Gautam Gambhir

Gautam Gambhir wants rank turners in India

Some people seem to think there’s a bit of “yeah, well, see how you like it,” about this. That’s understandable. Gambhir’s had a couple of bad tours, so you can’t really blame him. However, he’d do well to remember that home success doesn’t negate failure away from home. It only highlights it.

However, even if ‘wanting to get your own back’ isn’t the best reason for requesting rank turners for Tests in India, we still agree with what he’s saying. The home team should always be favourites in a Test series. That’s half the point.

Test tours are meant to be hard. That way, if a touring team has any success, everyone knows they’ve done something special. India’s win in England in 2007 relied on brilliant swing bowling, not spin, and was all the more admirable for that fact. England’s win in Australia last winter was built on ‘not being utterly outplayed’ and ‘not crying in a corner’ in sharp contrast to their usual approach to away Ashes series.

Rank turners in India will generally favour the home side, but such pitches would also make anything achieved by tourists more impressive than an accident claims lawyer overlooking a technicality in favour of common sense and conventional morality.

Gautam Gambhir isn’t earning much praise

Banging his head two days earlier compelled Gautam Gambhir to send out a morningwatchman. The consensus seems to be that he’s a bit soft. Maybe he is still concussed, maybe he’s genuinely not fit to bat, but he might have stood a better chance of people believing that if he hadn’t already missed a Test this series with a bruised elbow.

We’re currently typing this with what is likely to be a fractured finger. We’re soldiering on despite the fact that precisely no-one is counting on us. For his part, Gambhir must be aware that one or two people would like India to do well.

Test cricket is rarely about the stars aligning so that you can bat exactly as you want. Test cricket is about trying to prevent some arsehole from breaking another of your ribs when the pitch is lumpy and torn to shreds and your team is 400 behind. Great batsmen score runs in that situation.

Gambhir is not a great player. A great player carried out the complex oral manoeuvre of biting his tongue while simultaneously gritting his teeth when asked to open in his place.

The five best batsmen over the next five years

The big names are generally old bastards. Who’s next?

Ross Taylor, New Zealand, age 25

Ross Taylor tends to look like he’s the man who’s going to win the match for New Zealand shortly before doing something slightly spacky. Pretty soon those fifties will become hundreds and those hundreds will become double hundreds.

JP Duminy, South Africa, 25

Duminy has barely started in Test cricket, but has the reassuring habit of being exceptional whatever the format. Twenty20’s just for sloggers, is it? Then why is Duminy so effective. The best batsmen are generally the best batsmen in all forms of the game.

AB de Villiers, South Africa, 25

Yes, he is only 25. There are already bowlers in world cricket who’d sooner try and insert a bat handle into their urethra than bowl at vehement letter-C denier, AB de Villiers.

Michael Clarke, Australia, 28

Recently voted ‘most overrated player’ by readers of the Herald Sun, Michael Clarke must be rated really, really, phenomenally highly. Quite clearly following in the footsteps of Border, Waugh and Ponting as an Aussie captain who’s mint with the bat.

Gautam Gambhir, India, 28

Test average after 18 Tests: 36, with one hundred. Test average in the next nine Tests: 94, with seven hundreds. Gautam Gambhir is up and running.

Gautam Gambhir’s worth getting out

Some said that England were unlucky in the first Test that three great batsmen – Virender Sehwag, Sachin Tendulkar and Yuvraj Singh – all fired at the same time.

It wasn’t bad luck. Those batsmen fire as often as they don’t and even if they don’t fire then Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman most likely will.

Or Gautam Gambhir will.

He’s the seventh member of India’s top seven, but on current form he’s the one you most want to get out. Gautam Gambhir positively flayed Australia a month ago and he’s got into double figures in every Test innings this year. He’s averaging 70 in 2008. Today he hit 179 against England at Mohali.

We tipped Gautam Gambhir for greatness back in 2005. You can see this in a post we wrote where we tipped Dheeraj Jadhav for greatness…

Gautam Gambhir against Australia

And Gambhir wins!

That seems to be the way this is working. It was four years between Gautam Gambhir’s first and second Test hundreds. Now he’s hit two in two innings.

He’s basically an attacking batsman who doesn’t feel he HAS to attack, which is pretty much what you want in a Test opener. He can career along at near enough a run a ball alongside Virender Sehwag, like he did in the second innings of the last Test, or he can edge along safely like he did today, setting a platform for later mayhem.

He’s someone who knows not to get himself out, but who can impose himself on the opposition too – which is vital. Gambhir and Tendulkar decided they didn’t want Cameron White allowing the main bowlers a breather, so they removed him from the attack via the simple method of repeatedly carting him to the boundary.

Gambhir plays a good game off the field as well. “There was no way he could have got me out” he said about Shane Watson, before rather optimistically trying to encourage Australia to persevere with their part-timers: “The way Katich bowled, a couple of balls really spun.”

Gautam Gamhbir impersonates a cricket ball

Here we see Gautam Gambhir sidling up to a cricket ball in disguise.

[At least we used to, but now the image has been removed...]

If Gautam’s deception is successful, perhaps he’ll get to mate with the ball