Tigers at home, why the Indian cricket team gets so easily slaughtered abroad

Sachin Tendulkar at India tour of Australia (1999-2000) Representational image | @ABhiDeobhakta Twitter

Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Jaywant Yashwant Lele, our latest cricket star. He is not the captain of the team but the secretary of the cricket control board. He does not play the game. He only predicts its outcome. He has won his stardom now by predicting, quite accurately, a 0-3 whitewash for the Indian team in Australia. The smile permanently fixed on his face may look moronic but it is a smile of vindication. Except, tell me another country where a Lele would be packaged as the master who got his prophecy right, instead of being dismissed as a jerk and asked what business he had to be on the Board if he predicted disaster for his young team just as a tough tour was beginning?

Just what makes us Indians such masochists that we treat a Lele as a star and Sachin and his boys as clowns? Nobody is denying that India have performed way below par in Australia. Nor is it anybody’s point that this Indian team, for far too long, has got away with accepting defeat abroad as a given and made up for it with a string of victories at home. A truly greatcricket team wins abroad, and consistently so. But at this point in world cricket there is no such team. No Clive Lloyd’s all-conquering West Indies, no Bobby Simpson’s Australia. Certainly, Sachin’s is by no means the greatest Indian team ever. But it is not as bad as the defeat in Australia has made it out to be.

In a country of a hundred crore cricket coaches it is tougher to defend Sachin Tendulkar’s cricket team at this moment than it was to justify Sonia Gandhi’s politics in the last elections. But we cannot forget that this record is entirely consistent with our away performance for a long, long time. We haven’t won an away series in a decade and a half, barring a 1-0 victory in Sri Lanka in 1993. In fact, that is the only Test we have won abroad since 1986. The last time we went to Australia, under Azhar in whose prowess Lele has such faith, in 1991, we lost 0-4. It was the same before that with Dilip Vengsarkar’s team in the West Indies. Earlier in 1999, we lost 0-1 in New Zealand and, subsequently, reversed the score line quite convincingly when they came calling.

It is not as if the home advantage works only for India. Simultaneously without recent series in Australia we saw South Africa and New Zealand also win series at home. In recent months the only team to defy this law was Sri Lanka in Zimbabwe. Despite Steve Waugh’s claim that his team could now be compared with all-time great teams, Australia lost a series in Sri Lanka just four months ago. And if you think the margin of our defeats was so shamefully large, please remember the margin of our victories against the Australians in 1998. Australia lost the first Test, at Chennai, by 179 runs (we lost Melbourne by 180) and the second, at Calcutta, by an innings and 219 runs (we lost Sydney by an innings and a mere 141). Of course, Australia were able to salvage something by winning the last Test but it was against a truncated Indian attack, with Srinath and Prasad unfit and with Harvinder Singh (who is he?) and Saurav Ganguly opening the bowling at Bangalore. Even in 1996 the Australians lost the one-off Test in Delhi by eight wickets, scoring just 182 in the first innings and 234 in the second. Not very different from Indian scorelines in the recent series, no?

In India, Ponting and Steve Waugh had averages of 21 and 38, respectively, compared to 111 for Sachin, 77 for Azhar and 44 for Dravid. In Australia now, the figures only got reversed. Ponting 125, Steve Waugh 55, but Sachin 46 and Dravid 15.5. Even for the bowlers, statistics tell a comparable story. The larger question therefore is, why have India performed so poorly abroad in the past 15 years. The answers are many, and complex, and not what Lele and his ilk who run the Board wish to hear. Second, it is only because they are so aware of the way they have destroyed Indian cricket that they can so confidently predict disaster when their teams go abroad.

On India’s tour of South Africa in 1992 Sunil Gavaskar once made a telling point. Please look at the shirt-collars of Indian batsmen at home and abroad, he said. At home, where the ball rarely comes higher than the knee, the collars are up, almost nuzzling their ears. Abroad, where the ball bounces into the ribcage, the collars are down where they should be, to the bone. This is why they are such tigers at home but so easily slaughtered abroad.

What this, the shirt-collar index of Indian batsmanship, underlines is the fact that our batsmen are brought up on pitches where many fast bowlers would have chosen to build their mausoleums. Even in domestic cricket because we want each match to go the full length we produce sleeping beauties that kill cricket, vastly exaggerate batting talent and destroy the bowlers’ will. That is why there are so many scores of 600-plus in our domestic cricket and so many of our tail-enders have first-class hundreds.

Mr Lele and his Board have reduced domestic cricket into a World Wrestling Federation (WWF) kind of farce. Except that they dig up the same pitches when foreign teams visit India to help Kumble and co. For the Board, preparing fairer pitches for home series is risky. If India lose at home, it will keep spectators and sponsors away and thus punch a hole in the Board’s pocket. A defeat abroad has no such implications.

Cricket, in India, is more than a mere sport. It is an obsession that influences national mood and morale as possibly nothing else does. World cricket now survives on the numbers that India brings to the game in terms of spectators, viewers, and sponsors. This is what fattens the Indian cricket board, gives its office-bearers international clout whereby one of them is now the chairman of the International cricket Council (ICC). And what do they give Indian cricket in return? Lousy pitches, poor playing conditions, sniggers and curses. What do they do for Indian cricket?

They accept silently the destruction of a teenaged Harbhajan Singh, on a chucking charge, while failing to raise a murmur of protest over a Brett Lee or against a Darrell Hair who has made a habit of victimising not just India but all teams from the subcontinent. From Australia to South Africa they acquiesce to poor umpiring, partisan match refereeing that target India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the three teams without whom international cricket would lose all financial clout and revert to being a weekend club sport for gentlemen.

So keep your chin up, Sachin. Your team may have done poorly, but ultimately there is no shame in losing to a superior team with the home advantage. The shame, if anything, should lie in being self-seeking, self-serving czars of the cricket establishment, living off the game and its Indian supporters and yet gloating in the humiliation of their own team.

Postscript: For those like Mr Lele who may believe that Mohammed Azharuddin would have changed India’s fortunes in Australia here are some figures. Azhar’s average at ho-me is around 56 against 36 abroad. His record against Australia is reasonable at home: just under 53. But take him to Australia and it drops to a mere 27.72.