For India, it's hat-trick time at Bangalore

Prem Panicker

If the Indian cricket team could have its way, it would probably opt to play all its matches at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore.

On Wednesday, the home side registered its third straight win at that venue - a win, moreover, in emphatic style just when it seemed that the odds were totally stacked against them.

The events of the match are too well documented, by now, for me to reiterate them in detail - and that reminds me that it is apology time, again!

We seem, of late, to spend more time apologising than doing cricket coverage - and this is just the latest instance. On the plus side, we are almost certain - fingers tight crossed, here - that this will be the last.

Wednesday's chaos was due to a concatenation of circumstances we could not anticipate. In brief, an attempt to reorient the local computer network at Rediff took longer than we expected, with the result that rewiring work was actually going on when we went live - and this in turn prompted the sudden collapse of the site midway through the game.

With our apologies, comes the news that for the first time, Rediff's cricket coverage is being sponsored. Helping us provide you this service is Hindustan Lever Ltd - and this means, first, that we can continue bringing you this free of charge and secondly, will be in a position, in the very near future, to add more elements to our live coverage and make it truly state of the art.

Meanwhile, back to India's first league game at the Chinnaswamy Stadium against New Zealand, and what follows is an attempt at analysing the outcome.

One of the key points worth noting is the real lack of choice when it came time to pick the playing eleven - Gagan Khoda and Dodda Ganesh were both automatic exclusions, because there was no way India would play three openers or three medium pacers. That left 12 - and the odd one out was Noel David, simply because he had split the webbing of his left hand and that would seriously hamper his fielding.

The pitch and outfield were absolute beauties. The pitch in particular was firm, hard and very true in bounce - in sum, a strokeplayer's dream. Complementing this was an outfield lush and smooth as a billiard table. Once struck, the ball raced along with the velocity of a bullet, and even deep-placed sweepers had the devil's own work trying to cut off shots hit a shade to the left or right of them. Every indication, thus, was of a very high scoring game - the sort of score a team batting first would look at putting up being, on this track, around the 275 range.

Given, then, that New Zealand - powered mainly by man in form Nathan Astle - had raced off to 56/0 in 10 overs, why did the final total fall way short of the optimum?

The best indication of what went wrong is the statistical progression of the Kiwi innings: 58/0 in 10, 81/1 in 15; 130/2 in 25; 144/3 in 30, 160/5 in 35; 172/6 in 40 and 190/7 in 45 before ending up on 220/9 in the allotted fifty overs.

The "choke" is obvious - a mere 91 runs added, for the loss of five wickets, between over numbers 16-40, as opposed to 81 in the first 15, meant that the Kiwis never had the hope of clawing back into the game.

And the most crucial factor, to my mind at least, was crowd support. India was visibly wilting under the initial assault by Astle and Young. And a deadly hush had fallen over the jam-packed stadium, as local hero Venkatesh Prasad and Abey Kuruvilla were dismissed by the Kiwi openers with an ease bordering on contempt.

Then Sunil Joshi came in to bowl - and off his very first over, produced a superb delivery bang on off stump, just short of length, which spun and bounced past Young's bat. An instant later, the crowd opened up - and the noise reached a crescendo when off ball number three, Young got an outer edge off an attempted flick against the turn, to give Kumble a simple catch at midwicket.

From then on, the pressure from the crowd was constant, and tremendous - and the Indian team visibly lifted itself as a result. Suddenly the bowling was incisive, the fielding razor sharp, the players were racing towards each other after every over for discussions and high fives - in short, 11 individuals suddenly became a team again.

And this factor is by any yardstick very, very difficult to discount.

The other key was the stranglehold imposed by Kumble and Joshi, both bowling with rediscovered control and backed by alert fielding. There were no easy runs, not even singles, for the taking - and when Robin Singh replaced Kumble and bowled with discipline and unsuspected economy, keeping the ball bang on middle stump and short of a length and not giving the least margin for strokeplay, the control was total. 14 runs conceeded between overs 25-30; 16 between overs 30-35 and just 12 between overs 35-40 meant that the Kiwi batsmen had to keep taking increasing risks in search of a viable total. The result, regular fall of wickets, and a grossly inadequate total.

On second thoughts, scratch "inadequate" - given the brilliance of the Kiwi fielding and the ability of part-time bowlers like Larsen, Harris and Astle to choke the runs down, even 220 could well have taken some getting.

If India cruised home with 7.3 overs, and eight wickets, in hand, the temptation is to give the credit to yet another outstanding innings from Tendulkar. However, well though Tendulkar played, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that a major portion of the credit should go to his opening partner, Saurav Ganguly.

True, it was Tendulkar who opened the floodgates with a spectacular assault on opening bowler Heath Davis, who went to the tune of 54 runs off just 5 overs - 18 runs coming off just the third over with three fours and a contemptuous pull for six.

True, too, that when Tendulkar is on song, his partner, no matter how well he is playing, fades into the background. But this once, Ganguly matched him not only in strokeplay but in the sheer freedom of his batting, consistently finding the boundaries on both sides of the wicket and keeping the scoreboard rocketing along.

And this marks a crucial difference from some of India's recent outings. The trend has been that when Tendulkar begins blazing, his partner pushes and pokes, working the odd single and permitting more than a reasonable share of dot balls.

This in turn has meant that Tendulkar has had to bat all the harder, to take even more improbable risks and, iin trying to do the work of two, to ultimately perish.

This time, the story was different. The minute Ganguly, after taking a little over four overs to guage the wicket and the bowling, blossomed into strokeplay, Tendulkar visibly eased up on the accelerator, and reduced the element of risk in his strokemaking, and settling down to the kind of long, match-winning innings that has been so lacking in recent times.

The other key factor was running between wickets. I've never quite figured out why, but Saurav Ganguly - not the surest of callers and runners at the best of times - is never hesitant when he is batting with Tendulkar. It could be that he feels confident of Tendulkar's judgement, where he has hesitated, even fatally, when running with the likes of Dravid or Jadeja. It could be that he is on his mettle when batting with his skipper. Whatever, Ganguly has always added a few yards to his footspeed when Tendulkar is at the other end - and here again, it was the way the two took singles that really put pressure on the Kiwi bowling and fielding in the middle.

When Tendulkar (13 fours and two sixes) and Ganguly (8 fours and a six) began hitting the fence, the Kiwi skipper spread his field out to cover the boundaries and try to stem the flow of runs. And suddenly, the two Indian batsmen were pushing the ball around with soft hands and racing through with their strokes, putting the fielding captain in the quandary of not knowing whether to keep the field back, or pull it in. One interesting incident in fact sums up this phase of play - off a Patel over, Tendulkar and Ganguly took three singles in quick succession to mid off standing deep. The fielder was brought in to check the runs - and Ganguly at once danced down to ball four and hit it above mid off, one bounce into the fence.

That was intelligent cricket, and it finally broke the back of the New Zealanders.

To me the result was surprising. I wouldn't have predicted, at the start, that the jaded Indians would have been any match for the match-fit, in-form Kiwi outfit. Even after a good performance in the field, I would have hesitated before suggesting that India would make the grade - chasing has not been among the Indian team's strenghts, the Kiwi fielding is a very strong factor to contend with at any time, and to add to it all, the home side was visibly low on both mental strength and morale.

Then again, India has been predictable only in the sheer unpredictability of its performances - so the Bangalore result was perhaps only too predictable?

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