India’s World Test Championship final against New Zealand does not start before 18 June but netizens’ loud thinking, or enthusiastic solicitude, seems already to be hinting at an eventual cornucopia in cyberspace of which the team will have been aware, profitably or not, well ahead of D-Day. One of the conclusions arrived at by some fans is that India must bolster their batting to the uttermost point, given that the in-England averages of some of their first-choice batsmen are not a throwback to Bradmanesque plentitude.
Secondly, should this adjustment call for their bowling’s numerical diminution – essentially one spinner rather than two ~ then so be it. We must bat deep is the central idea, given India’s ego-deflating defeat by New Zealand earlier in the competition. That was an away series in which India’s performance was stupefyingly underwhelming.
A repetition of it – fundamentally a collective failure to stand up to the threat of the new ball ~ will doubtless reduce India to also-rans in the forthcoming contest. If your front-rank batsmen are all at sea, groping and stumbling, as New Zealanders make the ball wobble and wickets begin to fall as frequently as raindrops in the Indian monsoon, a big, late-order partnership that magically turns the tide had better not be banked on.
The Mr Micawbar variety of optimism is not for practical life, or that might at least be a contradictory argument. Cricket’s history may be replete with episodes that reinforce the general belief that truth is stranger than fiction but a reliance on a providentially contrived last-chapter wish-fulfilment, as in a made-inMumbai pot-boiler, cannot be the game plan of a team going into the WTC final.
To say that is not to mean that we had better stay at home while the cricket board collects refunds on the tickets to Southampton but to make the simple point that if our boys have been good enough to defeat Australia in two successive away series, they do have what it takes, at least as a team. Whatever the quality of the wicket being laid out, dropping a spinner to bung in a batsman cannot fail to convey the message that India are being defensive.
Unless Virat Kohli and his peers find themselves on a greentop indistinguishable from the emerald of the ground, spin had better not be marginalised if only because New Zealand cannot relish coping with turn, aerial geometry and variations in Test cricket. We may in the wake of the sudden and dramatic emergence of an Indian fast bowling battery have tended sometimes to bypass our spinners even though they have been quite eminently useful.
A three-plus-two bowling line-up should perhaps be India’s logical choice on most occasions, with explanations for deviations from it to be deemed mandatory, given the widespread public interest in the matter.