If there is ever a bible written for sports fans, one of the first commandments has to be: "Thou shalt watch a cricket match that India plays in India." Based on the evidence of the World Cup, the Bangladesh fans are perhaps just as passionate as the Indian ones, but then the Bangladeshi team does not give them opportunities to cheer as much as the Indian team does to its fans. It is an accepted fact - and it is of course true - that it is because of the Indian cricket fan's unbelievable passion for the game that India is the engine that drives world cricket today.However, it is only when you see it from up close that you get a sense of the proportions of that passion, the cheerful insanity of it. And you watch abstract notions c
ome alive - for instance, the oft quoted fact of the crowd in India acting as the 12th man for the team. It works, and how! When the team is on song, there is non-stop bedlam. Every piece of work that is not terrible is cheered fit to bring the roof down if there is one.
And you can see players growing in confidence before your eyes. In India's thrilling tie against England, there was a point during the Strauss-Bell stand, when England seemed to be cruising to victory. The crowd lost its voice
a little, though not completely. And then, Zaheer Khan struck to get Bell out - which opened the floodgates and seemed to lend an extra decibel to forty thousand voice-boxes in the Chinnaswamy Stadium. When Strauss departed off the next ball, the noise level might have reached all the way to Delhi. With the mood of the crowd, the energy-level of the Indian team too underwent a sea-change. Suddenly, every fielder was attacking the ball.
The Indians were running like the wind, often with the man nearest to the one who was fielding also running to back up - just in case there was a mis-field. The fielders were geeing each other and the bowler up with constant encouragement and the team looked transformed from a beaten lot to one with a strong sense of urgenc
y and purpose. What the crowd also did, by its unstinting, unflagging support of the team, and by lifting the team's performance - was help paper over some disturbing weaknesses in the Indian side.
For starters, the bowling. A team that scores 338, does not have too many excuses if it can't defend it. True, the pitch was flat, but the bowling lacked penetration. There was a boundary ball virtually every over. One could argue that England's bowling was as bad, since India scored the same amount of runs as England did. However, for one thing the Indians have a higher pedigree in the batting department than any other team in the World Cup, and for another India's batsmen had to take a lot more risk to get to the total of 338 than the English batsmen.
The Englishmen were given generous lines, and helped by fielding that was safe but hardly electric - with the occasional fumble not too far away - and that is something the Indian team should be concerned about. The current Indian team resembles the kid in the playground who owns the bat. He comes and bats with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, but doesn't have the patience to bowl or field. Consequently, India have assembled a batting line-up that is the world's best - especially on sub-continental pitches. But the bowling and fielding continue to be sub-par. Given the performance against England, India will need Zaheer Khan to be inspirational for almost every match, and to ask that much of one bowler is neither fair nor realistic.
There were some mitigating circumstances for the loss - the pitch was flat and Andrew Strauss played his greatest ever ODI innings - but the fact remained that a better bowling attack would perhaps not have allowed Strauss to develop his innings into one of the best ever, or at the least, cut down his batting partners if he seemed immovable. It is critical that these questions get asked by the Indian team of itself, that they not be lost in the euphoria of a come-from-behind performance. Because if India get their bowling act together, they are likely to be unstoppable in the 2011 World Cup. After all, they will always be playing 12 versus 11.
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