India's Nemesis: Spin Bowling!
http://www.senore.com/Cricket/MS-Dhoni-c2028 was Steve Waugh, he could well have termed the country as ‘The Final Frontier’.
So, when the Indians embark upon their three Test match series against Sri Lanka from the 18th of July, they will know that they need to overturn history if they want to win the Test series.
Let us face the statistics first. India has travelled to Sri Lanka on five different occasions for a bilateral Test series. And they have won only one Test series, and that was in 1993 – 17 years ago – by a 1-0 margin.
Since then, India has won two, but lost four games to Sri Lanka in http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Sri-Lanka-c758, and that will be a source for some worry, given that the Indians have a decent enough side and have been fairly dominant over other nations.
So where is India going wrong? This piece analyses the Indian bowling over the years in the land of Sri Lanka and finds out whether that has been an issue with the side.
In the late 1990s, India’s best chances of winning a Test, any Test, was at home. The reason for the same was that they relied heavily on their spinners, like Anil Kumble, Venkatapathy Raju, Rajesh Chauhan and some of the others, on tracks in India that were so tailor-made for them that it could hardly be funny. The bowling issues would usually come to the fore when the Indians would travel outside the sub-continent, where neither their batsmen nor the spin bowlers could bail them out of trouble. Hence, their losses in http://www.senore.com/Cricket/South-Africa-c757 and England were understandable.
However, when one talks of Sri Lanka, there cannot be any other country, where the conditions are as similar to those back in India. The spinners, namely Muthiah Muralitharan and some of the others, have revelled in those conditions. So, shouldn’t the Indian spin bowlers have similar statistics?
In the 1997 series, when the Indians were held to a 0-0 draw, http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Nilesh-Kulkarni-c2108, who played only one Test match in that series, got a wicket off his first ball in his career, but went wicketless for the next 195 runs. Chauhan ended with figures of 1/276. However, the only solace for the Indians was that so high-scoring were both the games that they ended in draws.
Let us talk of the series after that, in 2001. It was not a high-scoring one and saw Sri Lankan spinner, Muthiah Muralitharan capture 23 wickets in three Tests at a paltry average of 19: as excellent as they come. India had three bowlers in the top six bowlers of that series, and rather surprisingly, all were pace bowlers – http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Sairaj-Bahutule-c2410 captured one for 101! Again, the spinners were thrashed around.
In 2008, when http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Ajantha-c42419 Mendis had taken every cricket fan by storm, the story was a little better, but not as good as the Indians would have liked. Mendis and Murali shared 47 wickets between them at averages of 18 and 22 respectively, as compared to Harbhajan Singh who finished third with an average of 28. What was worse was that Kumble again struggled and had 50 runs taken for every wicket that he scalped.
In short, going by the evidence of the three series before the one India play now, it would be fair to say that the Indian spin bowlers have not bowled as effectively enough as their Sri Lankan counterparts on tracks that assist spin. The reason for the same could be attributed to the fact that the Sri Lankan batsmen play spin better than Indian batsmen; which is, in fact, contrary to what one hears often! At least the records and statistics prove it!
Tags: