The proverbial horse may have left the stables many miles behind, but finally the West Indies batsmen have found a way to shut the door on the Indian spinners. The gung-ho approach favoured by the Australians first floundered on this very ground 18 months ago, while the meeker-than-meek tactics adopted by the West Indians led to them being spanked mercilessly in the first two Tests. Today, Chris Gayle and Wavell Hinds chose the middle path, and it worked a treat. Unlike at Mumbai and Chennai, where there was just enough erratic bounce and pace in the pitches to keep the spinners dead keen, the surface at the Eden Gardens is so batsman-friendly that someone like Sunil Gavaskar or Geoffrey Boycott might have turned up with five days' camping equipment. Or a deckchair, at the very least. And as we have seen several times in the recent past, Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble aren't quite in the Shane Warne/Muttiah Muralitharan class - bowlers who can run through a side on any surface, oil-slick or featherbed.

Both Gayle and Hinds used their feet well against the spinners and were especially good against Harbhajan, with deliveries pitching outside the leg stump given the cold shoulder. Their defensive technique was effective rather than elegant, but for a team that can't even buy a draw overseas, aesthetics mean little. And when the opportunity to free the arms presented itself, Hinds drove as fluently as a Formula One driver at the peak of his powers. There was much to admire in his batting today, especially the seamless transitions from defence to aggression. He favoured the reckless route in the first two games, but here, positive strokeplay went hand in hand with patience that would shame the average chess player.

The absence of the injured/rested Zaheer Khan was keenly felt, especially when the slow bowlers toiled without success throughout the afternoon. Many pre-Test columns spoke of Ashish Nehra as a like-for-like replacement, but that's wishful thinking. Nehra gave little away in his first spell, but he was never the constant menace that Zaheer has been. And the bouncers he bowled to Gayle in the afternoon were about as threatening as wet tennis balls thrown at you by an ageing coach with an arthritic shoulder. Gayle could have hummed four bars of a tune and wiped his brow before playing his nonchalant pull-shots.

But for Hinds's dismissal in the fading light, it might have been the perfect batting day for the visitors. Once he got a sniff, though, Harbhajan was irrepressible, aided by another accomplished piece of glovework by Parthiv Patel behind the stumps. Expect another seven-for tomorrow.

As for Indian fans, they can savour that rarest of sights, an Indian tail wagging. Javagal Srinath's batting technique seems to consist of backing away, giving the bowlers a lurid view of all three stumps and then getting bat to ball by whatever means necessary. It speaks volumes of the West Indian bowlers' limitations that he has got away with it twice in succession. You know exactly what the outcome would have been had such an approach been adopted against Holding, Marshall and Roberts instead of Dillon, Lawson and Powell. Quack, quack ...

Dileep Premachandran is assistant editor of Wisden.com in India.

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