It was a fine exposition of limited-overs batting skills that we were treated to in the three-match England series. Team India, under the tutelage of Virat Kohli for the first time in ODIs, were rampant to the point of seizing the series by the second game itself, but Team England were by no means disgraced. Their consolation win in the third match was, perhaps, a wake-up call for the host as the Champions Trophy, to be played this summer on sporting rather than overly batsmen-friendly surfaces, might just be a tougher proposition. Even so, the hope is Team India will be right up there as the favourite among all contenders, including World Cup champion Australia.
The second ODI was a standout in the sense that the batting was so easy on the eye when the old warhorses responded brilliantly to the smell of battle. The old adrenaline pumping, Yuvraj Singh and Mahendra Singh Dhoni made the encounter memorable after Kohli, who had to carry the Indian top order singly on his shoulder because of misfiring openers, failed for once. Maybe, the champions of yesteryear needed that crisis to bring out the old resolve in them not to make an early mistake in choice of strokes and to squeeze out every bit of their experience in milking the bowling when the big hit was not on. When they belted the ball, it stayed hit, with panache to boot.
The master class must have rubbed off on the youngsters too. It has been a while since Team India had such a good ODI specialist as Kedar Jadhav in the middle order. His instincts are amazingly right even as he mixes some rustic strokes with a few absolute gems to keep the pressure on the bowlers. There hasn’t been a cleverer ODI batsman in Team India for a while now, not since the days when Yuvraj was the ultimate finisher, a role that then passed on to Dhoni and is probably Jadhav’s for some time to come. While Kedar attributes some of his skills to tennis ball cricket, what must be admired is his ability to bring off the audacious in tight match situations. It is a pity then that his distress with his bat and gloves led to his mistiming the final stroke of the series.
The bowlers were made to suffer for a large part of the first two ODIs on typical Indian pitches with not an iota of assistance. The despair in the England bowlers’ eyes as one good ball or not-so-bad a ball disappearing over the ropes all the same told the tale best. Not that the England batsmen were any less in carting the bowling around. Jason Roy may have become Jadeja’s dummy in his attempts to force him square off the back foot, but there is a lot of entertainment to be had when the opener fires. There is so much of the modern batsmen’s fearlessness in striking out against the new ball a la David Warner. These batsmen embody the new philosophy of relentless aggression, which makes modern batting the spectacle it is.
It is in the lion’s den that the modern bowlers perform. In an era in which the ball disappears the moment a spinner gives it a bit of air, it was nice to see Jadeja retain such control without bringing into play too many variations. Again, cleverness trumped the constants like line and length and flight in the case of spinners. Ashwin may have gone to the Shane Warne extreme of variations being everything in limited-overs bowling. He may not have been as successful as Jadeja in a symbiotic partnership they have forged, but his day will come when the pitches allow more bounce. Let us not forget that spinners are bowling in the era of the super bat, the short boundaries and the loading of most laws in favour of the batsmen.
It must be the dream of marketing men to have a series like this in which impossible looking totals were chased down or the match hung in the balance till the very last ball, a full hit off which could have changed the result of the match, but not the series. This series would take a lot of beating for sheer entertainment value. The visitors fought valiantly even in going down in both the first and second games, but then how do you battle the brilliance of Kohli and Jadhav in one and the combined batting prowess of the stalwarts Yuvraj-Dhoni in the other?
In their home conditions, England must be hoping to pose a far greater challenge in the Champions Trophy. We have four good teams in India, Australia, New Zealand and England and then the mercurial Pakistanis and the Sri Lankans, with their all-round skills plus the ambitious Bangladeshis. The South Africans may be the great chokers but the new gen might wish to disprove that. The next great action in the game might well be the Champions Trophy, to be played in swinging and seaming conditions in June in England.
