DLF League

Tuesday 11, November 2008

What the press is saying...

INDIA 

‘India ends Aussies dominance of world cricket’. In no mood for understatement in the aftermath of India’s impressive and historic win over Australia, the Hindustan Times proclaimed the ‘death’ of Australian cricket. Happy to mix emotion and metaphors with the gayest of abandon, the Hindustan summed up victory in the fourth Test in Nagpur with some aplomb: ‘Led by MS Dhoni, a captain who thinks outside the box, India pulled the rug from under the Kangaroos with a 172-run win.’

Echoing the headlines of the Hindustan, chief selector Krishnamachari Srikkanth suggested that victory for India over Australia marked the start of a “transition” of power within world cricket, whilst the former chairman of selectors, Dilip Vengsarkar, predicted a bright future for the team, that should “sustain and remain” their newly found status as the world’s number one side.

Meanwhile The Times of India was celebrating a “resounding” victory in more muted fashion, reflecting on the departures of former captains Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble, with the latter revealing that the change of pace post-retirement would see the record-breaking leg-spinner switch his focus from taking wickets to pictures: “I will take some time off to take photographs. I want to challenge myself in different ways."

Which is precisely what the Express India believes the Indian team will have to do after defeating an Australian side that has “lost its bark”. Elsewhere in the Express, Indian legend Sunil Gavaskar gives, amongst all the hyperbole surrounding Nagpur, a more sober appreciation of departing hero, Sourav Ganguly’s, career suggesting that “at the one-day level, he is a great player. With the number of runs he has made, the number of man of the match awards he won he is right up there. But at the Test level, he was just a level short because he was not as consistent.”

The Rediff was less reticent in its praise for Ganguly: ‘Though he was not as talented as his other colleagues in the Fab Four, he still made the most impact of them all in Indian cricket… He was the most determined cricketer you could ever across and his passion for the game made up for everything he lacked as a batsman or a fielder.’

AUSTRALIA 

Australia and its media are unused to sporting defeat, so when their cricket team is beaten this emphatically, the reaction is fierce. The Melbourne Age caught the mood, printing ‘the lamentable’ Ricky Ponting’s remarks in response to the criticisms meted out by various former captains. Allan Border and Ian Chappell were among those questioning the skipper’s use of part-time bowlers to speed up over rates in India’s second innings.

Border is a Cricket Australia board member, and Ponting said he was "disappointed with some of the criticism, particularly from former Australian captains and Cricket Australia board members," before explaining his reasons for the go-slow: "As captain of the Australian cricket team I feel I have a responsibility to play the game in the right spirit. I have an obligation to bowl 90 overs in a day's play and the way we were heading, if the quicks had continued we would have been maybe 12 overs down.”

The Age foresees a difficult future for Australia’s once-vaunted machine. ‘In the same central Indian town where Australia conquered its final frontier four years ago,’ the paper concludes, ‘the harsh reality of life without three of the champions who orchestrated that triumph — Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Adam Gilchrist — hit home for an Australian team that is entering an uncertain and rugged era.’

But there was qualified support for Ponting in The Australian, which urges caution before condemning the Australian captain. Whilst acknowledging that many ex players were ‘shaking their heads in amazement that he seemed more interested in avoiding a one match ban than winning the Test’, the paper argues that he has responded brilliantly to adversity before, namely after the Ashes were lost in 2005.

‘Irrational calls for his and various other heads’, says the paper, were unnecessary then, and would be wrong now. They do suggest, however, that Ponting’s frenetic innings on day five, when he edged his first ball through the slips and was run out from his sixth, was the mark of a man ‘not coping well with the pressure’.
 

ENGLAND

India’s triumph over Australia has unsurprisingly set tongues wagging in Britain. With England due to face India in two Tests and seven one-day internationals over the coming weeks, to say nothing of the 2009 Ashes series, England has a vested interest in the fortunes of both sides. The British media have been fascinated by the recent series, with the majority arguing that it marks a clear downturn in Australia’s fortunes, and the potential emergence of a new cricketing superpower in MS Dhoni’s team.

Mihir Bose, writing for The BBC, explained that the contest perfectly encapsulated the fluctuating fortunes of the two teams: “What made this series remarkable is how often Australia played like India and India played like Australia. Australia specialised in letting India off the hook. The script when playing Australia is not meant to be like this.”

Christopher Martin-Jenkins in The Times was equally impressed with India’s performance and is in little doubt that they will start the upcoming series as favourites: “Although Sourav Ganguly followed Anil Kumble into retirement yesterday, India, whose victory lifted them to second behind Australia in the ICC Test rankings, have a perfectly balanced team in their own conditions, now under the exciting and enterprising command of Mahendra Singh Dhoni.”

He also maintained that if England and Australia want to consistently challenge on the sub-continent, their frontline spinners, Monty Panesar and Jason Krejza respectively, will have to improve: “Both have to develop a missing art: in Krejza’s case, a ball that genuinely turns from leg to off; in Panesar’s, a proper arm ball. Compare yesterday’s enforcers: Harbhajan Singh, who has the doosra, and Amit Mishra, a seasoned leg-spinner with a top-spinner and a googly.”

Simon Briggs of The Telegraph was in little doubt as to when India seized the initiative: “Australia really lost this series in Mohali, where the introduction of a crafty little leg-spinner called Amit Mishra caught them unawares. Since then, they have played Mishra more confidently, limiting him to seven wickets in the final two Tests. But the damage was done: it is virtually impossible to come from behind against India in their own conditions.” He went on to examine “the storm of ill-feeling that has surrounding Ricky Ponting’s captaincy on the fourth evening,” describing the efforts of the Australian part-timers Ponting employed to lift the Australian over-rate as “club-standard rubbish.”

However, Mike Selvey of The Guardian offered support for the beleaguered Australian captain: “Ponting should not carry the can for the debacle on his own... For starters, he may have been guilty of little more than what he might have viewed as extreme realism, flawed as that might have been. If he simply got his priorities hopelessly wrong (which does not mean he was putting himself before the team) then surely it would be against his ethic not to front up and admit it before facing the inevitable calls for his resignation.”