Wicket to Wicket

Well, it's time to wind up this particular discussion. My thanks to Anand Vasu, Ashok Malik, Dileep Premachandran and Prem Panicker for taking part, and to everyone who took the time to comment. We've had divergent views on whether India is getting better at Tests or worse, and on Greg Chappell and Sourav Ganguly, and many suggestions about how matters can be improved. It is written into the DNA of sport that it defies consensus, and whether India go downhill or uphill from here, I'd expect such a discussion two years from now to have a similar divergence of views. That's the fun!

Comments will be open on earlier posts of this discussion for another two days, and will then be closed. Feel free to have your say until then. And do follow Cricinfo's coverage of India's upcoming tour to West Indies, where some of the questions raised in this discussion will, one hopes, find answers.

The questions that Amit poses are interesting ones, and I think Indian cricket is nearer to finding the answers than it’s ever been.

Are there enough world-class bowlers out there? Yes, and no. Some of the pace-bowling talent that has come through is outstanding. Provided they can stay fit and enthusiastic, and steer clear of the glamour-laziness route that plagued a couple of their predecessors, Munaf Patel and S Sreesanth will have a lot more to offer. Rudra Pratap Singh has already given glimpses of his potential, and Vikram Raj Vir Singh will certainly improve with time and experience. He certainly has the raw pace to trouble batsmen. The key is not to expect too much too soon.

As Greg Chappell told this writer recently, most of these kids have not played too much high-level cricket, and they will break if too much is asked of them. Someone like Lakshmipathy Balaji – India’s best pace bowler in two consecutive series against Pakistan – still has a role to play, and the larger the pool of talent, the better. With the schedules as they are, none of these young bowlers should be playing more than 10 Tests and 20 ODIs in a year.

Amit, the word 'produce' seems to imply a well-planned system, a well-honed assembly line, a premium on R&D.

When has that ever been the case with Indian cricket? Our feeder system has traditionally been the streets and gullies and maidans, where the emphasis is on batting and where bowling well is important only to the extent that if you could get a batsman out, you got a turn at bat.

Start at the boring bottom: work out what has happened to our fielding in the Tests, particularly our close-in cordon, who are the spinners' biggest allies when playing at home.

Our slip cordon has vanished, there is no specialist bat-pad/short legs and the result of that was there for all to see versus England-B in Mumbai.

This discussion was supposed to be about how India fares in the two forms of the game, but somehow got held up around the narrow subject of whether Greg Chappell is good for the team or not. Comparing the Wright-Ganguly pair with Chappell and Dravid is, at this point, somewhat premature. Firstly, Chappell and Dravid haven't been in charge for long enough to pass judgement on them. And secondly, causality can never be so simply ascertained.

There are a multitude of factors that go into the making of a team: the coach, the captain, the selectors, the times, the resources available. That last is a critical point: Wright and Ganguly would certainly have done much better had Mahendra Singh Dhoni been around in their time, and much worse if Virender Sehwag had not. It's a complicated business, determining levels of responsibility.

Anyway, to take this discussion off personalities, let me throw a few questions to the participants.

Although not a part of this discussion, Different Strokes contributor Krishna Kumar has an excellent post up on the topic we are discussing: "Bringing some perspective." Do read.

This discussion will, meanwhile, continue late tonight or tomorrow. It ain't over yet!

Coming into this debate I feel a bit like Yuvraj Singh did a few years back. It was great to be part of it, and to contribute, but perhaps I was a few places too far down the order, for Dileep Premachandran and Prem Panicker have already put the team well on the way to the target, leaving me with little to do. I think it has been quite comprehensively established that there is no decline to speak of in Tests, while in ODIs India have gone from being a team that went into the fifth match of a bilateral series 2-2 with such regularity that it was a joke, to one that presses so hard on the pedal that series are being decided at the earliest possible juncture.

There has been a quantum shift in what we want to do, and the "we" in that sentence is worth looking at. While all the stakeholders that are involved in Indian cricket broadly want one thing – success for the team in all forms of the game, it might be useful to see how the immediate, short-term, and long-term goals of these parties are set.

Firstly there's the team management, consisting of primarily the captain and coach, but also including the selectors and that rare BCCI official interested in the cricket the national team plays. The team management have embarked on a program that will develop a squad of players that can pitch up, play purposeful cricket, within the roles they are assigned, and give the team the best possible chance of succeeding.

A funny thing happened on my way to this pulpit – I lost my sermon. Or more accurately, found it pre-empted most eloquently by Dileep Premachandran.

Presuming for the sake of argument that the breast-beating over the Test side has to do with Greg Chappell's tenure as coach (a presumption based on Ashok Malik's kick-off argument about the coach's Machiavellian machinations), what exactly are we talking about?

Under the Chappell regime, India has played 11 Tests, won five, and lost two. Excuse me, this is reason enough for us to break out the sackcloth and ashes why?

India’s prosperity in the one-day game, and austere times in the Test arena should surprise no one that’s even remotely clued into the game. The more complex skill-sets needed for the longer version mean that revitalisation will take longer than it would in the one-dayers, where a fresh face or three can engineer an immediate turnaround. Frankly, it’s laughable to read anguished columns about India’s decline as a Test side. Decline implies a previous state of excellence, a tall claim for a team that hasn’t won a series of note outside the subcontinent since Rahul Dravid was playing schools cricket.

There were three great results in the time that Sourav Ganguly and John Wright guided the team beyond the turbulent waters of the match-fixing scandal. The first was a stunning home win against Australia, the result of three scarcely believable individual performances – VVS Laxman and Dravid (never forget that he was Butch Cassidy to Laxman’s Sundance Kid) at Kolkata, and Harbhajan Singh over the final two Tests. That was followed nearly three years later by a draw in Australia, albeit against a side lacking the irreplaceable Glenn McGrath, and an epochal first series win in Pakistan, against opponents riddled with problems.

In between, series were drawn away in England, at home against a New Zealand team that played the percentages beautifully, and a Pakistan team that escaped defeat in Mohali to inflict a final-day mauling in Bangalore. There was a shellacking at Australian hands on home turf in 2004 – with the captain bailing out half an hour before the toss in the decisive Test – and also the now-familiar capitulation in the West Indies, against bowlers who wouldn’t even have been allowed near the nets in Caribbean cricket’s heyday. A good team with three or four batsmen that had legitimate claims to greatness? Perhaps. World-beaters? Only if you were blinded by patriotism and under the influence.

I blame Greg Chappell. I wouldn’t want to call him Dr Faustus – too literary and dramatic a metaphor for someone I’ve come to associate with low cunning – but he’s struck a bargain with the devil, in this case with one-day cricket.

Chappell knows he’s here for a year – I can’t see him sticking around in India after summer 2007. He knows he’s coaching the team of a society that can’t tell the difference between good cricket and facile victories against an English C team. He knows he’ll make a fortune if he wins India the World Cup. He’s ready to pay a small price for it – scupper the Indian Test team.

Luckily, he’s been helped by a Board that’s too busy playing factional politics or fixing blockbuster deals, by a captain, Rahul Dravid, who’s proving to be as commanding and independent minded as, frankly, Manmohan Singh, and by a media too much in awe of the Chappell mystique to ask hard questions.