, when was the last time you remember two left-handers batting together at the top of the Indian order?

Raman, who celebrated his 50 with another flowing coverdrive off McMillan, perished to that bowler when, owing perhaps to a momentary lapse in concentration, he drove at a drifting delivery outside his off stump with front foot nowhere in line, to give second slip Klusener an easy overhead catch. (W V Raman caught Klusener bowled McMillan 57, 124 balls and 12 fours). The second wicket fell at 111.

In at number four came Sachin Tendulkar - and right from the determined forward defensive push he played off the first ball he faced, one thing was apparent. The Indian skipper, realising that he has been going through an overlong run of low scores, was determined to stay out there for as long as necessary, and concentrate on getting wood on ball, in an attempt to play himself back into form.

Sound thinking, for with the SA tour coming up, India will need its best batsman in top form. And when Tendulkar had painfully inched his score up to 10, he added to his growing collection yet another world record, beating by almost a year Javed Miandad's record for the youngest player to complete 3,000 Test runs.

Ganguly, meanwhile, was moving smoothly along until Hansie Cronje, coming on himself after the tea-break, straightened one up with the arm to trap the batsman in front of the wicket as he looked to play to leg. Saurav Ganguly lbw Cronje 39 off 81 balls with seven fours. That wicket fell with the score at 160, in the third over after tea - and at that stage, with Tendulkar and Dravid coming together at the crease and Azhar to follow, it appeared that India would have little difficulty in putting up a total upwards of the 350 mark.

What followed can only be described as sheer madness - in the next 16 overs, the two Indian batsmen managed to score a total of just 14 runs.

The bowling in this phase was not of an incandescent brilliance. Neither did the fielding raise itself a notch above the level it was on when, in the first two sessions of play, the Indians scored 160 runs with the aid of 24 boundaries. Rather, Sachin Tendulkar choose to stonewall - and Dravid promptly followed suit.

Spare a thought for Rahul Dravid - in course of this series, he has batted at three, four, one, and now he was in at number five. The effect of such constant promotions and demotions in the batting order on the psyche of arguably India's most promising young talent can best be imagined.

It is difficult to say for certain if this impacted adversely on his batting. It is even more difficult to understand why the Indian batsmen, even if they planned to bat with caution till they got set, preferred the dead-bat defensive stroke to the push for singles - at the very least, they would have kept the score ticking over, and rotated the strike, preventing the bowlers from settling into a rhythm.

But the mistake of Calcutta, when India scored 28 runs off 28 overs in the second innings, was repeated here. And as at Calcutta, the South African bowling, which till then had been as good as the conditions and the batting allowed them to be, suddenly began to look totally unplayable.

Understandably so - a bowler who knows that no matter what he served up, the batsman would not go beyond a defensive push is a bowler who can afford to experiment. And Cronje cashed in on this defensiveness by employing as many as four and, on one occasion, five fielders round the bat to Tendulkar and Dravid, India's two best batsmen, when Paul Adams was bowling. Remember that in his first four overs, Adams had gone for 23 runs (he was to concede just seven more runs in eight overs in this spell, in the process taking three wickets) and the extent of India's defensiveness becomes apparent.

And as at Calcutta, the wickets began tumbling. Dravid stuck a defensive pad in the way of Adams' straighter one (Dravid Lbw Adams 7 from 55 balls) to reduce India to 185/4.

Azharuddin has, from his first innings in Calcutta, brought a slight change to his stance. Earlier, he used to take the leg stump guard and bat absolutely side on - in his last three innings, he has preferred to take the middle stump guard, and open his stance a bit. What it means is that he is now able to hit through off with greater fluency, as he showed at Calcutta, and bring more power to his leg side drives. The negative, of course, being that his wrist-play has got somewhat affected - being square on, he now tends to play the ball in front of his body, where earlier the wristwork was picking the ball from off his legs. And inevitably, he departed before he had time to settle down, looking for the wristy flick to leg off Adams and managing only to scoop a return catch to the bowler Azharuddin c&b Adams 5 off nine deliveries), the fifth wicket falling at 193.

In came Sunil Joshi, and yet again gave proof that despite his apparently strong technique, he is a bit weak in the head when it comes to thinking about his batting. Adams bowled a rank long hop, the ball pitching half way down the track and then sitting up and begging to be hit. There was just one fielder in the deep on the leg side - Klusener, backward of square on the line. And Joshi managed to hoik the ball straight down his throat with unerring accuracy, when any shot played finer, squarer or straighter would have got the certain four that was on offer. Joshi caught Klusener bowled Adams 0 off 5 balls, the wicket falling at 193.

At close, Tendulkar was still unconquered on the most laborious 43 runs he has ever made in his life, off an incredible 151 balls. And his vice captain Anil Kumble was batting five off 21 deliveries, and looking as usual determined to hang on in there.

For the South Africans, Fanie De Villiers was the best bowler on view - which makes it inexplicable that after his first spell of seven overs, he was not used at all till after the tea break. Fanie made the ball swing both ways, regularly came up with the reverse swinging yorker, and alone of the SA bowlers looked dangerous - cricketing logic being what it is, he of course went wicketless for his trouble.

As to the rest, Klusener was his usual self, bowling at top pace on a wicket where that was so much wasted energy, and never looking really threatening with either new ball or old; Symcox managed to make the ball turn, as did Adams - but with the ball coming on slow, the Indian batsmen had all the time to read the turn and play with ease. And Brian McMillan, who got two wickets for his trouble, bowled like the proverbial curate's egg - the odd good delivery on the stumps mixed in with a lot of stuff drifting way down the off and leg.

So there we have it, India on 204 for 6 at the end of the first day and now facing a grim, hard struggle to put up enough runs on the board to pressure the SA batting. Funny, isn't it, that Indian batsmen, having defended dourly when there was no need to, have now played themselves into a position where they have to defend grimly because the situation now warrants it?

A lot now depends on Tendulkar. Having played a good 151 deliveries for his 43, the Indian captain will now have to parlay that time at the crease into a big score, with whatever support Messers Kumble, Srinath, Kapoor and Prasad can give him, if India is not to find itself on the losing side again.

Remember, if India is bundled out early on the second morning and South Africa bats with more application than the Indians did and runs up a score around the 350, 400-run mark, then it will be the home side that comes under enormous pressure in the second innings. And all because the Indian batsmen refused to take the runs that were there for the taking...