Victory to the valorous

The Indians dominated on every day of the Test series

There were only a countable few, and I must admit, extremely optimistic ones, to have augured such a result in the Indian Cricket Team’s favour.

Inspired team led by an inspired captain

An inspired captain, a resilient team, and a belief in the dressing room is all it took to decimate “the best touring test team” and presently the No.1 Test Team in a Test Series which was watched world over (while there was a revolution in the form of a Day-Night Cricket match taking place in another part of the world) for reasons beyond the more routine aspects of the game.

There were tweets that did rounds about how Indian pitches were denigrating the levels of Test Cricket across the globe, and I personally feel this was substantiated by the Nagpur pitch in more ways than one. But that aside, was it the pitches which won India the series, or was it the brand of cricket they played?

A quick flashback to Mohali (yes that seems so long back in time) – a captain short of runs, a bowling attack which was coming at the back of some real hard bashing by the South African ODI batting line up and a few players who were making a comeback to the side.

There’s a common thread that runs across these groups – all of them had a point to prove, and boy did they prove it! Indian spinners led by Ravichandran Ashwin and ably supported by the comeback man, Ravindra Jadeja and Amit Mishra bowled South Africa out of the game in Mohali, quite literally.

Indian bowlers made the best use of the conditions

On a pitch that wasn’t really the regular “Mohali Belter”, the Indian bowlers who had the back of their captain, always, did something that a lot of Indians had almost forgotten an Indian lineup could do – bring the team back into the game.

Every time Virat Kohli wanted a wicket and made a bowling change to effectuate that, almost every time, his bowlers delivered, and that’s a big plus for any captain. Be it Mohali or the lone day at Bengaluru or the venomous Nagpur wicket or the final test at Kotla, you could literally sniff a wicket any moment, just something seemed to be happening in the middle, always.

To read the pitch into the equation and attribute a team’s success/failure to the tracks has been a long-standing method of analysing a victory or a defeat, especially in Test Cricket. But, what such attribution mustn’t take away is the due credit to the players who perform on such tracks and ensure that the other side is outclassed.

The Freedom Series is a perfect example of the same, while there was assistance from the tracks, it is the way the two sides extracted maximum benefits out of these tracks is what determined the result of this series.

Hence, to give an outright judgment over how the pitch made it unfair for one team would be to say that a localite at a college could outclass a hosteller in the exams because he was served better food, we must remember, this was until this series, the best touring side and had an undefeated streak which lasted for a little over 9 years.

Contrasting performances by both teams

South Africa, for most part of the series, were defeated way before they even stepped out on the ground, and that was evident in the way they applied themselves all through the series, especially their batting unit.

There was so much that was talked around the premise of there being square turning wickets that all the South African batsmen, for a major part of the series, could do was to anticipate square turn on every ball, eventually getting out to the straighter ones, to the illusion of spin than the spin itself.

At the end of this series, ironically, the two teams stand at opposing ends of a paradox. India have hit almost all the right notes, their fast bowling seems to be the most improved of all (given the state it has been in for a long long time).

The spinners have stepped up to every instance where they were required, the batting with a few issues with a few of the batsmen, has largely been pretty good.

For South Africa, as they say, it is time to drag their feet back to the drawing board and look at what went wrong, and for a team of their repute and conscience, they must already, somewhere deep inside, know what went wrong where.

The brouhaha settles, and we come to the end of another series. End to an exhilarating period of play. Think of someone who batted for 297 balls for a 43 and ended up on the losing side just when he could see the light of the rescue boat, at last.

Cricket is a game which opens so many books for us, at times even the quintessential “Life Lessons” one, doesn’t it?