Round the World

Fixing India's batting order

A kind of planned progress, a gradual fitting together of the parts, has led to a visible improvement in the playing standard of the Indian Test team since 2002



Sourav Ganguly is at the top of his game at the top of the order - and perhaps that is where he can serve India best © AFP
A kind of planned progress, a gradual fitting together of the parts, has led to a visible improvement in the playing standard of the Indian Test team since 2002. To a stable core of four solid middle-order batsmen, two world-class spinners, and a couple of good seamers, Sourav Ganguly and John Wright have added a middle-order batsman who was persuaded to bat at the top of the innings and has succeeded spectacularly (Virender Sehwag), another competent and secure opener of a more traditional kind (Aakash Chopra) who is now himself under threat from another middle-order player ready and willing to open (Yuvraj Singh), a good young wicketkeeper who now also looks the part at No. 7 (Parthiv Patel), and two young seamers in Irfan Pathan and Lakshmipathy Balaji.
Competition for places in the Test side is stiff - a player like Zaheer Khan, the spearhead of the bowling attack last August, is today no longer assured of a place in the side even when fully fit. Looking at the Test side, it is easy to tell that it can extend even on its considerable achievements of 2003-04.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the Indian one-day side, which underperformed all of last season, and has given no cause for optimism thus far in the new season. This is curious, for the one-day side also features a stable core of players (particularly the batting order) and a consistent strategy (seven specialist batsmen and four bowlers, with Rahul Dravid keeping wicket) going back to the tour of West Indies in 2002. Yet, looking at the one-day team's record over the last two years, it is difficult not to entertain the suspicion that the side may have peaked in the period between July 2002 and March 2003, when it won the NatWest Series in England, was joint winner of the Champions Trophy, and made the World Cup final.
The statistics certainly point to a decline: between May 1, 2002 and April 30, 2003, India won 27 matches and lost 14, but from May 1, 2003 to the current date, they have won 12 and lost 13. The win-loss ratio in the first period under consideration was 1.92; for the second period that is down a full point, to 0.92. No team can afford to dismiss such a drop in performance as just another of those things, or attribute it to the glorious uncertainty of one-day cricket.
There may, of course, be a number of explanations for this, but here is one. The one-day team is too stable, especially in the way it organises its (not inconsiderable) resources, and needs a little shaking-up to function effectively again. Since 2002 only two areas in the team have really been the subject of competition: the No. 3 slot, where VVS Laxman finally appears to have beaten off the challenge of Dinesh Mongia, and the fast-bowlers' places, where Pathan and Balaji have emerged to challenge Zaheer, Ashish Nehra and Ajit Agarkar.
The area of greatest concern in recent times has been the batting order - and it is batsmen who win matches in one-day cricket, though bowlers can make this easier or more difficult. The seven batsmen are just not producing enough runs between them, or functioning as efficiently in partnership as they have in the past. A couple of problems are readily identifiable.
Ganguly, whose record suggests that he is the second-best one-day batsman India have ever had, does not appear to have found his niche after ceding the opener's slot to Sachin Tendulkar, and is not taking the same toll on bowlers as he did in the past. Also, players are traditionally thrust into positions of more responsibility as they mature, but the team's most experienced batsmen continue to take the top five places in the batting order, leaving Yuvraj Singh and Mohammad Kaif to keep up the difficult task of batting at six and seven. Clearly, if such a configuration was in the best interests of the team two years ago, it has now calcified and is in need of reworking.
So Tendulkar's absence through injury for the NatWest Challenge, while undesired, may paradoxically aid the Indian team's cause by forcing a reshuffle that has been somewhat overdue. Ganguly can return to his preferred role as opener, and should he make runs there he will succeed in reopening the issue of whether that place should be rightfully his. And the Indian team management could take the adventurous step of summoning, as a replacement in the squad for Tendulkar, the dashing wicketkeeper-batsman Mahendra Dhoni, whose blazing strokeplay against Pakistan A in a recent tournament in Kenya suggested that he is actually good enough to play for India on the strength of his batting alone.
Dhoni is potentially both an alternative to Mohammad Kaif, who has had a lean trot of late at No. 7 (though in fairness to him it is a very hard job), and also perhaps the player to whom Dravid will finally (and gratefully) relinquish the keeper's gloves. When Tendulkar does return, it could well be as part of a new scheme of things, which would actually be very much like an old scheme of things: he batted in the middle order for much of the successful season of 2002, and it could be argued that the anchoring role he currently plays as an opening batsman privileges his interests ahead of the team's.
This Indian side just has too many good players to be winning only half the matches they play. Some innovative thinking and hard decisions in the past turned it from an average side to one that was a real force to reckon with, but at the moment, even though the players have just come off a long break, there is something jaded and dreary about their cricket that suggests the players have got stuck in a groove. A little tinkering may be all that is required to kick-start a return to prosperous times.
Chandrahas Choudhury is staff writer of Wisden Asia Cricket magazine.