Crushing defeat spells elimination for India
Forget talk of a recovery. Dismiss speculation that a remarkable reversal of fortune may be in store. India's prospects of altering the texture of an eminently forgettable tour of Australia are indeed extinct. Of that, there can be no doubt following another humiliating loss today - this one by the margin of 106 runs to an impressive Pakistan at the WACA ground in Perth.
In an act of by now almost predictable repetition for the Indians, this was another day on this visit which brought another defeat in another set of circumstances in which they ceded an early advantage to their opponent and waged a losing battle to fight their way back. Pakistan won the toss, and they decisively won the first hour of play too - the aggression of openers Saeed Anwar (44) and Shahid Afridi (41) seeming to take their opponents by some surprise. By the time that the former was dismissed in the sixteenth over, seventy-seven runs were already on the scoreboard and, from there, no way back was detected for the Indians.
In an ominous opening, Anwar set the tone for the proceedings with a delightful cover drive for three from the very first ball of the match and there was little respite from either of the two players thereafter. Straight drives, cover drives, off drives, cuts, pulls and even one lofted straight hit into the sightscreen were indeed all in evidence in their association.
And, while medium pacer Sourav Ganguly (3/34) was able to transform the position to some extent, their platform proved more than stable enough for the portents of victory to be established. Notwithstanding the fact that gifted their opponents a relatively regular succession of wickets during the middle of the innings when five batsmen fell for only barely over one hundred, the tally ultimately still climbed to a more than challenging 8/261.
The Indians were set even further back on their heels by the combination of prodigious bowling talents of Waqar Younis (2/32 off eight overs) and Wasim Akram (3/10 from seven) and yet more controversy through a remarkable opening ten overs of their own innings. An evening high on action looked in prospect when maestro Sachin Tendulkar despatched the very first ball of the innings to the backward point boundary. And that was certainly the way it proved, although for all the wrong reasons for the batting team.
The first instalment of the drama came with the first ball of the second over, which had Ganguly (1) driving nervously at a glorious Waqar inswinger to outside edge a catch to wicketkeeper Moin Khan. After he had cracked a total of four blissful boundaries in the course of his fourteen ball innings, further disaster ensued for India when Umpire Simon Taufel decreed, it seemed harshly, that Tendulkar (17) had inside edged another inswinging Waqar delivery through to Moin. Mystified by his dismissal (and it seemed a fair reaction given that the ball seemed to strike nothing but his back leg on the way through), Tendulkar's head spun around quickly to look at Taufel and then check his position in relation to his stumps on the off chance that he may have been adjudged lbw. With him went any vague scent of a contest.
Scenes became even more tense shortly after when Jacob Martin was then chosen as Tendulkar's replacement; the Pakistanis congregating around Umpires Taufel and Darrell Hair and the player being sent back to the pavilion on account of the fact that the playing conditions did not allow him to bat at that point. In sending Martin in to bat, the Indians indeed appeared blissfully unaware of ICC playing condition 13.3 (ii) which reads that a player who has been absent from the field of play during the first innings is not permitted to bat until his side has either lost five wickets or the equivalent amount of time for which he has been absent from the field has passed. That Akram then chimed in with two quick wickets of his own - removing Rahul Dravid (3) courtesy of a thin outside edge to a leg cutter and VVS Laxman (1) lbw to a classic inswinger - merely served to exacerbate the general sense of catastrophe for his opponents.
As inexorably as they then tumbled to a sixth loss in seven matches in the tournament to ensure their elimination, so many among the crowd of 10,531 filed out of the ground to signify their own lack of interest in the fight. Notwithstanding either the efficiency of Pakistan's win or the quality of its players' efforts, it was indeed a drawn out and most unsatisfying night of cricket for even the most wholehearted of followers to behold.
While there should be a significantly larger audience here to witness it, such events also rendered the final match of the preliminary series (between Australia and India on Sunday) a contest which will have no lasting bearing upon the outcome of the tournament. In the wake of yet another crushing defeat for the bedraggled Indians, one can only hope that a more competitive scenario reigns then and that it pervades the Finals too, for an end to such hopelessly lopsided matches can not arrive soon enough.
