For an Indian cricket fan the South African safari is heading towards a tragic finale. Not only has the Test series been lost but with it also India’s dream of becoming a team that could call all venues their home ground, a phrase its coach Ravi Shastri coined before the series began.
Ironically the defeat at the Centurion came on a track which, among the many shades it had, was predominantly Indian. It was the closest they have played in home-like conditions – slow with uneven bounce and a bit of turn in it. To be fair to them, unlike an Indian track, the ball suddenly reared up and swung and seamed with the occasional low bounce, making survival that much more difficult. Both the tracks India have played so far would qualify as extremely difficult, if not treacherous. It has produced exciting cricket, with the final day’s play in both the Tests exposing India’s woeful lack of batting skills and leaving the South Africans runaway winners.
These are results the Indian team is not used to. Virat Kohli in his stint as captain had conquered almost everything he surveyed, winning matches with the ease and felicity of a born champion. Even if these victories came in much more familiar conditions and some of them against teams with broken spines, the manner of the victories suggested even better things to come. It had inspired Shastri to predict a wonderful future for his team and call them potentially the best ever Indian team to have played the game.
Just eight days of cricket on foreign soil and the demons from the past have already come to haunt them. Far from being the best, they are now competing with the worst Indian performances ever. One must confess that more than these two defeats, the abject batting surrender has come as a surprise to even the most skeptic of Indian fans.
Even if some of us were not completely drowned in the gush of the winning tide at home, there appeared all the signs of this being a team that could break many frontiers the past teams had failed to breach. Its pace attack had the sting and bite, unmatched by teams bygone, and most batsmen looked in form of their life, banging the ball with so much venom that we forgot the helpful conditions in which these staggering batting feats were being achieved.
This brutal reality check now has left the most optimistic of Indian fan disoriented. Kohli, who could do no wrong till now, was subjected to the kind of scrutiny in the post-match press conferences that he is not used to. The ultra-aggressive streak which the Indian captain seemed to have harnessed well of late on and off the field, resurfaced again. And both displays of unwarranted irritability don’t make for good viewing. It may be understandable that a man of Kohli’s ability and achievements would feel let down by his teammates and the equally “ultra” aggressive reactions to the defeats, but as captain of a national team he has to reign in his temper and keep his overflowing emotions in check.
Though the series has been lost, all may not be lost yet. It is a long year ahead, with England and Australia the next stops in this journey to discover how exacting the challenges are when not under the protection of friendly home conditions. Do they have the strength to recoup and throw counter punches? If not, then, to borrow these famous lines from TS Elliot’s poem The Hollow Men, “That is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”