Bowlers not bowling but feeding the batsmen

The Asia Cup has reached its final stage where India and Sri Lanka will lock horns to battle for the title of Asian champs. Let's have high hopes of it being a competition between the ball and the bat.

The six-nation Asia Cup in Pakistan has been a damp squib. No crowd attendance, no competition and no upsets. To add to the woes, the game which is played with 11 players a side has been reduced to 5 or may be 6 a side.

The bowlers in any of the teams have hardly impacted the outcome of a game. In the 11 matches played till now, 10 man-of-the-match awards have gone to batsmen. Rising Sri Lankan spinner BAW Mendis was the only bowler to win the man-of-the-match award.

What a pity for a tournament which had bowlers like Murali, Vaas, Umar Gul, Sohail Tanvir, Ishant Sharma and others but not a single one of them could make headlines. If this tournament was to bring out the Asian champs then there should have been a good competition between the ball and the bat.

Here, the bowlers are like bowling machines, just hitting the deck because they have to. It looked like the bombing in Pakistan killed the pitches in Lahore and Karachi. They were life less, dead rubbers. Not that they should have been lush green, but some help to the bowlers would have done no damage.

The memories of the Chepauk test are yet to be erased where a hapless South African bowling attack was plundered by Virender Sehwag. Bowlers had no clue about what to bowl to the 'Butcher from Najafgarh'. The Chepauk strip was under the cloud as soon as the test got over.

Why a single question has not been raised on the under-prepared Lahore and Karachi strips. Not once we could see Ishant Sharma or Umar Gul bowling their whooshing bouncers. Spin wizard Murali was played with relative ease. Looking at the statistics would validate the argument further.

Twelve centuries and twenty half centuries have been recorded in the eleven games played. In three of the nine matches played in Karachi, the match aggregate was an astonishing 610 on an average. All the 600 runs and up have been scored in less than allotted 100 overs of both innings.

Thrice the target of 300 plus has been chased in less than 47 overs. The stats make the bowlers look like punching bags. They look like they are feeding the batsmen rather than bowling. There was no swing, no bounce and no turn at any stage of the game and reverse swing has become a passé as the ball is changed after 34 overs.

The most astonishing fact of this edition of Asia cup is that it has already got 10 scores of 300+, which is second highest for any tournament. The maximum number of times 300+ scores were scored in any tournament was during the 2007 World cup which was 16.

Fact of the matter remains that sub-continental pitches are not suitable for fast bowlers, but that should not mean that they become belters. In Australia, England and South Africa to some extent, the weather conditions and liveliness in tracks take care of many things. But their pitches also give 300+ scores.

With the emergence of T20 cricket, batsmen have started becoming more and more aggressive in the process have innovated too. But the bowlers neither are able to attack more nor innovate. If bowlers are stopped from bowling more than one bouncer per over, then there should be some restriction also for batsmen too.

The survival of a bowler is now becoming a difficult task. Hope they do not become rare commodities in the process. T20 has already made the willow the entertainer while the 5 ½ ounce leather is playing the complementing act.

s_gautam@dnaindia.net