India's grade card

One of the hardest things for a fan to do these days is to retain in his mind an uncluttered sense of how the Test team is doing. Test match tours are tacked on to one-day contests, one-day tournaments (the World Cup, the Champions Trophy,) keep elbowing and shoving their way into your consciousness, players are picked and dropped from Test match teams on account of their limited-overs performances, and all these things together create a hybrid sense of well-being or despair.

So before the one-day series against England begins, and before its results colour our feelings about the Test matches that have preceded it, it might be useful to take stock of our standing in the only arena that counts, Test cricket.

Out of 10, I think we’re at 5; if we were using letters instead of numbers, we’d be graded B. We lost to South Africa away and Australia at home when we really shouldn’t have done. We drew against England the last time they toured, when they were an underdone team, and that did us no credit. Losing to Pakistan 1-0 on their grounds wasn’t great but it was sort of acceptable. Beating the West Indies in the Caribbean was a milestone but given how bad Windies are now, beating them 1-0 wasn’t a rousing statement about a resurgent India. Beating Bangladesh was a relief for the reasons referred to in the first paragraph: the modern tendency to let one-day emotions tint our Test match feelings. But this one was different.

One, we beat a decent team that fancied itself after destroying the West Indies. The argument that England was playing its second string pace attack is unpersuasive: if Chris Tremlett, James Anderson and Ryan Sidebottom had won England the first Test (as they nearly did) we wouldn’t have heard any excuses about them being ‘B Team’ back-ups. It’s like an Indian fan sighing for Munaf Patel, L Balaji, Irfan Pathan and Ashish Nehra. In the contemporary game people are always injured and someone generally does the job.

I thought the English bowlers did well: it was their batting that did them in, in the Trent Bridge Test. Sidebottom was my favourite: he bowled well and his look of windblown frustration and wordless rage was a constant delight. I think he was auditioning to play the Saxon serf in a film about the Norman yoke.

Two, the pleasure of watching Sachin Tendulkar grinding out the runs, Sourav Ganguly playing fluently, yet solidly, like a left-handed Gundappa Viswanath and VVS Laxman mothering the lower order like an anxious but elegant stork, was a balm after the perverse disruptions of the Chappell years. For them the series was a vindication. After the ugly, hysterical talk of their selfishness, their lack of team spirit, their nearness to the knacker’s yard, it was good to see them show us what we’ll miss when they do retire. (The shot of the tournament was Anil Kumble's falling inside-edge for a hundred. He was always a bowling Titan; now he's Kanhai.

Three, it was great to watch the young(ish) ones help us win. Dinesh Karthik and Wasim Jaffer might, with a bit of luck, be the opening pair India’s been looking for and with Virender Sehwag likely to press for a place, it’s nice to have competition for the opening spots. Mahendra Singh Dhoni showed us why he’s an exceptional player: his ability to adapt his homemade style to every circumstance is endlessly impressive. He’s looked like captaincy material right through this series. (I’ve often wondered what that means: I think it means someone who seems articulate, responsible and composed on and off the field. Dhoni manages that, comfortably) Given that one of my cleverer suggestions before the series began was to play Karthik as 'keeper so India could drop Dhoni for Yuvraj, I'm feeling contentedly foolish. RP Singh was a decent foil to India’s star turn, Zaheer Khan. Zaheer’s performance was a once-in-a-generation spectacle for the Indian fan: I can’t remember the last time an Indian quick was our dominant bowler in all three tests of a series played outside the sub-continent. Even Chetan Sharma, twenty one years ago, starred in only two of the three Tests we played.

Finally, this series was different because it was played on wonderful grounds (lovely to look upon, great drainage, a soothing sense of first-world order) in front of happy full houses. The one thing that qualified my pleasure in that great series we won in Pakistan the time before last, were the empty stands. Things aren’t much better on Indian grounds when Test matches come round. This, when most of the tickets in our stadiums are given away to freeloaders. In England, concessional tickets for the last day were ten pounds for kids and twenty for grown-ups! I can’t bring myself to imagine what full-price tickets cost—and still they pack them in. Watching a match being played in a deserted concrete doughnut is like being shown a preview of Test cricket’s death. In England, on the evidence of this series, the game is triumphantly, joyfully alive.

Still, if Australia is A+, a B is fair. We’ve beaten England, but Sri Lanka looks like the second best team in the world in both forms of the game. Definitely B+. They’ll kill England at home (in the interests of even-handedness let me say that if it was India visiting, they’d kill us too). But I could be persuaded to abandon this measured view quite easily. If we beat Pakistan in India and Australia away… hell, if we lose to Pakistan at home and beat Australia in Australia, we’ll be Masters of the World. We’ll switch grading notations to serve notice that the cricketing balance of power had shifted eastwards: instead of the boring Alpha plus, we’ll be alif awwal.