You knew when the pitch started detonating on the fourth afternoon that Zimbabwe were done for. With Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh finding the bowlers' footmarks and the ball behaving like one of those hard-rubber crazy balls, the question wasn't if Zimbabwe would lose, it was when. Brighton Watambwa's flailing heave that ended the innings encapsulated their batting effort. It was as if Trevor Gripper – who fought the good fight against the demons in the pitch for close to five hours – and the other batsmen knew that their task was as futile as trying to bail out the Titanic with a bucket. The last two sessions were a throwback to the ugly days of the early nineties when India buried opposition on pitches designed to behave like an active minefield after a day or two. Instead of acknowledging the soil's (rather dust's) contribution to our success, we persist in asking ourselves why our spinners aren't effective overseas. How could they be when they barely have to work on their craft in home Test matches? A bowler of Kumble's calibre just has to turn his arm over a few times to be guaranteed plentiful pickings on a pitch such as the one in Nagpur.

Contrast that with Shane Warne at the Wanderers yesterday. That match was played on an absolute belter, yet the Australians knocked over 20 South African wickets for just 292 runs. Warne accounted for six of them, and bowled quite beautifully on a track that was no spinner's idea of Utopia.

Instead of getting cocky about an innings victory over one of Test cricket's basement sides, India would do well to watch tapes of Australia's Wanderers demolition job. It was the finest exhibition of Test cricket that most of us will ever see, and an object lesson to other teams that aspire to the Australian throne. The batsmen blitzed along at four and a half runs an over – Gilchrist playing one of the great Test innings – before the bowlers made a good pitch look like a minefield. No paeans of praise can ever do justice to that kind of performance.

India, on the other hand, won this match without ever going full pelt. The batsmen in particular, till the Bangar- Tendulkar flourish on the fourth morning, went along at the sort of pace favoured by pensioners on their constitutional. Because we rarely push ourselves to the limit, we have no clue what we can achieve. Steve Waugh's men, on the other hand, are constantly on the edge, a place that Jim Morrison described as having no boundaries. They can, and will, keep stretching those boundaries. A bit like Gilchrist who kept whacking the ball over the ropes – and out of the ground – with the sort of insouciance one associates with beach cricket.

Dileep Premachandran is assistant editor of Wisden.com India.

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