Team India makes several plans to trap the visiting team. Similarly, a professional side coming to India also prepare some strategy before embarking on a tour of India. Most of the time, Indian rope trick succeed as we never allow the opposition forge ahead from the word go. This has been the practise for many years and only few touring teams could spoil the bid successfully. By preparing a spinner’s wicket we make sure that our bowlers have upper hand all the time and the weakness if any in our batting will not come to the fore by our tactical approach.
The lopsided approach in preparing tailor made wickets to suit our spinner is the trick in our sleeves for long. However we dug our own graveyard, as the opposition had a better spin option and they made a match of it. In the late 1970s we laid a wicket to suit Narendra Hirwani, our leg spinner for the Brabourne Test under Dilip Vengsarkar. But John Bracewell, off-spinner and a grave digger by profession from Kiwi land dug our own graveyard and we lost the game miserably. It is highly risky to lay spinner’s track as pointed by Harbhajan Singh. Harbhajan enjoyed rank turners at home to reap rich harvest of wickets with over appealing and a tweak of his arm, now find the method wrong. As R Ashwin has replaced him, he would like to forget the wily off spinner and talk about Ishant Sharma and Mohammed Shami. Now Ishant is ill and Shami may fall in trap of injured list any time.
Anil Kumble is in charge of the team after the negative approach of Ravi Shastri saw we could not do much on overseas tours. Anil Bhai can plan an encore with both pace and spin combination and not to rely on spin all the time. With neutral umpires at both the ends and a tricky track, we may find difficult to come out with flying colors in the end. Australians under Ian Chappell won a series in India with Ashley Mallette doing the damage and bettered the performances of both E.A.S. Prasanna and Srinivas Venkatraghavan to upset the applecart. Again in the year 1978, MCC under Tony Grieg made use of Vaseline in front of local umpires to win a series 3-0 straightaway before an odd consolation win came our way. English professional side won in India after losing the first test at Ahmedabad. We have not learnt lessons and may fall in the spin trap as both Ajinkya Rahane and Rohit Sharma are susceptible to spin.
Battle line is drawn for 13 long home test matches to follow and our knack of playing on spin tracks may boomerang in the end as in the past. Indian rope trick was successful when home umpires were officiating matches as umpires and the ICC pitch committee did not function then to put a break on home made wickets. We look for an open chance to win against weak opposition as our overseas record is not encouraging in the recent past. It is now or never situation to make up for the overseas loses in England, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.
Calicut Krishnan
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
