Momentum lies with Pakistan

The upcoming ODI in Kanpur is one-day cricket at its most typical. Land about 15 hours before the start of the match, get through an obligatory press conference, play your match without any training or practice and leave. Neville Cardus' belief about there being much more to a cricket match than the cricket itself is rendered irrelevant. The teams come to cricket centres only for the cricket; the diarists among them can take a walk.

The teams arrived in Kanpur at about 5.30 pm. India had a press conference at their hotel and will be ready for the toss at 8.30 tomorrow morning. Shoaib Malik and Geoff Lawson, Pakistan's captain and coach, went to the ground to look at the pitch but were too late - the wicket was covered and the curator wouldn't budge. At the time of writing, 8 pm, it seemed unlikely that India would have a look at the conditions and get luckier than Pakistan.

It must have taken a lot of hard work, though, to keep Shahid Afridi away from the Green Park for so long. Two and a half years ago, here in Kanpur, Afridi took cricket to a different sphere. For about 75 minutes nothing else mattered but Afridi. His 37-ball hundred was not seen by many, so he scored one in 45 balls here in a match that not many miss: India v Pakistan. That hundred was his first in three years; he is yet to hit one since.

The teams have arrived in Kanpur in a similar scenario as they did two years ago. Pakistan had come back then to level the series 2-2 before the Kanpur match. They are 1-1 now, but Pakistan have the momentum with them following possibly their greatest run chase, at Mohali.

What would please them is that they seem to have worked out an effective batting strategy, which involves using Afridi in roles other than an opener. And on paper their batting is not their strength so, if the law of averages works, their bowlers must be close to turning a game around. Not that they haven't impressed, but they have done so in small, inconsistent doses. The number of extras they bowled at Mohali has hit their pockets, and they must have been pretty close to losing their captain Shoaib Malik because of the slow over-rate. A specialist spinner can only help them with the over-rate and they are likely to bring back Abdur Rehman on a wicket that tends to be flat.

Having dropped Murali Kartik for the previous game, doubts about India's combination still revolve around the second spinner. They will surely want to go with one more bowler after failing to defend 321, but will they drop Virender Sehwag who looked good in scoring 25 on his comeback? Five bowlers have served India well in the recent past but the more worrisome factor for India would be the inability of their bowlers to restrict the runs in the closing overs, something Mahendra Singh Dhoni has mentioned in his press conferences even as he has been optimistic about everything else.

Since the start of the series against Australia, in completed innings and up against a charge, Indian bowlers have had only two respectable showings (less than 150 runs) in the last 20 overs. Spinners have played a role both times, once when Murali Kartik dismissed Hayden to stifle Australia's chase in Chandigarh, and then in Guwahati when Harbhajan Singh and Kartik gave away 65 runs in their 20 overs. Lalchand Rajput, India's cricket manager, indicated that if the wicket was flat, a "traditional Kanpur wicket," they might bring in Kartik. Of course, they haven't seen the wicket and all that thinking can be left until tomorrow.

The drama that India-Pakistan matches offer hit a crescendo in the last game, conventional wisdom has it that the only way now is down. But, if there are two teams capable of replicating such drama at short notice, we have them playing tomorrow at the Green Park. The laptops in the press box, uncovered and on the first tier straight down the ground, can never be safe enough.

Teams (from)
India: Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Yuvraj Singh, Robin Uthappa, Mahendra Dhoni, (capt, wk), Irfan Pathan, Harbhajan Singh, RP Singh, Zaheer Khan, Sreesanth, Murali Kartik, Rohit Sharma, Praveen Kumar.

Pakistan: Salman Butt, Kamran Akmal (wk), Younis Khan, Mohammad Yousuf, Misbah-ul-Haq, Shoaib Malik (capt), Shahid Afridi, Sohail Tanvir, Umar Gul, Shoaib Akhtar, Rao Iftikhar Anjum, Abdur Rehman, Imran Nazir, Yasir Hameed, Fawad Alam.