Press 'P' for panic

It is lonely at the top for only those who crave the refuge of mediocrity. As the paint of the embarrassing whitewash still dries over a humiliated and humbled Indian Test team, you’d think this former world number one team belongs to that category. For Test match cricket, which is much like the fine art of oration and debate where you need carefully prepared arguments and well chiselled perspectives, the BCCI has prepared as if for an extempore speaking event. And in a tour where Mr Murphy and his law have had a field day with India ever since Zaheer Khan pulled his hamstring at Lord’s, almost every flaw in the plan (or the relative absence of one) has been exposed. Like a cathartic bad day at work, it might not be such a bad thing. The result means India slip to no. 3 in world rankings, still above Australia who just started their rebuilding process as the Argus report (the Ashes debacle postmortem, if you will) and its recommendations have been made public.

The fall from the perch raises the immediate question – what’s the way back? The magnitude and margins of victories for the home side in the series raises another question – granted, England were bloody good, but just how bad were India? And finally, the resigned attitude and the lack of fight that Indian fans have had to endure over four painful Test matches raises the most key question of them all – does the BCCI, the players or even the skipper care anymore?
The way back to the top is going to be arduous, what with England looking balanced and hungry as they ever have been and a proud South Africa unwilling to rest before they scale the peak while a steely Australia quietly rebuilds. India’s immediate attention needs to be focused on reinforcements and replacements. Back in 2006, when England were whitewashed in the Ashes down under, it had resulted in the Schofield report. And much of the professionalism and ruthless precision seen in the side today is a direct or indirect result of recommendations of that report. In a country where a mass revolution is required to focus the government into passing an anti-corruption law, a transparent postmortem into a mortifying Test series defeat looks unlikely.

As for the point about England being good, and us being superbad, the underpreparedness of our reinforcements, be it a Suresh Raina whose Test career may soon hit a limbo or an R P Singh plucked out of nowhere as a replacement for Zaheer tells the story. You may say a similarly unspectacular Madan Lal was picked out of the blue in 1986 after a mini epidemic of injuries and promptly took three wickets in a winning effort. But then, those were the days before life was complicated by such three letter acronyms as the DRS or the IPL. Former cricketer Nikhil Chopra has this suggestion, "It is very important that we don’t only think about these 15 players for India, but also about the other 15 guys, who might play for India in the future, so exposure should be given to them on a rotational basis and they have to get these guys ready. Let’s say you have 15 players playing for India, then the next five, like one opening batsman, one middle order batsman and one spinner and two medium fast bowlers should be prepared. These guys should be (available as) ready replacements with the National Cricket Academy."

The biggest disappointment of the series though has been India’s attitude. Former cricketer and current MP Kirti Azad, tells TSI, "Players have no passion to fight for the name of the country, or in being the no. 1 team in the world." Even in the final Test, where there was a glimmer of hope of valiantly saving the game, the batsmen following Tendulkar and Mishra committed hara-kiri when heroism was the need of the hour. Sehwag’s cavalier king pair at Edgbaston epitomised the listlessness of the batting, almost cutoff from reality (with the honourable exception of Dravid, of course). The bowling attack has been bullied in the manner a school bully might ask a young kid for his lollipop, have it and then throw the stick back at him just to mock a little more. While commentating, Saurav Ganguly on numerous occasions expressed surprise at how India had been playing, repeating, ‘I have never seen India like this’. For all of Dhoni’s Zen-like calm, what is indeed surprising is that was there never a rallying cry inside the dressing room? Or the captains steely exterior only shielded a wilted and fatigued spirit underneath.

In Rome, when the lions were released amidst the gladiators, they went berserk because they were hungry. Now imagine asking the lion to do this thrice a day, six days a week. That’s how the bowling attack must have felt. The English gladiators, fresh and ready for battle, were more than obliging to ground them to dust.

Granted some large strokes of luck went against India (even in the last Test, Gambhir’s injury was both unfortunate and unsettling), but even when India did catch a break, they never capitalised. India looked good or in control in only about three of the 50 odd sessions of cricket throughout the series and those are not very good odds even at the roulette table. As Nikhil Chopra says, "It’s more to do with under preparedness; it has nothing to do with bad luck.  (In cricket) preparing yourself  would help one make their own luck."

Soul and scapegoat searching is but naturally to follow this debacle. But careful consideration must be given to the plan of action from here. What would be the blueprint for the future? To paraphrase The Rembrandts “…when it’s not been your session, your day, your test, or even your year..who’ll be there for you? Like they’ve been there before… who’ll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour?” The last India featured in a whitewash was in Australia in 1999-2000. What followed was a decade of achievement. "We all have to put our heads together and plan for the future," Kris Srikkanth told a leading newspaper. The only hope is that the noise India’s selector is making isn’t all white – the current colour in vogue.