Selection fack up

[King Tendulkar]

Shocked that we are not playing 6 front line batters plus dhoni and pathan. Total mistake. We need the runs on board. How great if we still had pathan to come in after Dhoni. Also type of track were if Karthick or Jaffer opened they may have got runs. Awful error to play 5 bowlers. To win we needed 500+

[Gambit]

Yeah but thank heavens we won the toss. The only thing left to do now is to get to 350 atleast to put some pressure on OZ. 400 will be a godsend from here.

[King Tendulkar]

We can still get 400+ if Dhoni finally gets a 50 and if taill puts on 50 +. Heck if that happens and Sachin keeps going we could be 450+. But we need 6 propoer batters. Shocking to make pathan open. Would england or sa ask pollock or flintoff to open? Its not fair on pathan or the indian team

[Dhondy]

Agree, dsr. The pitch looks full of runs. Unfortunately, India don't have any gluttons left to feast on it. How on earth anybody can even conceive opening up with a man in a series decider against Australia, that doesn't open routinely even in first class cricket, I'll never know. Irfan down the order, would have been good for a 50 on this wicket. His interests and India's interests sacrificed on the alter of Punjab Police Welfare Association (Pauwa)...as usual. Dhoni will go to the new ball pretty early tomorrow. It'll be a miracle if India cross 350 here.

[talksport]

The biggest cricketing nations in the world against the best batting line ups are playing Brad Hogg and Harbhajan Singh, in a decider of a Test Match.... Puts things in perspective about the Spin Talent available and the roles Warne, Kumble played for their Countries.... P.S. I rate Harbhajan highly in this series and back him to deliver a knock out punch that he is capable of against Aussies. I also feel Kumble did not use him effectively in this series the one critisism I have got against him. Here is hoping for a Test Match win.

[Ram]

I am with the OP and think we should have never gone into Adelaide with 5 specialist bowlers. The pitch is slow, full of runs, 5 bowlers is a bit of a luxury, IMO.

[Dhondy]

I am with the OP and think we should have never gone into Adelaide with 5 specialist bowlers. The pitch is slow' date= full of runs, 5 bowlers is a bit of a luxury, IMO.

Non-sequitor, Sriram. Five bowlers were chosen because batsmen would be hard to dislodge on this road of a pitch. However, the corollary is that your batsmen should be good enough and consistent enough to make up for the one missing. That was never going to happen once Pathan was pushed up the order to face Australia's top guns. So, in effect, India have ended up two batsmen short. Pretty short sighted thinking, I'm afraid. The genesis of this kind of scrambled thinking lies in the Indian selector's boneheadedness in not selecting a genuine third opener to go with Jaffer and Sehwag. With Jaffer's failures, there was a genuine opportunity for another opener to seize the moment, but so low is the team management's faith in makeshift incumbent Kartick, that they couldn't bring themselves to select him. You can see where they are coming from, can't you? Kartick was massively outscored in the Pakistan series by Jaffer. The thinking is, if Jaffer is struggling to get into double figures against this quality of bowling, what chance would Kartick have?

[Anakin]

I think it's an aggressive move, this game is a must win one for India and they've believed in their batsmen. 2-1 or 3-1 doesn't really make much difference.

[Ram]

Doc, you are absolutely right when you the team management's decision to go open with Irfan when Karthik could have been given a chance is indeed a damning reflection of the team's lack of faith in Karthik. Either that, or they were determined to play 5 bowlers. My line of thinking when I said 5 bowlers was a luxury on a flat Adelaide pitch was - " The pitch is so good, the Aussies will score big irrespective of how many bowlers we played. So we must have tried to out-bat in this match, rather than out-bowl them". I think not playing 6 specialist batsman on this wicket could be the difference between a 370 total and a 450+ total and that, could ultimately make all the difference.

[The Outsider]

It was always going to be tough call. I am fine with either decisions actually. Even now, it's not a bad decision to go in with 5 bowlers if we can get to 400-450. The problematic thing is that the 5th bowler is Harbhajan who has looked less effective than even Sehwag and Symonds in the series so far, but if he can pull up a miracle somehow or even dismiss Ponting cheaply twice more, it would have been worth it. My reading of the pitch is that it's not as much of a batting beauty as the one we saw the last time we were at Adelaide or even the one against England last year. The ball is holding up a bit and I distinctly saw some small puffs of dust come out late in the evening yesterday. 450 in the first innings will be a very good score here, IMO.

[Mandrake]

I won't blame the team management,there was hardly any choice. Opening with KKD wouldn't have been much different than opening with Irfan. I do agree with Dhondy on the point that the selectors erred in not going in with an alternative genuine opener. I don't see how we are aiming to be a top test team with a makeshift opener at the top. Should have taken along Chopra in place of Karthik.

[Mr. Wicket]

or even dismiss Ponting cheaply twice more' date=' it would have been worth it.[/quote'] Well, Harbhajan wasn't around at Perth and Ishant did the job just fine. And despite Harbhajan's acclaimed mastery over Ponting, Ishant had him in far more trouble than Bhaji has at any point this series, and dominated him as I've never seen him worked over before.

[The Outsider]

Well' date=' Harbhajan wasn't around at Perth and Ishant did the job just fine. And despite Harbhajan's acclaimed mastery over Ponting, Ishant had him in far more trouble than Bhaji has at any point this series, and dominated him as I've never seen him worked over before.[/quote'] To paraphrase Harbhajan, Ponting has never stuck around long enough to be troubled by him. If we had a genuine opener it would have been an easy decision to play him but with the kind of form Jaffer and Yuvraj have shown and the only other reserve batsman being Karhtik, puts us in a tricky situation.

[riya]

In these sort of pitches we need 5 bowlers . The only mistake was sending Pathan as opener. Dravid should have opened with VVS at number 3 .

[Mr. Wicket]

The counter to that - had Ponting been given LBW when palpably plumb or been good enough to nick one of those jaffas from Ishant he could only spar at (:D), HE wouldn't have lasted long enough to be troubled by Ishant... And ah well, just shows the magnificent selectorial insight in picking an opener who couldn't buy runs against a gassed Shoaib, Malcolm Sami and the great phaasht bowling/left arm spinning hope Sohail Tanvir. Should have gone with an in form guy like Chopra (that too with a decent track record in Aus), but bah...

[Ram]

I can only pity all those talking as though its Bhajji's/Sharma's birthright to dismiss Ponting. Punter is too good a player to miss out for 4 tests in a row. I see a big one coming from him.

[sandeep]

My reading of the pitch is that it's not as much of a batting beauty as the one we saw the last time we were at Adelaide or even the one against England last year. The ball is holding up a bit and I distinctly saw some small puffs of dust come out late in the evening yesterday. 450 in the first innings will be a very good score here' date=' IMO.[/quote'] I think that's a bit of wishful thinking there shwetabh. I think the disciplined and consistenly high-quality bowling and fielding performance by the aussies has made batting look harder than it actually is. I hope our young fast bowlers get some early break-throughs, because if they don't, the aussie juggernaut just might get rolling on this paata. Gaining a 100+ lead in the 1st innings gives a team the best chance to win a test - 450 might give us a chance to do that with some luck, but 550 would have given us a realistic chance to do so and made our bowlers that much more effective on a pitch that's not that difficult to bat on. We lost 1, if not 2, too many wickets on Day 1 - Let's see if Tendy and Dhoni can add another 100 runs here. If Sachin could do it with Bhajji at Sydney in I1, why not here? First milestone would be to get past the 1st hour without losing any wickets to the new ball tomorrow, then a Tendy double and a dhoni ton will do nicely :D

[The Outsider]

NJ, undoubtedly the Australian quicks bowled really well, specially that 9 over spell from Lee in the last session but didn't you see how the edges were not carrying to the slips or to the boundary, the number of fielders employed in front of the wicket, a man in as good form as Laxman struggling to get the timing right. Yes we need early wickets from our pace bowlers but if you keep on bowling straight on this wicket, you are going to start to frustrate the batsmen into playing across the line at some point.

[living]

I can only pity all those talking as though its Bhajji's/Sharma's birthright to dismiss Ponting. Punter is too good a player to miss out for 4 tests in a row. I see a big one coming from him.

plus he got a big double hundred against us here last time around. I disagree with the OP. We NEED 5 bowlers to win this game. It was high time AK gambled with our star studded batting line up. Besides, Pathan did a decent job played somewhat similar to what Jaffa has been doing throughout the series. I understand this pitch is more sub-continental-ish, and jaffa may have scored but that was an equally risky gamble.

[Sachinism]

even though we have 5 bowlers, i still feel we need close to 500 to have a chance of winning this game the pitch is pretty good to bat on, so dont expect the aussies to get bowled out for nothing scores