Ole! Victory at last for Team India over Australia Down Under! It took far more than expertise with the white ball for Dhoni’s men to break a seven-month jinx.

By R. Mohan

There is light at the end of the tunnel, after all. The victory, even in a T20 game that is usually forgotten the moment the number of spectators is counted and the money deposited in the bank, had many positive points for Team India and its beleaguered captain Dhoni.

Young legs, eyes and hands that hit the stumps with frightening regularity made all the difference. The common mistake spectators and followers of cricket make is to equate victory with team spirit and defeat with dissension. This is one deflated Indian team that was simply knit by the common purpose of having to win something in order to keep its crumbling credibility intact and the T-20 win came like a modest fig leaf.

The victory does not change too much except to engender the hope that the tri-series following the T-20s will by no means be a washout. What the win demonstrated was the kind of intensity of cricket needed to win in Australia, probably the toughest place in the world to beat a home team, regardless of what the circumstances and ranking of Australia on the computerized scale may be in any form of the game.

There is huge ground to cover to beat the Australians on their home soil. South Africa and then England beat them in Test series Down Under on their way to the top of the Test rankings with very special efforts. That kind of sustained and intense competitiveness is probably beyondTeam India in the Test match arena now. Honestly, the passage of time that rendered the seniors incapable of such a big effort at this point in their lives and careers led to this.

Besides intensity, what touring teams need to perform in Australia is a kind of thick-skinned ability to not let the hostile crowd reception get to you. The young and inexperienced like Virat Kohli and Ishant Sharma did not realise this, which is why they fell prey to reacting boorishly to the Yobbo-like tactics of the common Aussie spectator who is never far from crossing the line of decency in every sense, including the racial.

The barrackers have this indecent ability to get under the skin of visiting players. It is the same around the cricketing world, except that it does not affect the teams visiting India so much because they cannot understand the lingo in which much of the cursing is done. It really hurts when you know what the person is saying, as Kohli revealed, somewhat ineloquently.

Not all the barrackers have the class of the guy they have built a statue to at the SCG.

The other factor that is different from most cricketing countries is the size of the grounds. Not only do fielders cover huge amounts of real estate in order to save runs but also the batsmen have to be nimble footed and physically strong enough to squeeze the runs out by actually having to run 22 yards several times over. The laziness of the Indian stroke player, who is more accustomed to hitting the ball to the boundary or over it, has to be overcome just to keep his team competitive in these demanding big grounds like the SCG and MCG.

The pitches are also such that no batsman can assume he is in despite the true nature of most surfaces. The extra bit of bounce that is always to be had means a batsman, who is on the attack as in limited-overs cricket, can never be certain that he has played himself in. Usually, once he is in, he can toy with the bowling on slower pitches and small grounds made even smaller by the boundary line being brought in some distance these days, probably for the sake of television coverage more than player safety.

Team India did not sustain the T20 performance in the first ODI but then the MCG pitch was much more Australian in its bounce and that flummoxed the famous batsmen a bit. And yet there is the hope that the white ball would bring back the instincts on which Team India thrives.