India

Where do you stand on Gautam Gambhir?

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Cricinfo have published a story with the slightly mischievous headline: “‘We still average 53 as an opening pair’ – Gambhir”.

It’s not much of a statement, but by making it a headline Cricinfo have made it seem like a rather desperate plea. Gautam Gambhir is under pressure and he’s resorting to the kind of talk often heard from England batsmen after a collapse: “There’s some good batsmen in this team. We’re all averaging over 40.”

Statistics only tell you what has already happened, so citing them in your defence smacks of living in the past. After being simply unstoppable in 2008 and 2009, Gambhir averaged 32.75 in 2010, 31.33 in 2011 and 24.77 so far this year. He isn’t pointing to recent stats.

We used to rather like Gambhir. We tipped him for greatness in 2005 (to ourself) and hadn’t particularly changed our mind by 2009. However, since then, he’s given off an air of being rather cosseted.

This might be unfair. We might just be seeing a reasonable batsman getting understandably defensive in the light of less stellar performances. However, it could also be that he grew a bit self-satisfied and developed a sense of entitlement as a consequence.

Earlier in the year, Gambhir made comments about wanting rank turners in India on which the home team would hopefully humiliate tourists. This may have been a reasoned philosophy, but being as it came on the back of personal failures in England and Australia, it actually seemed reactionary and sulky.

We’re going to try and give Gautam the benefit of the doubt. Good players have a tendency to bounce back and perhaps this prolonged lean spell will become another old, meaningless statistic.

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23 comments

  1. He was decent in the SA tour and after that he has really struggled. Not a naturally talented guy so the bad patches will be really bad.

    Not liking this approach though. Should be man enough accept he is worse than even Sehwag right now.

    1. Surely the more workmanlike the cricketer, the more they are reliant on a solid methodology which should help them endure tough times?

  2. You haven’t given us enough information to answer the question properly. What are we trying to achieve? Causing him pain? In which case, I’d suggest his nads. Sneaking a look in the shower-room window at the local nurses’ home? Here I’d suggest his shoulders, although at 5’6″ I’d also suggest you’d picked the wrong player.

    1. We nearly changed the title, but then thought: “No, we’ll give them this one…”

    2. Thanks. I need something obvious these days. But I do feel that it’s important not to let an opportunity pass by, no matter how obvious or trite.

    3. You’re among your own here. We consider it OUR DUTY to ensure such jokes aren’t left unsaid.

  3. My own view is that Gautam is India’s Shane Watson. Don’t care for him much.

    Continuing on our recent trend of bad analogies, he seems to be Margaret Thatcher to Sehwag’s Bill Clinton.

    It’s always nice to start the day with a great hover caption, btw.

    1. Could you elaborate on what it means to be India’s Shane Watson?

      We think we get what you mean, but Watson has so many… qualities… we’d be interest to know which you’re thinking of.

    2. Being an ass on the field, and quick to take offense and descend into cheap argument. I attached four youtube videos to prove my point, but your site rejected them.

    4. Gambhir once got banned for elbowing Shane Watson on the field. How do you even comment on that?

  5. That’s right Gautam Gambhir certainly have to figure out his shortcomings if he wants to be successful against the top contenders in the world when it comes to face bowling.For example he is not comfortable against short bowling which he has to figure out quickly.

  6. From the 2009 blog post of KC:

    Spider // November 27th, 2009 at 10:57

    Not sure Gambhir has made enough scores outside Asia…

    he has never played against SA, Australia or England on their home grounds…
    [UPDATE] He now has. Not much to show for it, eh, Gauti?

    getting runs on those flat sub-continent pitches is not exactly a stern test of his abilities…
    [UPDATE} Indeed!

    Reply
    King Cricket // November 27th, 2009 at 11:03

    There’s a lot of truth in that, Spider. Time will tell

    [UPDATE] Time has told.

    But I guess he might make merry against England in India and cement his place for years to come. The next overseas tour to one of SA, Aus and England is atleast two years away.

  7. A digression KC: Here’s a comment on Zaltzman’s latest blog:

    “You complete me, Andy”

    Do you consider yourself a failure for not having been able to provoke such a, er, warm sentiment in your readers’ minds? 🙂

    2. Sometimes you make me feel like I am a complete…

      …something or other…

      …KC, but I don’t suppose that is the same thing.

  8. Well, I missed mentioning the cricinfo connection. The reason for invoking Zaltzman’s blog, is, ofcourse, that his blog was at Cricinfo, just as a few of KC’s are.

  9. Just wanted to let you know KC that the photos you manage to dig up of batsmen in trouble are one of my favourite things about this whole site.

    1. The digging’s a piece of piss. We have permission to use the marvellous work of Sarah, Canterbury.

      http://sarahcanterbury.com/

      There you will find photos of batsmen playing shots or looking uncomfortable, rather than the standard ‘celebrating a century’ images you see in newspapers and on other websites.

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