India cricket news

Bowling fitness for a modern Test series

Being stupidly fit is one of the greatest attributes a fast bowler can have. Accuracy and the ability to seam or swing the ball are entry requirements. Beyond that, you elevate yourself above your rivals by making the most of those strengths for longer.

So many backs

Fitness is even more important in these days of back-to-back-to-back Tests. Over the course of a series, bowlers have little time to recover and a 30-over stint in the first Test can end up having an impact on the outcome of the fourth Test.

England know this. They plan accordingly. They have about six fast bowlers who they’re happy to call upon so that they can keep their attack fresh, but they also ensure that their main guys are as fit as can be.

We always use James Anderson as our example. His bowling at the end of the day is generally not that inferior to that in his opening spell, which isn’t true of all pace bowlers. It’s common for people to think of players as being machines with set qualities, but their performance ebbs and flows according to how tired they are, as well as according to the vagaries of form. Indeed ‘form’ isn’t disconnected from fitness.

England v India

In a longer series, every hour your team is batting in earlier Tests is an investment for later on. (This might even be one of the major reasons why Jonathan Trott was identified as a potential Test match batsman.)

In this England v India series, Praveen Kumar and Ishant Sharma have been forced to send down 235 overs in the first two Tests, versus 176 from Anderson and Broad. Playing four bowlers and suffering injuries to key players has added to the workload of the Indian pair, but the reasons don’t really matter. The effect does.

Sharma seems fit and Kumar has a certain economy of effort, so maybe this won’t tell, but we’ll be interested to monitor whether it does. We’d guess this is exactly the kind of thing that Andy Flower thinks about when plotting each series.

We often value players according to how they play when they’re at their best, but what really matters is being better than your opponent at each particular moment, even when you’re both knackered.

Suresh Raina and the short ball

Dear Short Ball,

I would be most grateful if you would come round later on. I will pull out all the stops for you. You can sit in my armchair. I will bring you drinks. I even have some of your favourite cake.

Don’t worry about replying. All of this is no trouble at all.

Looking forward to seeing you,

Suresh

No-one invites the short ball quite like Suresh Raina. We don’t know if we’ve ever seen a professional batsman play short-pitched bowling so consistently badly as he did during his brief stay at the crease in the second innings at Trent Bridge.

Surely that was some sort of freakish one-off? The guy’s played 153 international matches, after all. No-one – particularly someone who’s barely five feet tall – could possibly have reached that level while being so jaw-droppingly incompetent at such a major aspect of batting.

That’s not a joke and it’s barely rhetoric. He couldn’t be that bad, could he?

The Test rankings are pretty accurate, but…

A lot of people quibble with the ICC’s Test rankings, but we think they’re pretty good. The rankings are more weighty than simply saying which is the best team at any given moment. They reward sustained excellence.

You can say that they should recognise which is the best team right now, but how do you do that? You’ve got to impose some sort of timeframe on what you’re measuring because you need data. For example, a team doesn’t become the best in the world the very moment it takes a wicket or scores a run, which is what would happen if you evaluated too short a timeframe.

Similarly, a team doesn’t become the best in the world when it wins a Test match, or a series. It doesn’t even become the best team in the world by winning three or four series in a row. At present, these are all just steps towards that number one ranking and we think that method of calculation actually gives the rankings a fair bit of cachet.

When number one isn’t the best

It’s counter-intuitive, but it may be that the number one ranked side isn’t the best at a particular moment. This is because it would be unreasonable to expect superiority every second of every match. There’s a fluidity to being the best and the rankings merely reflect which team tends to perform better more often.

There are also different margins when it comes to being number one. When India became number one, many people evaluated their case with reference to the recent, great Australian side. That was unfair and inaccurate. India had been performing better than everyone else for a decent period of time. They justified their ranking. Australia, on the other hand, had been so superior for so long that they were top by a distance. They were different kinds of number one.

Room for improvement

Being the number one Test side isn’t like winning the World Cup. There’s no end point, it’s just a constantly shifting evaluation. There are always more challenges. Maintaining your position is one challenge. Winning a difficult away series you’ve previously drawn or lost is another.

Test cricket is all about competing against different teams in different conditions. You can lose to a team away and still be considered better than them, because you might thrash them in your home conditions.

No team has ever done a grand slam of home and away against every other Test nation. It’s virtually impossible. That’s a good thing. For every side, there is always room for improvement; there are always more targets. Test cricket is simply far too beautifully complex for anyone to ‘win’ at it.

That’s why we watch. That’s what we talk about. That’s the whole point.

Playing England is no fun for India

It is like being in a broken submarine at the bottom of the sea. England are the water.

England don’t hammer to get in. They just apply constant force. Every now and again, one of the Indian crew wonders whether they’ve somehow floated to the surface and opens the door a crack to have a look. The water is still there. Some of it gets in.

The water will always be there. Whether someone throws the door wide open straight away or whether people open it once a day for five days, it makes little difference. At no point will the water have gone away.

England won’t always be able to do this, but they’ve done it so frequently of late that we can say this is the best England side we’ve seen. It’s not the hat tricks or the batting counter attacks that make us say that, so much as the fact that at their worst they never fall too far behind, so they’re always THERE when the opposition slip up. They blather on about consistency interminably, but to be fair, they are delivering in that regard.

The second Test win was a case in point. It is ridiculous to concede a first-innings deficit, have your most consistent batsman get injured and then win by 310 runs. Just ridiculous. It is ‘give me half an hour and I will find you the Ark of the Covenant’ ridiculous.

When India allowed Ian Bell to carry on batting at Trent Bridge

Cricket action stops and starts and we didn’t feel very comfortable with someone being run-out when pretty much everyone on the field had stopped playing.

We don’t care too much about the technical rights and wrongs and everyone on the field seemed to share those feelings once they’d had a look at a replay. All the same, the Indian team still deserve a huge amount of credit for having the balls to allow Bell to return to the crease. It sounds pompous to say that they transcended sport, but they did. They were pretty confident that they were right and the Laws of Cricket were wrong in this instance.

Besides, a great innings in a great Test match didn’t warrant such a crap ending – one that no-one was that overjoyed about. Praveen Kumar thew the ball in like it was one he’d just found in a hedge and Abhinav Mukund took the bails off like he was the only one still playing because all his mates were going home for their tea. Which is pretty much what was happening.

When Bell was dismissed a second time, the Indians actually looked happy. People celebrated. It seemed more fitting. It seemed like it was actually part of a Test match.

Rahul Dravid can cope with a good pitch

This is a good pitch. It has led to good cricket.

A one-day pitch can be flat, because the game progresses with each over, but Test matches progress with the fall of wickets. When a match is progressing, other events other than wickets also matter more. It is how Test cricket should be.

A flat pitch tests the relentlessness and concentration of batting sides, but little more. A pitch like this one at Trent Bridge tests those things to a lesser degree, but it also tests skill and decision-making. A hundred in this context is worth so, so much.

Dravid’s value

Rahul Dravid hit a hundred and it is innings like his that remind you why a batsman’s average doesn’t directly correspond to his value. Dravid’s average is high, obviously, but if Thilan Samaraweera is a better batsman than he is, we’ll start going on work nights out at the next available opportunity.

Samaraweera is a good batsman too, but his 231 during this absolute horrow show boosted his average more than Dravid’s 117 yesterday – that’s the point we’re making. We’d describe exactly why Dravid’s innings was so good, but we have little to add to Mike Selvey’s dissection of it.

In not entirely unrelated news

Ravi Bopara achieved something similar this week. Overshadowed by a Test match and David Masters’ bizarre figures of 8-10 in the same fixture, Bopara’s innings has been lost a bit.

Only two of 44 indvidual innings in the Essex v Leicestershire match were of over 40. Billy Godleman made 77. Ravi Bopara made 178. That is exceptional.

However, while the pitch added to the challenge and therefore the achievement, County Championship second division bowling detracts from it.

What detracted from Dravid’s innings? Nothing. That is Test cricket.

England beat the eight men of India

Hyperbole, but not entirely unwarranted. Sometimes a pint of dour dissatisfaction and a willingness to take the negatives doesn’t do you any harm.

India had the misfortune of having three players handicapped by a perennially twangy hammy, a pock-marked elbow and the wild shits. This wasn’t their fault. They also didn’t bother acclimatising to English conditions – which is their fault. Some day they’ll recognise that giving the opposition a 1-0 headstart every series isn’t the best way of staying at the top of the tree.

Even so, their three remaining bowlers gave England a reminder of how the top Test side operates in the second innings – and it’s much like England, actually. They bumble along, playing fairly conventional cricket and then suddenly, out of nowhere, they viciously mug the batting team, ferociously panning them into the ground in a weird speeded-up way.

Which isn’t to say that England weren’t very good. In fact, what impressed us most is that they actually managed to polish off the last few wickets in fairly short order. In years gone by, playing a physically pained team who seemed on the brink of defeat, they’d have ended up going through the motions and would have let the game get away from them.

Not any more, but we can’t help but feel that sterner tests await.

England need to take their chance

We well remember the first Test of India’s last tour, which is weird, because we were in Canada for all but the final day.

But it’s that final day that’s important here. Nine wickets down, MS Dhoni blocked the shit out of it and for England, that was the difference between drawing the series and losing 1-0.

In recent years, India have started Test series slowly. This might be down to the fact that they tend to have half-an-hour of beach cricket as their entire build-up, but whatever the reason, the home team needs to take advantage while they can.

England also have an opportunity because half of India’s team are queueing up to see the team doctor. As the old saying goes ‘strike while the iron’s injured or insufficiently prepared’.

In other news, we’ve done a piece for Cricinfo which even we don’t really know what to make of.

Get The Wall on the board

It’s not the usual way round, but it makes a lot of sense if you follow cricket. Rahul Dravid should be on the Lord’s honours board. And now he is.

After Dravid made his hundred, there were a lot of people implying that he has played in the shadow of Sachin Tendulkar. If that’s true, it’s a very faint shadow as if there are a large number of light sources in the immediate vicinity, because we’ve considered him to be one of the finest batsmen of all time for about as long as we can remember and so has pretty much everyone else we’ve ever spoken to about him.

Rahul Dravid deserves a better nickname than The Wall. Walls are always dotted with Polyfilla. Dravid’s classier than that.

Zaheer Khan Operation Greggs latest

Bert has just left a comment drawing attention to Zaheer Khan’s performance this morning, pondering whether Operation Greggs has been put into practice. Operation Greggs involves plying Zaheer with meat and tatty pies until he’s bowling at Praveen Kumar pace.

Bert is right to raise this possibility, but it is worth investigating more thoroughly and thus far, we see little evidence that Operation Greggs has had any impact.

According to Hawkeye, Zaheer’s deliveries have averaged 80-odd mph thus far and he’s even hit 88.6mph with one. This is perfectly respectable.

He’s also got 2-9 at the time of writing. We move that a different pie be introduced. The man has a weakness, we just need to identify precisely what it is.