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Being beaten, or even annihilated, in India shouldn’t bother us. They beat us there, and we beat them here. That is the usual scenario.
Clive James, describing the home of one of his characters in The Silver Castle – a street child from Mumbai – notes: “The pavement where Sanjay was born and lived out his first difficult years, can only loosely be described as a pavement. Mainly it consists of packed earth, irrigated at intervals by rivulets of sewage”.
India’s Test cricket pitches can only loosely be described as cricket pitches. If they’re irrigated at all, it’s by a sewage of sorts: the sprays of verbal abuse (“sh*t!” being the most prominent) from fast bowlers of touring teams.
Once not even the great teams were really expected to win in India.
It is too hot, too noisy, the batsmen have to accumulate runs for hours on end to post a decent score, the Indian spinners are able to turn the ball at right angles on pitches that are so slow and unresponsive for the visiting quicks that they pray for a little raw sewage to green things up a little.
It’s a different story for the IPL, of course.
Last May, at the scene of Australia’s most recent annihilation – the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad – David Warner clobbered 109 off 54 balls.
So it’s not surprising, given the ability and inexperience of the current team, that Australia has been thrashed in the first two Tests.
After the second Test, Gerard Whateley bemoaned the fact that “rookie errors abound”.
Well, that’s because the team was full of rookies (I thought Moises Henriques erred quite impressively with 68 and 81 not out on debut in the first Test).
Seven of the eleven had played less than 20 Tests. One was debuting, another was playing in his second match and our best bowler had participated in only nine.
Compare that to the strong England side who have double the match experience of the Australian squad. They won the recent series in India but even they had their troubles, such as losing the first Test after being skittled for 191 and being forced to follow on.
They had a debutant too in opener Nick Compton but he had the captain and 87 Test veteran Alastair Cook as a companion.
After scoring a century against New Zealand yesterday Compton said of Cook: “He’s fantastic, a real solid grounding sort of guy. He’s a special guy. He’s a tough character and he kept me going when at times I wanted to get on with it a little bit.”
Our young players in India need similar support.
Let’s just get the Indian series out of the way and concentrate on England and our strength, which is our fast bowling.
Micky Arthur has said he believes Australia’s poor performance in India doesn’t mean it’s incapable of regaining the Ashes, which is all we’re really concerned about.
A thrashing in India is usually forgiven and soon forgotten because of the strangeness of the setting.
However strange a place England may seem, an Ashes series loss is never forgiven.
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