Port Elizabeth Test, Day 4, Close
Monday, November 19, 2001

A brief but interesting session, purely because we saw some old-fashioned Test cricket, the kind which I grew up watching in the 70s. Two teams were struggling a bit to make the kind of adjustments that have become alien to modern cricketers, where the batsmen try to defend and the bowlers strive for wickets.

Under the circumstances, I thought the Indians did pretty well, especially Deep Dasgupta who gave me the impression that he would not be too intimidated in the international environment. I have seen far too many Indian cricketers getting rattled by foreign players and conditions, which is why Dasgupta looks so refreshingly different.

One sensed the South African bowlers were not too comfortable with the Indian batsmen leaving everything outside the off stump. Modern day cricket is about batsmen playing their shots and bowlers picking up wickets in the process of batsmen attacking, so it was nice to see the Indians trying to preserve their wickets. It all made up for an intriguing session.

India were faced with a situation similar when on the 1992 tour of South Africa. We had to save the Test with an entire day's play left, but then we also had a chance to win the game. In the 70s and 80s, teams would have achieved a draw quite comfortably under similar circumstances, but cricket has undergone such a dramatic change in the last decade or so that batsmen have become very, very attacking; it has made cricket very entertaining but also that much more difficult for sides trying to save a Test.

As India go into the final day, I would put India's chances of saving the Test as 20 percent, assuming the weather permits a full day's play.

Sanjay Manjrekar, mainstay of the Indian batting in the late '80s and early '90s, was talking to H Natarajan.

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