CHENNAI: All is fair in love, war, and well, sport too. In the now manically obsessed realm of win-at-all-costs ethos and sporting Shylockism, you can’t justify your methods without clawing a pound of your rival’s flesh. Here is where winning equates only to winning, and inversely losing only denotes losing. Forgotten or denigrated to a subsidiary, and at times perfunctory, level is your means. Those times of sport as a fair and square pursuit of gentlemen exists in a distant, gentrified world of knights and squires. Or perhaps it was just a mere illusion transcended by the immortals of the game or may be hued by our own urge to romanticize.
Hence, the means to accomplish an end carries no degree of righteousness — pseudo or real. Winning is not only everything, but also the only thing. And how it’s accomplished — gloriously or ingloriously or cut-throatily or soporifically — brooks no argument. So can’t be questioned/derided/criticised, Team India’s strategy to gazump South Africans with a deadly tessellation of flaky, dusty surfaces and a confrere of guileful exponents of the conditions.
It’s not as if they sought something deceitful or unlawful. They merely maximised their home advantage — though taking out even the slightest pretense of a parity-playing field — and hence such against-the-spirit-of-the-game aspersions ring a tad hollow or at the most pretentious. In plain speak, India gave the No 1 team and the best travellers in the last decade, a plain, painful drubbing, where South Africa didn’t so much play poorly as not play at all, defected as they were by retirements and injuries to key personnel.
Justifiably, Virat Kohli & Co are basking in the afterglow. Kohli, like most other counterparts, staunchly professes give-what-you-get retaliation code: “Fact is that we have won the series. That is not going to change how many articles are written about the pitch, how many are written about our batting or undue advantage for our spinners.”
By his logic, what you get is what you give, evoking instances of India being ambushed on bouncing beauties and green mambas on the road. Fair enough. But what complicates the scenario is, you can’t concretely discern the progress of the young team, unlike perhaps when the golden generation toppled the Aussies in 2001. There was a clear portent of India rising, and so did they in the next decade, eventually reaching the pinnacle of Test ranking.
Kohli asserts this side can beat any side anywhere in the cricket globe. But can they realistically walk the talk, after just two series wins in the subcontinent? For instance, can their batsmen survive English bowlers on the first morning on a Trent Bridge-like surface. Or can they shackle David Warner and friends on as placid a track as they had recently served up to the Kiwis at the WACA? Or even at their own backyard, can they negotiate an inspired Yasir Shah and Zulfiqar Babar in full flight in Nagpur? Or a Dale Steyn at full pelt in Cape Town?
At least at this juncture, Kohli’s claims sound a little preposterous. “Of course, credit has to be given to them. The conditions suited them, but they executed their plans well. But they are not yet a finished product, and whether they are truly a world-beating side can only be assessed if they win in all conditions. The biggest positive was Ravichandran Ashwin. With the form he is in, he would have taken wickets in most conditions. The way Ajinkya Rahane batted and Umesh Yadav bowled in Delhi, too, were promising signs. But their biggest tests are yet to come,” reckoned former spinner Maninder Singh.
Those tests are still far away, though Kohli would know that the favours would be reciprocated in kind. Whether they can transcend those will drop discernible hints on whether they are an all-weather suit or mere backyard bullies. Then those we-were-undone-by-conditions excuse-lines will be a soluble defence.