And as with most instances where teams lose due to their own incompetence and/or lack of mental fortitude, the post mortems at the end of the inaugural Titan Cup clash between India and South Africa at the Lal Bahadur Stadium in Hyderabad followed predictable lines.
``Yes, it was disappointing to start the Titan series with a defeat,'' admitted Sachin Tendulkar. ``I think we conceeded 20 or 25 runs more in the field than we should have, and that made a big difference. We were in a good position when South Africa were 166/6, but we let them go from there to a big total.''
And how did the visitors pull off that escape act?
Tendulkar seems to feel that Sunil Joshi, who went for over 60 runs in his ten overs, had something to do with it. ``I can't say he bowled badly,'' the Indian captain said. ``But I would have liked him to have bowled better.''
Rival skipper Hansie Cronje, whose unbeaten innings and partnership with Brian McMillan for the seventh wicket put the tourists back into the game, for his part feels that his side was never in real trouble. ``Even at 166/6, we were confident that with me and Brian in the middle, we would put up a big score,'' says Cronje.
South African coach Bob Woolmer - he of the peripatetic laptop computer - is less sanguine. ``It was a good toss to win,'' Woolmer said. It would have to be difficult for us to face the Indian spinners on the turning track in the second half of the match.''
Having said that, Woolmer is inclined to share the credit for the side's win equally between batsmen and bowlers. ``Gary Kirsten played a marvellous innings, Andrew Hudson, Hansie Cronje and Brian McMillan all chipped in with good scores and helped us post a defensible total. And both our spinners, Pat Symcox and Derryck Crookes, bowled very well. I was quite happy with our performance overall, and it was good to win before a 35,000-strong crowd.''
Every commentator and critic, however, has been unanimous in saying that this was a game lost by India, rather than won by the South Africans. And as so often in the recent past, it appeared to be India's inability to keep its nerve in the chase that let the side down.
Tendulkar, though, is not ready to concur, just yet. ``We always feel we can chase big totals - in fact, if we did not have this positive attitude, we would not have been able to play at all. When we started off, we were looking to win and myself and Sujit Somasundar had decided to play our natural game, give India a brisk start. But it did not fall in place, and such things do happen.''
Tendulkar is not unduly upset about his own performance, either. ``It is only a matter of time before I get my concentration and high-scoring rhythm back,'' he says. I need just one big innings to get back into the groove. As for pressures of captaincy, that is a myth, I don't feel burdened by leadership at all when I go out to bat, I go out as a batsman, not as a captain.''
Our own analysis begins with this last point from Tendulkar. And basically we - as indeed most thinking commentators - would tend to concur.
``Pressures of captaincy'' is one of those media-created myths with little factual basis to back it. After all, there have been more batsmen than bowlers captaining international sides. And you could count on the fingers of one hand the instances where ``pressures of captaincy'' saw the skipper fail as a batsman. Certainly neither Allan Border, nor Sunil Gavaskar - the two highest scorers in Test history - felt that pressure. Neither did Graham Gooch, England's highest run-getter. Nor does Gooch's successor, Michael Atherton. Clive Lloyd of the West Indies played some of the most brilliant innings of his career as a captain. As did his successor Vivian Richards....
Why belabour the theme? The point is, batsmen succeed or fail on the basis of individual talent and ability, allied to mental strength at the time of playing. Not because they are, or are not, captaining sides, or going through marital or other personal problems, or whatever. To attribute Tendulkar's failures in recent innings to ``pressures of captaincy'', thus, is facile and, more importantly, foolish.
So what then explains the failure?
Ironically, captaincy is involved - but in a peripheral sense.
Tendulkar has long been aware that the team depends to a considerable extent on his batting abilities. He is aware, too, that as captain, his responsibilities in the batting department have increased. Simply because earlier, he had a captain - in his case, Azhar - instructing him before he went out to bat. Thus, if his captain told him 'Go out there and go for the bowling', then Sachin could follow those instructions blindly, and if he got out then well, that was a contingency his captain would have budgetted for.
Now, though, it is Sachin's call. The buck, in the classic cliche, stops right there in front of him. And a studied analysis of recent performances will indicate that the Indian skipper has fallen not to any suddenly discovered technical fallacy, but because he has, at the beginning of each innings, been struggling to resolve the dilemma of going after the bowling, and yet needing to hang around for long enough to bat India to a winning position.
And as anyone who has played cricket at any level will tell you, going out to bat when in two minds about your role is a sure prescription for disaster.
From that diagnosis, comes the cure. Sachin obviously cannot bring himself to play with the irresponsible abandon of his days under Azhar. Aware that he is the side's skipper, Sachin feels he is duty bound to play responsibly, and for long stretches. And as a batsman with enormous technical ability, he can do that role just as well as, earlier, he did his assigned task of getting India off to fliers.
Having sorted that out, we then come to the task of building a team around Sachin Tendulkar the accumulator, rather than aggressor. And - this suggestion may seem strange, and must be read in context of the fact that the team for the first three games of this series has al- ready been picked - it would make sense for Sachin to get Ganguly to partner him up the order.
The two batsmen would need to go out there with definite, and differing, game plans. Sachin's must be to bat through a bulk of the overs, picking up runs mostly with the placements at which he is so adept, and launching into strokes only off the bad balls. Ganguly, meanwhile, will be briefed to use his fluent offside play to good effect early on, with the field restrictions in place and the quicks bowling flat out. There is a double advantage in Ganguly opening - in fact, come to think of it, there are three advantages.
One, it brings a left-right combination to the crease, opens up the fielding side and unsettles its game plan, and forces it to conceede runs to the untenanted boundaries in the early part of the innings.
Two, Ganguly batting down the order can be curbed with the line of attack angled into his body on leg stump, with a leg side field cutting off the runs and frustrating the batsman by exploiting his relative inability to play through the on. Early on, with field restrictions in place and the fielding captain forced by law to keep his leg side fielders down to a minimum, Ganguly will be able to play through the on with more freedom and less fear of getting out caught or finding the fielder in the way of his strokes. And, thus, his productivity and utility to the home side will be maximised.
Once this pair settles into their roles, then the rest of the batting follows its own logic. Dravid will continue in the role of the anchor - taking the singles at will, playing strokes off either foot and on either side with his high degree of technical competence, and ensuring above all that the fall of the first wicket is not the signal for a batting collapse.
Azhar, as always, will remain the aggressor, using those tensile wrists to keep the runs coming at a fair old clip, as he always does even at his worst. And throughout, either Sachin - or Dravid, depending on which of the two remains at the wicket - will guide the batting, rotating strike, planning the chase, and guiding their partners through the innings, while taking responsibility for pacing the chase. Tendulkar and Dravid are selected for this role, simply because they are the best equipped, technically and mentally, to perform it.
Ajay Jadeja, then, will come in at number five, and stick to his role of innovative slog-phase batsman. With the proviso that if the fielding side has two or three spinners operating at the time, Sunil Joshi will be sent in ahead of Jadeja to indulge his penchant for going over the top off the slower bowlers - a quick 20, 24 runs from Joshi will be well worth the price of a possible wicket.
Mongia, then, will come in at seven. And with Joshi having an established role in both the batting and bowling departments and Tendulkar notwithstanding, it is our opinion that Joshi, on the day, got carted by the South African bowling not because he bowled badly, but because the S'Africans had predetermined to hit him out of the attack as, on a famous occasion recently, Kambli and Jadeja hit Younis out of length and line - and Ganguly slotted neatly in at the top of the order, India now has the luxury of not only batting to seven, but being able to afford five regular bowlers at the same time.
The choice of Kumble, Srinath, Prasad and Joshi being pretty automatic at this stage, the only uncertainity remains the choice of fifth bowler. And again, the only yardstick to use while filling this slot is the nature of the wicket, and the opposition. For instance, a third spinner against South Africa would have, at Hyderabad on Thursday, given Tendulkar the freedom to rotate the spinners more frequently, and prevent the batsmen from settling into a rhythm against them.
All of this, of course, is fine on paper. But just having a settled lineup is not enough - the Indian side needs to do two more things, in a hurry, if they are to start winning again. One, they need to watch videos of one-day games of recent times, especially those involving the Sri Lankans who, on the day, rank as the best chasers in the business. They need to study how the Sri Lankan batsmen position themselves just a shade under the required run rate midway through the innings, ac- celerating smoothly at the psychological moment with little fuss and no panic.
And two, they also need to work on their temperament. All the talent in the world, allied to brittle temperament, will not help the Indian cause. If this side, however, can get its mind back in order and start believing in itself again, then - and this might sound foolhardy, but we will stick our necks out and say it anyway - this team has what it takes to rank among the top three, four sides in the world.