ICC World Twenty20: Lessons from Nagpur

NAGPUR: Indians are traditionally known to be good navigators of spin so it was shocking to see how they got caught in the web of a Kiwi trio of Nathan McCullum, Ish Sodhi and Mitchell Santner, the last being not the least.

Come on guys! We are the ones who have always had those delectable wrists. We have those scintillating drives to turners. We are the ones who have been the spin masters. We have the Ashwins and the Jadejas, as we had the Bedis, the Chandrasekhars and the Prasannas We’ve been masters of the Doosras and the Googlys. So how come some remote visitors who know only of pace could beat us in our own game in our own backyard in our own tournament?

It’s a concern, this deteriorating quality of Indian batters in handling a good spin attack. Oh let’s not be modest. It’s a shock that we got completely felled by three lesser known spinners from another land — all nine of our willow wielders being scalped by the alien trio.

Even if you were to ignore the reckless sweep by Shikhar Dhawan to a turning delivery by Nathan McCullum as a one off thingie, how would you explain Rohit Sharma striding out and misjudging Santner so massively that he walked out on leg and got beaten on the offside!

Yes, Kohli went down to a beautiful leg break delivery by Sodhi but isn’t he Kohli-the-best precisely because he has shown the ability to read the ball in a jiffy, that too in situations where his team is struggling? Dhoni said “It is a wake-up call.” For the rest of the nation, it is sleepless nights from now on with the Big 3 looking clueless at home.

It would be great to believe this was a temporary lapse of concentration, an out of the day bad night, something we can stitch back fast. But what Dhoni said after the match robs us of that hope too. He admitted our vulnerability to spin bowling.

“It’s actually difficult to score runs on a spinning wicket than a seaming wicket.… It’s a challenge to score runs on such turning wickets”. Spin tracks, he insisted, were becoming more and more challenging. “In the initial days of cricket, the ball was not turning enough even when Muralitharan was bowling. Stats may say that a batsmen scored a hundred but in the last few (Test) matches in India, we have got difficult pitches where even a 40 was a good score,” he pointed out.

Bouncy, swinging, seaming, green tops are already a nightmare for India. Now even turners at home? Come on!

And really. If Dhoni knew this was the case, why order something the doctor cautioned against?

So, the biggest lesson from Nagpur? Never make a track like that. Why there should be such a raging slow turner for a T20 tournament is a question India must be asking itself again and again. The poor quality of the pitch had earlier come in for a rap by the ICC when 33 wickets of the 40 in the India-South Africa match were taken by spinners.

In this tournament, all suggestions to make it a batting track were so disastrously ignored by the curators that India are now in the tightest corner of the tournament, fallen from being singular favourites of the event to becoming its most vulnerable team.

As Brian Lara observed: “India have a terrific side, they just need to play on good surfaces because their batting is so good. They don’t need to make pitches like this.”

Crazily, all except the Indians saw it coming and Twitter was ablaze with scathing criticism of the track. England all-rounder Ben Stokes saw it as worst than “the astro-turf pitch with cigarette burns on a length at my old school” while Michael Vaughan felt “This has been an exhibition on how not to play spin by the so called best players of spin in the world….only weakness is preparing a pitch like yesterday.”

Finally, it was Gavaskar who nailed it all: “If spinning tracks are the medicine that India are going to use in World Twenty20, they must be ready to tackle it themselves,” he told NDTV.

Source:  The Pioneer, 17 March, 2016