The expected and the unexpected

Come the first test of a series featuring India, and one can expect a reasonably incompetent performance, possibly culminating in a heavy defeat. The Galle test, therefore, is not much of an aberration, but rather, just another data point that further clarifies and establishes the claim that Team India is very consistent with its inconsistency. Things will be better in the second test, I'm sure (or maybe I'm not - is such certainty justified with such an inconsistent outfit?)

What is an aberration, however, is that a test bowler is retiring with 800 wickets to his name. To be honest, I haven't still quite wrapped my head around that number. 300 wickets used to be a lot and then it got to 400. From that point on, the wicket-taking record became an increasingly fantastic number. 500? 600? 700? These numbers simply boggled the mind. Murali has gone one further, and staked out a point that is going to be very hard to get to for any bowler that follows him. Besides the usual worries about injuries, form, getting "found-out", will bowlers of the future even play enough test cricket?

The team and the individual - getting the balance right

Quick straw-poll: how many folks watching the Gwalior ODI yelled at the television sets (or at the monitor) when Dhoni took a single off the last ball of the 48th and 49th overs? (I presume people were a little louder when he did it in the 49th over).

Well, I did. Because like everyone else, I had forgotten about the match underway, and the fact that it was being played by two teams, and had become fixated on the achievements of one man. Fair enough to a point; world records do tend to obsess us and the man occupying centerstage was not just any player but arguably the greatest batsman of his generation.

But later, when I had calmed down a bit and put the rampaging schoolboy in me to bed, I thought a bit more about my reaction. What exactly, had I wanted Dhoni to do? And I don't just mean the bit about the single, for I had wanted him to turn the strike over to Tendulkar as quickly as possible.

But why on earth should Dhoni have done that? The team needed one thing at that moment, and one thing alone: as many runs as possible on the board. There is not point in saying, "We already had 350 runs plus on the board". This is a modern ODI and such scores are not unattainable.

Dhoni could have turned the strike over to Tendulkar, yes, and then perhaps, gone back to his hitting ways. But why let that consideration arise? In a team-sport, if a team is to truly rise to champion level, it must, find a way to somehow subjugate the individual (and I don't mean that in any offensive sense whatsoever) to the team's needs.

I agree that a happy team is made up of those folks who think the collective takes care of their individual aspirations; hence the attention paid to individual landmarks when timing declarations. But the cleverest declarations run these two together ("We need some quick runs, go on get your ton, I can give you another 10 overs before we call it off").

And Dhoni, canny man that he is, knew he could balance the two. I don't doubt he would have taken a single quicker had Tendulkar been on 195. His swinging for the fences added runs aplenty and even the singles that he took on the last balls of those overs only came about because his shots didn't. He wasn't trying to keep the strike, he just kept playing the shots as he could manage them, all the while knowing that Tendulkar was tiring, and couldn't play the big run-producing shots any more.

All that was needed was a single, and he knew Tendulkar would need two balls at most. When the time came, he turned down the chance for a second run and let us all (including Tendulkar) a sigh of relief.

Sachin's double-ton; how utterly expected

Craigslist, this is for you :) A post on Sachin breaching the 200 barrier is up at Different Strokes.