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ShareThis new Indian team, with the retirement of Ganguly and Kumble, and perhaps that of Dravid to follow soon, will no longer play second fiddle to the Australians
"All the wickets around the world are pretty flat now and you need big, tall bowlers who are going to get extra bounce," Ricky Ponting said in an interview last year.
He might have been right, but I doubt he imagined the "big, tall bowlers" would be Indian. Less than a year later, it was Ponting who was hopping and prodding on the fast and bouncy Perth track as the 6'5" Ishant Sharma loped in with his hair flowing in the wind like a Dennis Lillee.
A team that once opened both its batting and bowling with the 5'6" Sunil Gavaskar, and relied almost entirely on spinners like Kumble to get wickets on crumble-tops, now has an assembly line for fast bowlers -- Ishant and Zaheer, Munaf and Pathan, Sreesanth and RP Singh -- who can compete in a variety of conditions, from the pace and bounce of Perth, to the seam and swing of Headingley, or the reverse swing of Mohali.
At the same time, India's spin factory continues to hum. All that Amit Mishra needed was an opportunity to play -- which he finally got, thanks to a Kumble injury -- and he bowled India to victory on debut. And there's teenager Piyush Chawla too. While Australia struggles to find a leg-spinner half as talented as Shane Warne, India is bidding adieu to Kumble almost in relief as it looks forward to exciting new talent whose time under the sun is overdue.
It's a similar story in batting. A favourite canard until a year back was that there was no alternative despite the decline of the fab four -- Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, and Laxman. That got punctured in the T20 World Cup, which the senior players opted to skip, never imagining how this form of cricket would captivate the popular mind. It opened the door for players like Gautam Gambhir, Rohit Sharma and Robin Uthappa to showcase their prodigious talents. Combined with the already established Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh and MS Dhoni, it turned out to be a world champion side. But that was just T20, wasn't it, asked Ponting. He got his answer again when India won the tri-series Down Under for the first time. And don't forget the flak Dhoni caught at the start of that series for insisting that Dravid and Ganguly had no place in his one-day side.
But could they have done it without Tendulkar's important knocks in the finals? The answer to that came in Sri Lanka. After the Test team floundered against the mystery carom-ball spinner Ajantha Mendis, it was the one-day side, minus an injured Tendulkar, that showed how to tame Mendis.
The speed with which Gambhir has adapted to Test cricket, that too at the top of the order, leaves little room for doubt that the likes of Suresh Raina and Rohit Sharma too are ready to step into the shoes of Ganguly and Dravid. That also means younger legs on the field, ending a bane of Indian cricket: sluggish out-fielding. An example of the new zing was evident in the manner in which debutant Murali Vijay ran out Mathew Hayden with a direct hit in the current Test. When have you last seen a Ganguly or Tendulkar do that? And the way Sehwag and Gambhir, Dhoni and Yuvraj, Raina and Rohit run between the wickets is no less than what the Aussies have been doing for years.
That brings us to another cog in the Aussie success story: the wicketkeeper-batsman. But if Adam Gilchrist's dual role gave depth to the Aussie batting, MSD promises to take it to another level with his triple role. Captaincy sits easy on Dhoni, as his three fifties in Mohali and Nagpur show.All this augurs well for Indian cricket as it comes out of the transition period under Dravid and Kumble, who never looked like natural captains. It was as though captaincy had been thrust upon them.
Yes, it's too early to write off the Aussies, who remain the number one Test side. But this new Indian team, with the retirement of Ganguly and Kumble, and perhaps that of Dravid to follow soon, will no longer play second fiddle to the Australians. They have shown in the T20s and ODIs that they expect to beat the Aussies consistently, and not just be content with the odd victory here and there. The only X-factor is the selection, but new talent is irrepressible after the advent of the T20 leagues. As the French philosopher Voltaire said, nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.
