A spectator at the Oval held up a banner on the 3rd day of the Fourth Test that read “Anna Hazare fasts for Team India”. If India is to come back to the motherland with a series whitewash, there may well be a few more people lining up to fast. The test series hammering will go down as one of the worst in Indian cricket history ever since India won its first test match away in 1968. India’s last whitewash was in 1999 against Australia; but back then even the BCCI secretary predicted it. Does that make this test series the worst ever? Was Team India’s short team planning leading to long term failure?
Ineffective planning after World Cup success should be looked upon as the start of the downhill trend for the Indian team. The blame could be sheeted home to the BCCI and also the players to some extent. The first disappointing thing was to schedule the IPL only 3 days after the World Cup final. Did BCCI do this deliberately and take a gamble in case India failed in the World Cup? If it had happened that India didn’t win the World Cup, then the attention would quickly have been diverted to the IPL, and players and BCCI would have escaped the nation’s backlash. Either way, there should have been at least one week in between. In that week, the players should have been paraded across two or three major cities to celebrate a victory which meant so much to the nation, or should have been whisked away to their secret hideout if they had failed. The players should have had time to take the success of the field before their lucrative deals with IPL confined them on the field. This would have allowed the players to relax and take it all in before they started to aim for the next objective in their cricket schedule.
Would the England series have been a disaster had India not won the World Cup? One thing the public of India needs to understand is that the players are human, after all, and the success at the World Cup was physically and mentally draining. It is a normal human behaviour that, once such a goal has been reached through dedication, the mind seems to relax and takes time to become motivated again. In a business situation, once an employee has worked hard to get a promotion over a period of time, it is common for the individual to sustain the dedication once he/she gets the promotion. The person then needs to re-evaluate his/her goals once at the summit. It takes some time, as an individual and team, to set the next range of goals. Sometimes, people are not used to success and find it difficult to motivate themselves once successful ... or can even become complacent. Team India has suffered from both malaises on this tour.
The first time Team India’s new coach and manager came together was only a month before the England tour. The other senior players were not even together only two weeks prior. The planning towards the England tour could never have been a top priority – and if it was, then it was pathetic planning. Virender Sehwag admitted that the players planned for the World Cup final exactly one year before; if this England team was priority, when were players emulating the England series? The World Cup has been a long term goal; good planning by coaches and dedication by players ensured it was executed. Similarly, winning the England series was the goal but no plans were derived for it. This brings us to the question: how much time was required to plan for England? The answers would have been with new coach Duncan Fletcher, M S Dhoni and other senior players. Sadly, the next time all these parties were together was only two weeks prior to the first ball been bowled at Lords. Surely, in the modern world of technology, a plan could have been executed during the IPL. The poor scheduling is a good excuse to the public, but there are defining problems underneath it all.
As so often happens, though, it only takes one successful tour in the short-term future to dissolve memories of the pathetic performance in England. Team India along with the media are masters at washing a bad series away. It won’t come as a surprise, should India win the ODI series, if the news headlines read: “Team India still world champions”, and this test series will be a distant nightmare.
But, in the long term, India will face the proposition of an overseas tour after hectic schedule in the next four months again. One hopes the primary goal should be the series down under in Australia. In between is the Champions trophy (IPL’s brother), ODI series at home against England, test series and ODI against the West Indies at home. It is imperative the BCCI takes input from the team management. Whether the input has fallen on deaf ears will be determined by the schedule and the team selection for the home series against West Indies. The planning and executing could well be the significant factor in whether India can save themselves another embarrassment within six months.
The Australia test series will be nearly a year after the World Cup, and one hopes that, just like the individual in the office who has now found his new goals after his promotion, team India has found theirs. It would be nice to hear Virender Sehwag say, “We started planning for this over four months ago,” after the Adelaide test match in January next year.
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