manedge

T he men's Indian cricket team has been used to winning Test matches at home on rank-turners inside three days. They have just been handed-over a reality check by the New Zealand cricket team. Two successive defeats in three days each on different pitches and weather conditions, saw the Indian cricket team succumb to both pace and spin. The top two - skipper Rohit and Virat batted like novices in three of the four innings, trying to let their egos come in between them and the not so celebrated bowlers. New Zealand have not really been a force in Asian conditions. Their two losses to a resurgent Sri Lanka prior to the India series did not suggest what was coming. The star-crossed media had already declared a 3-0 victory margin for India in the series. This could at best be 2-1 or worse 3-0 for New Zealand now, as things stand after the Pune disaster and the Bangalore fiasco. I have been advocating in my previous posts the primacy of domestic cricket for red-ball cricket to survive, ...

For quite some time, I have been arguing in favour of India's top cricketers playing domestic cricket so that the level of competition helps young players coming through the system to mature (refer my previous blog posts). Thanks to IPL and relentless tours after tours throughout the year, India's top cricketers don't go back to domestic cricket, unless they are coming out of injury or have been dropped. IPL has become such a monolith that the BCCI had to face insult as players like Ishan Kishan and Shreyas Iyer chose to ignore its directives and skipped the Ranji Trophy. Of late there has been a trend wherein once players have established themselves in the Indian team, they do not go back to their domestic teams. This trend is of recent vintage, particularly post the star syndrome brought about by IPL. Ishan Kishan is a classic case. He wasn't in the top league except for the absurdly astronomical auction amount that propelled into the limelight. Thus he was able to ge...

The much-awaited, much-delayed debut of Sarfaraz Khan for the Indian Test team finally happened on 15th February 2024 at Rajkot in the third Test against England. For years, cricket aficionados have believed that Sarfaraz is the future of Indian Test cricket team. But a series of events, the most significant one a statement from a BCCI official who declared in June 2023 that Sarfaraz will never play for India, for reasons that seem to no longer exist, kept delaying the inevitable. Sarfaraz Khan emerged as a player with great potential in 2013 when he was first picked for the India under-19 (U-19) team. He debuted for Mumbai in 2014 and played IPL in 2015. In an era when one has to get noticed more in the IPL than other 'domestic' tournaments, Sarfaraz failed to pass the litmus test as he never had a knock of significance or a regular run with the three different franchisees he turned out for. Even though he was one of the three players retained by RCB in IPL-2017, he reportedly...

Sunil Gavaskar, in a post-mortem of the short two-Test series played by India in South Africa, advised the Indian cricket team to play a few first-class practice games on an away tour. By refusing to do so on numerous tours in the last decade or so, the Indian cricket team has invariably lost the first Test and then has to play catch-up.  I am reminded of India's Test tour to Australia in 1977-78, the first series that I followed as a 12-year old. The tour itinerary below gives a glimpse into the number of first-class games that India played before and in between the Tests. India in Australia, 1977/78 South Australia v Indians at Adelaide, 4-6 Nov 1977 Victoria v Indians at Melbourne, 11-14 Nov 1977 New South Wales v Indians at Sydney, 18-21 Nov 1977 Queensland v Indians at Brisbane, 25-27 Nov 1977 1st Test: Australia v India at Brisbane, 2-6 Dec 1977 Western Australia v Indians at Perth, 9-12 Dec 1977 2nd Test: Australia v India at Perth, 16-21 Dec 1977 Tasmania v Indians at Launc...