India: Bleeding one single at a time

[SachDan]

By Prem Panicker

It was supposed to be a lazy Sunday afternoon of minnow-mangling. The fiercest debate centered around which of the two, Sachin Tendulkar or Virender Sehwag, would inflict more pain on the opposition. And then, March 2, Ireland lit up the night in Bangalore with a stunning batting display against England, and in pulling off a brilliant 3-wicket win, not only brought Group B to life but upped the ante for the game this Sunday against India. Cue desperate analysis, reams of it. Should India play 5 bowlers or 4? 3 seam bowlers or 2? Should the side persist with Piyush Chawla, or should it ignore the "logic" that suggests two off-spinners is one too many, and bring Ravichandra Ashwin, an attacking offie who has a proven ability to bowl even inside the power plays, into the playing side to partner Harbhajan Singh? (One question that is totally missing from all this analysis is whether Harbhajan should play at all, but let's leave that lie.) Alongside all of that, there is a lot of ink being spilt over the fielding, an aspect of Indian cricket that captain MS Dhoni said, in the aftermath of the England game, just could not be improved. That hasn't stopped the morning papers, on the eve of India's next game, from much po-faced pontification on how the fielding "just has to improve". How? As Dhoni pointed out, the Indian team is burdened with more than its fair share of slow movers, in fact, where once the side boasted an enviable close cordon of Yuvraj, Raina and Rohit Sharma, today the first in the troika is so slow his captain gave him dirty looks the other night for turning easy twos into labored ones; Raina's skills are used largely to ensure he doesn't drop the bottle when he brings out the drinks, and Rohit uses his catching hand to hang on to a glass of Scotland's finest. Virat Kohli is the only player with fielding skills on par with international standards. So how exactly is the fielding supposed to improve? This is the World Cup, not the IPL with its shortened boundaries. There is more real estate to cover, and the Indians as a unit have neither the fleetness of foot to cover the expanded space, nor the energy to sustain over the course of 50 overs. Everyone knows this, and the better teams will use this to their advantage to run India ragged in the field. If Dhoni's comment signaled anything, it was that he, and the team management, had accepted this as a fact of life. That leaves MS and Kirsten two areas to focus on: the bowling and the batting. Oh, and the mindset. The MS captaincy playbook has just two chapters: 'Desperate Attack' and 'Studied Defense'. If his batsmen score 250 or less, MS wakes up to the need for wickets, and goes on the offensive (most recently, consider the warm up game against the Aussies). If his batsmen put 300-plus on the board, however, MS invariably falls back on defense; he spreads the field out to "protect the boundaries" and banks on the size of the total to produce the win. Counter-intuitive, to see the least: shouldn't the higher total give you more scope, more incentive, to attack? This is not merely a theoretical discussion, of the sort that fills in time in between games. The Indian bowling unit has in recent times rarely demonstrated an ability to mount a sustained attack, and the reason at least in part is that its role has been recalibrated into a largely containing one, designed to play to MS' favorite strategy of packing one side of the field and getting the bowlers to adhere to that line. Nice theory; it has even worked on the odd occasion, but show me an Indian bowler capable of bowling six in the same slot. Anyway. So slow, tired fielders are an easily identified, if not as easily solved, problem. What is not being discussed, though, is how those same tired legs perform when they bat. Understandable perhaps, given that thus far the batsmen have put big totals on the board, but there is a huge problem waiting for an inopportune moment to manifest itself. Consider these stats from the India-England game: When batting, India hammered 35 fours and 7 sixes, against England's 29 fours and 5 sixes. So since India clearly outdid the England batsmen in the big-hitting stakes, how did the two teams end up dead even? More, how did it happen that for every over of the chase, England stayed well ahead of India until that fateful power play? Here's the clue: India's top four batsmen between them scored 86 singles, against 124 dot balls (The Indian innings had a total of 140 dot balls, that is, just 10 balls shy of half the total allotted balls; it was only after MS Dhoni came out to bat that the dots to runs equation became better). Against that, England's batsmen had 96 dot balls, and 117 singles. Consider the main bowler of each team. Graeme Swann got taken for five fours and three sixes; England managed a mere 4 fours off Harbhajan; Swann bowled an over short and gave a run more than the Indian offie. The difference lay in how Strauss and Bell played the Indian spinner in course of their game-changing partnership: Strauss had 13 dot balls off the offie against 17 singles; Bell, who never found the boundary against Bhajji, had just one dot ball against 11 singles (that's 14 dot balls against 28 singles off the off spinner). That's the two-faced problem for the presumptive favorites right there. In the field India can't stop the singles; with the bat we can't score them. The first removes pressure from the good batting sides and transfers it to the bowlers, who thanks to rapid strike rotation are forced to constantly adjust lines and lengths, ensuring that they can't settle into any kind of attacking plan against any one batsman (a classic example of how this problem manifests was the game between Pakistan and Sri Lanka, when Younis Khan, with 42 singles against 23 dot balls, and Misbah ul-Haq, with 45 singles to 35 dot balls, nudged and nurdled the Lankan bowlers to distraction). The second means that opposition bowlers can settle into preferred lines and lengths, since the batsmen are not doing anything to disrupt them; the captain can set fields and sit back without the need to constantly reassess. Simultaneously, the batsmen are under increasing pressure to find the big hits that will ramp up the run rate (and their individual scoring rates). Against England's mediocre line up, they managed; the problems will begin first against the likes of South Africa, and once we get into the knock out stage, that problem will put the side behind the eight ball in every single game. No one is even talking about this problem, but from where I stand, this is the single biggest chink in the Indian armor, the single reason they are not, in the field, the favorites they appear on paper. Oh, and about the bowling combination everyone's banging on about? My two bits: This is Ireland. If a line-up that reads Sachin, Sehwag, Gambhir, Virat Kohli, Yuvraj Singh and MS Dhoni can't get runs on the board against them, well, hell, India deserves to lose. I'd drop Yusuf Pathan, bring in Sreesanth (Munaf is a lot of things, a lot of them good, but an opening bowler he ain't); drop Chawla and bring in Ashwin, and I'd ask/urge/exhort MS Dhoni to, for once, shed his safety-first mindset and attack from the get go. One thing for sure, tomorrow is not the lazy, laid-back Sunday everyone expected when the schedule for the 2011 World Cup was drawn up.

[cowboysfan]

good article but has been discussed to death on ICF. MS has always been a "safe" captain,be it declarations or field placements.the problem in India is that that on flat wickets the batsmen will milk even the better spinners easily for singles.Dhoni needs to rethink this or he will find out the saffers can run just well as the English.

[gaurav92]

^After all English are half Safricans :--D

[flamy]

good stuff. and great dissection of Dhoni's captaincy.

[zubinpepsi]

very nice article by prem... not that its not been discussed here in ICF... but to see this been posted by someone in the mainstream media is good to see..

[putrevus]

Dhoni is first guy ready to scream about inept fielding but he forgets one main thing he is the main reason fielding inept ,he let the game drift by not attacking. see Ponting is having five fielders and stopping the singles for SL, if you save two singles an over that makes a huge difference.

[Karan114]

very nice article by prem... not that its not been discussed here in ICF... but to see this been posted by someone in the mainstream media is good to see..

Agreed - good to see this get mentioned in the media, it is so frustrating to watch.

[Sid]

Ponting today had good field for lankans and even Porterfield had his fielders up in the ring in the middle overs for some time against the Poms.I hope Dhoni learns something from that and stops being ultra defensive in the middle overs.

[asterix]

Ponting today had good field for lankans and even Porterfield had his fielders up in the ring in the middle overs for some time against the Poms.I hope Dhoni learns something from that and stops being ultra defensive in the middle overs.

Look he is a busy sportsman..He might not have time to learn etc..Stop criticising Dhoni..

[Sooda]

Interesting, hed play Sree Santh...:hmmm:

[Guest Gunner]

"and Rohit uses his catching hand to hang on to a glass of Scotland's finest." :hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical:

[vvvslaxman]

Wow prem. we think alike. I brought up all the points in various discussions. I am glad somebody decided to write a piece on Dhoni's atrocious field sets and resigned feeling about India's fielding.

[vvvslaxman]

very nice article by prem... not that its not been discussed here in ICF... but to see this been posted by someone in the mainstream media is good to see..

Check the thread importance of field set.