Over & out

India squander a brilliant beginning by Tendulkar and Ganguly to give Australia a decisive 4-1 lead in the seven-match series

NAGPUR:  Mahendra Singh Dhoni comes to the post-match press conferences with a smile, irrespective of the outcome of the contest. And he answers every query with a smile.

He smiled away when someone posed a question best left unasked: “Are you in love?” Given the gravity of the situation the relevance of the query was debatable. Dhoni still smiled it away. Even in the face of adversity and absurdity, he failed to lose his cool.
But one hopes he lost it and spoke his mind in the dressing room. After all Sunday was an occasion when the captain needed to tell it like it is to his team, seniors included. For, India lost a match which could have and should have been won.

Chasing a formidable 318, the home side came close to the target but failed to deliver that finishing punch. From 140 for no loss in the 25th over - thanks to yet another good start provided by Sachin Tendulkar (72 off 72) and Sourav Ganguly (86 off 111 balls) - they ended up at 299 for seven, falling short of the target by 18 runs to lose the series even before it was over. The Aussies now have an unbeatable 4-1 lead going into the final match in Mumbai.

“We did not take our catches, we did not bowl at the death, we did not get the breakthroughs at the right times, we did not convert our good start, we kept losing wickets as the wrong time,” the Indian captain explained. Looking back, one wonders, were these not the failings in every match. The team, it looks, has done very little to address the problem areas.

Strategically too, India may have made a few blunders. They sent an out-of-form Rahul Dravid when the team was in need of over seven runs per over. Yuvraj Singh, Robin Uthappa and Dhoni himself were cooling their heels at that stage.

Dravid pushed and prodded for about half-an-hour (13 balls), before losing his wicket in pursuit of acceleration. Exactly 100 runs were needed in about 10 overs at that stage. When Dravid went in to bat, India needed 129 in 17. Uthappa, who created some pulse-pounding stuff later, may have been the right choice.

Both Uthappa and Dhoni rekindled hopes of a great Indian win with some swashbuckling batting, but the Aussies were not as wayward as the Indians were at the death. They tightened the screws with some imaginative bowling.

A chase for 318 entailed a solid start and India had exactly that. Tendulkar and Ganguly batted with a lot of understanding and urgency taking calculated risks to keep the asking run rate down. But once they got out, the Indian chase lost momentum. Brag Hogg, the wily left-arm spinner, struck at regular intervals to sour the home team’s hopes. Hogg emerged with four for 49 to emerge as the bowling hero for his side.

But he was not the real hero of his team’s win. Andrew Symonds continued his dream run in the series striking an unbeaten century to help his side post an imposing 317.
The total, at one stage, looked difficult to achieve as the Indian bowlers struck some blows in the middle overs. But the breakthroughs failed to rattle the 32-year-old Symonds, who hit nine fours and four sixes in his 88-ball 102 to take Australia past the 300 mark.