Posted by Their wheel nuts. Don’t be crude.
It’s not so much that India keep losing Test matches that’s depressing, it’s the way that they lose them: the wheels keep coming off.
In England and Australia, India have collectively averaged 24.5 with the bat and 56.97 with the ball. To put that in perspective, they’d be better off fielding 10 Ajit Agarkar’s and a wicketkeeper. Criticism doesn’t come much more damning.
They sometimes start well – as they did in Adelaide (84-3) – but once it starts to get away from them, that’s it; they get pounded like unresponsive dough (604-7). It saddens us a lot and we’re not even Indian.
Meanwhile…
Australia take the positives like deprived addicts
Which is essentially what they are. They LOVE being super-positive for no real reason, yet they haven’t had much reason to feel confident until recently. Cue a self-aggrandisement binge.
Australians feel like world-beaters if they manage to put their socks on without falling over, so comprehensive Test victories basically psyche them up to laughably cartoonish levels.
Annoyingly, it doesn’t much matter whether the confidence is justified or not. It’s still real and it still helps them play well in the next match.
When the series started, it seemed like the senior Indian batsmen were going to go into retirement with VVS, Dravid, and Sachin holding each other’s hands, smiling a knowing smile, and walking on a meadow toward a glorious scene of the sun setting behind the mountains with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” playing in the background. Meanwhile, Ricky Ponting sat in a corner, rubbing his hands, and muttering to himself like that character in that despicable “Lord of the Rings” movie.
Cricket can be a cruel game.
Would you like me to take some negatives out of the Aussie performance, just for balance?
Yet again, over two thirds of the Aussie score came from two players. Take them out and what do you have? 170 for 5, that’s what you have. And bear in mind that that 170 for 5 is against a demonstrably weak attack (as recently demonstrabled by Clarke and Ponting).
One of those players won’t play a home series again. That’s half of Australia’s run scoring ability gone in an instant.
The other of those players has scored five centuries in 12 tests as captain. It is a fact that all good captains suffer a lack of form when appointed to the role. Therefore, by definition Clarke cannot be a good captain.
The minimum required for any 4-0 home series win against India to be a proper annihilation is that you score over 700 in at least one innings.
Selectors pick the best players to do the job. Therefore, by definition, Shaun Marsh is a better batsman than anybody else outside of the test team, and he currently stands second in the all-time ever list of worst ever series for a top-six batsman ever.
Good work. Try and persuade the Aussies of that though.
Nice use of ‘demonstrabled’, by the way.
Jeez, you got it wrong mate. I feel like a world beater even if I fall over putting on me thongs.
What do you know about Ajit Agarkar to darn such a statement “they’d be better off fielding 10 Ajit Agarkar’s and a wicketkeeper”????? It’s because of him and Dravid that India won for the 1st time in 22 years in Australia…. It may be a one-off performance and Ajit may not be even an average Test Player.. But Ajit has served the country for 10 years and in the period has become the 13th highest wicket taker in ODIs.. and he last played in Sep 07 and 5 years later, not one person has overtaken him.. Now talk about, perspective….
Yeah, but he’s crap though, isn’t he?
Come on, he is.
lol…. great post to read at work. What do you think the outcome will be for next game for India? Good start, bad ending.
King Cricket – Just imagine… If a crap bowler can take 288 wickets, how crap the batsmen should be….
and his bunnies were Gilchrist, Jayasuriya and Gayle……
Basically, he was the bowler they all went after. A climbing run-rate can serve such a bowler well.
But he’s still crap.
Come on, he is.