Dhoni’s Killer Instinct does a disappearing act
As Dhoni’s boys return victorious from New Zealand, one cannot help but stand and applaud the only Indian team to have won a test series there in the last forty one years. They are continuing their march towards cricketing supremacy and deserve most of the plaudits they are getting along the way. But sitting through the last two days of the final test in Wellington, something just didn’t seem right.
At the end of day 3, India had amassed an almost unassailable (yet not impossible!) lead of 531 with 349/5 on the board in their second innings. We all waited for the declaration that never came. But we decided to cut them some slack, maybe they’re prolonging the suspense just a little bit longer, Dhoni and Yuvraj will come out and whack the poor New Zealanders around for a few overs in the morning and send them into bat even more demoralized. Alas, this was not to be! The Indian batsmen added a leisurely 85 to their overnight lead in 18 long overs with a measly 37 runs coming off the last ten overs (hardly a great run rate from a team looking to get a move on). The chase for New Zealand: 616 runs in five and half sessions of play.
The rest, as they say, is ‘history’ (!). The Indians knocked over eight of the New Zealand batsmen before rain came to the islanders’ rescue on day 5.
So India ensured that they won the series, but they also gave away a test match that was theirs to win. With rain likely to come into play and a New Zealand batting line-up that had fallen for 197 runs in the first innings, surely going for the kill with a 500+ lead would have been the way to go. Instead, we had to sit through a draw that shouldn’t have been. Where is that ruthless killer instinct that we’ve all come to expect of Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his new breed of Indian cricketers? And why isn’t anyone too bothered about its disappearance?
With this series win India may have inched closer towards Australia and South Africa in the ICC test rankings but in those final two days of the series they have also shown that they are still miles away from the relentless drive that makes the two teams above them the most revered in world cricket.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Absolutely, I agree. But this is not the first time we have seen an “aggressive” Indian skipper prefer to play for a draw. Remember Sourav Ganguly in Steve Waugh’s last Test? I really think this reverence of “better to draw than even have a single per cent chance of losing” is what keeps India from attaining the kind of dominance that Australia and the West Indies had enjoyed in the past. One could understand the likes of Gavaskar and Wadekar being defensive because they simply did not have the resources to push for victory all the time but for people like Dhoni and Ganguly, such an attitude is unpardonable.