Team India and Short Length Balls

Blues afraid of the Short Length !

Huge expectations are on the Indian Cricket Team ahead of the World Cup. Having proved a point to critics and fans across the world by staying on top of the test rankings, it was time for India to prove a point in the shorter version of the game, but only this time against a side which who would certainly give them a run for their money.

Chasing a challenging 289, India went on to bat

without Gautham Gambhir, Virender Sehwag and Yusuf Pathan which would only serve as an excuse at the end of the day when they crumbled and got all out for 154.

Indian fans who were not too busy with being disappointed with the fall of each wicket would notice something peculiar. It was not just the aggressive bowlers who tore the Indian batting line up apart, it was also their perpetual problem of handling short pitched deliveries which is more prominent when they are not playing home.

Four batsmen got out on a short ball which was used over and over again by the pacers only to each and every batsman doing the same mistake again. The first was the master Sachin Tendulkar who got outdone by a little extra bounce. The truth became evident in the eleventh over when Morne Morkel took the confident looking Rohit Sharma’s wicket with a monstrous bouncer in the first ball of the over. Yuvraj the next man to walk in again succumbs to a short ball having faced just 4 balls.

As the Indian line up shattered one by one, it was Virat Kohli who was expected to hold fort and his half century did a help a lot. But eventually, he too got dismissed for 52. And again it was a short ball. Kohli who tried to clear the infield could not time the shot and the ball went straight into the hands of Smith at mid wicket.

And that was it. And soon the game was over. Many think India not being able to face short balls is a stereotype. It’s much more than that and a big concern for the World Cup. It happened in the last edition in the group against Bangaladesh. It happened in the one before that in 2003 when India got bowled out by Australia for a meager 125 and that game took place in Cenutrion, South Africa.

Is India’s crisis of facing short balls being passed on through the generations?

If you look at the scorecard of yesterday’s game again, you will notice that 9 of the 10 wickets were taken by fast bowlers or medium pacers. Let’s hope the problem is with just the short balls and the players give it due diligence to fix it in time for the World Cup which is set to take place in India, where of course conditions will be different.

Ramesh Ganapathy, with his first post on SportsKeeda.com