Travel-sick India need Dravid's cure

[King]

Heroic captain, Rahul Dravid, is the main hope for tourists who are notoriously wobbly away from home comforts, writes Scyld Berry. More... Travel-sick India need Dravid's cure By Scyld Berry, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 12:12am BST 24/06/2007 When England and India meet in the second Test at Trent Bridge at the end of next month, it will be India's 200th Test match abroad. The most populous cricket nation, filled with natural talent, should have won a goodly proportion of them, but no. India have won only 28 Tests away from home, and if you deduct their easy wins in Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, they have won only 21 since 1932. Captain fantastic: Rahul Dravid is key to India's touring party If he needs a challenge, Sachin Tendulkar, on probably his last tour of England, can rectify India's record of having won only four of the 45 Tests they have played in England. Nobody in international cricket has been playing as long as Tendulkar. He started in 1989 when 15, touring England for the first time a year later and scoring the first of his 37 Test centuries, easily a world record. Yet at practice at Stormont last week, in the shadow of the building designed to impose with an imperial grandeur, Tendulkar could easily have been confused with the new members of India's touring team. Normally Tendulkar, a super-star who has made far more money out of cricket than any other player, cannot blow his nose without being watched by thousands. In the nets at Stormont he chatted in a woolly cap with his fellow Mahratti, Ajit Agarkar, and bowled medium-pace with the enthusiasm of a teenager not a 34-year-old, while more people watched the six-a-side hockey practice on the artificial pitch alongside. When Tendulkar batted the finest cricket brain of his generation (rather than the finest natural talent) was applied intensely to dealing with a green, seaming surface. The hunger remains, the boyish delight in playing with bat and ball, perhaps because he can only be himself when playing cricket. If Peter Pan ventured into his real world, the streets of Mumbai, he would be mobbed. The world of Indian cricket - or at least of the Indian cricket team - has been a closed book until now, but one which will open this week when Indian Summers is published. John Wright, the former New Zealand opening batsman, an endearing combination of tough and whimsical, became the first foreign coach of the Indian team and survived in the job - even prospering as the team matured to a peak before tailing off - from 2000 to 2005, when Greg Chappell took over. Wright tried to make the team evolve, Chappell to revolutionise, which ended in tears and India's early exit from the last World Cup. Wright lifts a veil to reveal a cricket team like no other. When he went to India's first team practice the players got off their bus, leaving their kit behind, and sauntered over to the nets, there to sit in wicker chairs while waiters brought them tea and biscuits and porters lugged their kit around. Indian cricketers are as famous as Bollywood film stars, and used to behave like them. When the Indian players held a team meeting the junior ones would walk around the room handing out snacks to the senior ones. Wright, not surprisingly, found that most of them were so pampered they were seriously short of physical fitness. "When they did go for a run they set a pace that a tortoise with a double hip replacement would have found comfortable," Wright wrote. "I told them I had to rub my eyes to make sure they were moving." But attitudes are as difficult to change as physiques. The hierarchy of senior and junior players still applies: the Indian board divide the players on central contracts into three categories of A (five million rupees per year, or just over £60,000), B (3.5m rupees) and C (2m rupees). It is a sure way to damage team spirit, especially as it is mainly batsmen who are in category A while the pace bowlers languish in C. Then there is the attitude to playing away from home, away from their comfort zone of porters and waiters. Wright does not say so, but the Hindu belief that one lost caste when crossing the sea may have helped to set Indian cricket abroad off on the wrong foot, where it has more or less remained ever since. "I was coming to realise just how strongly the players believed in their ability to beat anyone in Indian conditions... the downside was how much of that self-belief ebbed away the moment our plane left Indian airspace," Wright observed. "There was almost an expectation that things would go wrong." But one man has begun to reverse that trend of losing away from India, and it is not Tendulkar. Statistics show the world record-holder is well past his best: in the last three years he has made four Test centuries but three of them have been against Bangladesh. Since April 2004 Tendulkar has played 21 Tests and averaged 28.90 with one century, aside from bullying Bangladesh. The other senior batsman, Sourav Ganguly, has been no more successful: his only two Test hundreds in the last three years have been against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. The man who has turned the tide has been Rahul Dravid, an urbane south Indian who has played for Kent and Scotland and become a cricketer of the world as well as India's captain. Modest, too, he is not one to behave like a film star. Last Friday in Belfast I asked him about India's away record and his reply was perfectly correct in what he said, but even more remarkable in what was unsaid. "In the last five or six years we've won Test matches in nearly every country we've played in. We've won a series in Pakistan and the last time we were in England we won at Headingley. We've won a Test, not a series, in Australia, West Indies and South Africa. That's something that will give us confidence." What was unsaid was that Dravid won some of those games as near to single-handedly as any cricketer can do. At Headingley in 2002 he scored 148 to set up a total beyond 600 and an innings victory which levelled the series at one-all. On a pig of a pitch in Kingston, Jamaica, Dravid played two match-winning innings. In Adelaide he batted for 835 minutes to score 305 runs for once out, and was on the field for all but two hours. Australia knew how to beat England at Adelaide last winter after conceding a first innings of more than 550 because they had the template. India, propelled by Dravid, had done exactly the same to Australia in 2003-04. India have traditionally lacked a pair of opening batsmen for overseas conditions, but as Sri Lanka showed last summer in England when they drew 1-1, that is not an insuperable problem - not if Dravid excels at No 3. They also lack pace bowlers as usual: Zaheer Khan, currently injured, and Sree Sreesanth, often injured, are their only pair of note, while their spinner, Anil Kumble, has been coming to England since 1990, along with Tendulkar, but has taken no more than 22 Test wickets at 45 runs each. India should win the one-dayers by a street and England the three-Test series 2-0 - unless Dravid thwarts them off his own bat.

[King]

There you go the English perspective of Indian cricket team. They still marvel Tendulkar but their focus now has shifted from Tendulkar to Rahul Dravid. Rahul Dravid suits the English perspective of playing cricket. Well dressed, nicely presented, good language and more than anything technically perfect batting that they like so much. I think this is a good article, it has started by stating Tendulkar's zeal for playing cricket and moved on to ascertain Rahul Dravid's presence that can change things on this tour. Anil Kumble needs to tidy up his figures this time around. 45 average for someone like Anil doesn't sound good. I have been told he finds it hard to grip the ball when India tours early summer to England but this time around they are touring later in the summer which is good. They are expecting India to win ODIs hands down and lose the test series 2-0 but I reckon India is going to struggle in the ODIs and win a test.

[Dhondy]

Pred needs to read this.

[Gambit]

Tendulkar has contributed in almost all of our non minnow wins abroad in the last 6 years as much as Dravid has.

[Predator_05]

The biggest reason why India have started winning away from home is because the development of fast bowlers was made a priority under Wright and Chappell. Still, 28 wins out of 200 makes for depressing reading. I like the point Berry makes regarding the hierarchy observed with the central contracts. Maybe it's time they got rid of it altogether. All the cricketers who feature in the starting XI should get paid the same salary. Bonuses can be apportioned based on performance, and the # of matches played during the course of a season. The current contractual system is flawed.

[The Outsider]

Tendulkar has contributed in almost all of our non minnow wins abroad in the last 6 years as much as Dravid has.

No.

[Predator_05]

Gambit is right. See for yourself; vs ZIM @ Bulawayo '01; Tendulkar 74, 36 - Dravid 44 vs SL @ Kandy '01; Tendulkar did not play - Dravid 15, 67 vs WI @ PoS '02; Tendulkar 117, 0 - Dravid 67, 36 vs ENG @ Headingley '02; Tendulkar 193 - Dravid 148 vs AUS @ Adelaide '04; Tendulkar 1, 37 - Dravid 233, 72 vs PAK @ Multan '04; Tendulkar 194 - Dravid 6 vs PAK @ Rawalpindi '04; Tendulkar 1 - Dravid 270 vs WI @ Kingston '06; Tendulkar did not play - Dravid 81, 68 vs SA @ Jo'burg '06; Tendulkar 44, 14 - Dravid 32, 1 Dravid only out performed him at Adelaide and Rawalpindi.

[The Outsider]

Hmmm....wonder why Rawalpindi is not in the list. And anyone who thinks Tendulkar outperformed Dravid at Headingly needs a course in cricket 101.

[The Outsider]

So we have : 1. Honours even at PoS. 2. Dravid @ Headingly 3. Dravid @ Adelaide 4. Tendulkar @ Multan 5. Dravid @ Rawalpindi 6. Honours even @ Johannesburg

[Ram]

How about some of India's significant test victories at home ? We should analyse that too. However. If this thread is about India's record abroad , then doesnt make sense to do that..

[The Outsider]

Significant wins at home : 1. Dravid at Calcutta vs. Aus 2. Tednulkar at Madras vs. Aus 3. Honours even at Mohali vs. England 4. Dravid at Bombay vs. WI 5. Tendulkar at Madras vs. WI 6. Tendulkar at Bombay vs. Aus 7. Dravid at Calcutta vs. SA 8. Dravid at Calcutta vs. Pak 9. Tendulkar at Delhi vs. SL 10. Dravid at Mohali vs. England.

[Lurker]

A good read overall but I could not help detect an under current of trying to "ethnicize" Indian cricket team. It is ridiculous to suggest Indian win record(or lack thereof) has any connection to caste-system. The reason boils to lack of a balanced attack, specially pace bowling. There is a subtle mention of "Marathiness" of Agarkar and Sachin as also the fact that Dravid is a "South Indian". How does all these observations add to the story other than probably provide a spice factor? The other day I was reading Henry Blofeld's Crickets Greatest Entertainers and in there an article was about SRT. The author started with a graphic description of 2003 India-Pakistan match suggesting how important it was for both the team, how Indo-Pak games are a war blah blah. He was doing quite alright till he ended up slipping, "Afterall this was a game of Muslim Pakistan against a pre-dominantly Hindu India" and I am left wondering where the eff did that come from? I had the same feelings when I read this article today. By the by I do agree with Berry that India should win the LOI and England should come up trumps in Test games. xxx