It takes substance to succeed

Sujata Prakash

If only someone could explain how the Indians lost the second Test! There is an art in losing a game after winning the first one handsomely. Especially with everything going their way. The pitch was supposed to be a belter and climatic conditions were not hostile. No key player was injured and the team was not suffering from the hangover of terrible defeats. Rather, it was the reverse. They were on a high.

Perhaps the operative word here is 'defeat'. The Indians need to lose before they can win. No doubt if there had been a third Test (which is more civilized than having just two) the shaken Indians would have gone in with a determined gleam in their eyes and won it without much fuss. And then the whole cycle would have been repeated.

Alistair Campbell had stated that it's a well-known fact world wide that when the Indians are on a roll it's very hard to stop them. What he didn't add, but must have banked on, is that they are rarely on a roll twice in a row. And thrice is as rare as the Kohinoor. It's a slight exaggeration to put it like that, but no other team can boast of such mercurial moods, not even Pakistan.

The saddest part is knowing that the Indian team is as good, if not better than the Pakistan and Australia ones. Yet the real contests are being waged in England. Even a truncated, weakened English team mustered up enough resistance to give the clearly superior opposition some very close matches.

Just imagine if they had had the talent of our top five batsmen at their command. The results might have been very different. Or would they, given that Steve Waugh can stay cool till the third ball of the last over and time the win to perfection, and Waqar Younis can take seven wickets in a match dubbed as meaningless, since Pakistan were through to the final anyway.

It seems churlish to blame Ganguly for the loss -- he was not the only one to fail with the bat -- but had Waugh been standing in for him he would have somehow convinced his men to not throw it away like that. And had Waqar been the chosen one, and found himself defending a modest total, he would have somehow got those figures of 7 for 36 from somewhere. Yes, they might still have lost the Test, but the odds on that happening, in Zimbabwe, under present conditions, would have been very, very long.

None of this should take away the credit from Heath Streak, who exhibited the very same qualities mentioned above. In the end it all boils down to finding your own substance on the day.

John Wright must try to help his team find this substance they never seem to retain long enough to make it part of their psyche. What is it that prompts Dravid to play carelessly at the last delivery of the day, or Sachin to get out when he could have easily stayed on, or Ganguly to fail to find form yet again? The Indians are physically fitter but playing abroad still challenges their mental strength. And complacency has not stopped dogging their steps either.

It is a pity because this team can be on a roll more than just twice in a row; it can roll right up to the World Cup if it wants to. If only it could learn that many a times snatching a win is only a little harder than losing.