well-known batting woes on bouncy pitches. Suresh Raina struggles to handle extra bounce, Rohit Sharma and Yuvraj Singh get into trouble when seam movement is thrown into the mix, MS Dhoni is not in danger of losing his wicket but doesn't score as fluently against such deliveries and India don't have Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir. Virat Kohli has improved on this front - in 2008, Zaheer Khan troubled him with a lot of bouncers in an Irani Cup game - but India are still heavily dependent on Sachin Tendulkar to set the pace. He failed in Durban, and the rest, barring Kohli, couldn't handle the heat.
The track at the Wanderers, the venue of the second ODI, will have bounce but will it do so much as to trouble India? It will be interesting to see how Tendulkar bats. Will he take on the bowling and counter-attack or will he see out the new ball to ease the burden on the middle order? Will India open with Rohit and bring in Yusuf Pathan, who's himself no stranger to trouble against the short ball, in the lower order? This is a big series for several India contenders for the World Cup and it will be interesting to see how the think-tank accommodates them.
And what about India's bowling? Dhoni has already indicated that these are his best bowlers and he will persist with them. Ashish Nehra has had three bad games in a row - he leaked runs in the end overs in the fourth ODI against New Zealand, and struggled with the new ball in the fifth - but his record suggests he will remain one of the key bowlers. It was Munaf Patel who shouldered the burden of bowling in Powerplays and in the final overs in the last game but Nehra was doing that job effectively till recently.
For South Africa, the first ODI was a near-perfect game. In the absence of Jacques Kallis, the team lacks balance and the tail seems long. But AB de Villiers and JP Duminy paced themselves well to control the middle overs. However, concerns remain. Had one of them fallen, would the lower order have the talent and the mental strength to tackle the situation? The next four games will give us a clue.
South Africa packed in four fast bowlers and all of them delivered in the first game. For a brief while, when Dhoni and Kohli were batting, India showed South Africa some of the problems they are likely to face in the World Cup on what would be entirely different tracks in the subcontinent. It also presents another interesting conundrum: is playing and beating India on bouncy tracks in this series the ideal preparation for the World Cup? New Zealand did something similar when they steamrolled India at home just before the 2003 World Cup but it was India who went on to reach the finals then. Or will we see more benign pitches in the rest of the series?
No comments:
Post a Comment