Bring on the fast men

• How many teams in this World Cup have a pace attack to match this one?

• How come nobody has ever talked of this entirely new phenomenon as a strength of Indian cricket, the fortunes of which are still supposedly built around its starry batting line-up?

• Finally, how would this batting line-up fare against a bowling attack that included Zaheer, Nehra and Srinath backed up by three Australians in the slips?

The idea is not to take advantage of the open season on running down Indian batting stars, Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Sehwag, Yuvraj, Kaif, Mongia. I am only trying to look at the brighter side. Perhaps the reason we don’t even notice how we have acquired a genuine pace attack — genuine pace, mind you, not just seam-up medium — is that we have been so conditioned by only our batsmen and spinners winning matches. Or maybe because over the decades we have become resigned to the idea that India is incapable of producing fast men. This line-up should persuade you to revise that opinion.

Our record — particularly overseas — in the past three years shows that our fast men have always measured up to the challenge and it is our batsmen who have failed. In the process, they also undermine their own fast bowlers by making the opposition’s look so much better. You wonder what goes on in the minds of Zaheer, Nehra and Agarkar when they see their batsmen ducking and weaving even while facing such mediocre pacemen as Pedro Collins and Adam Sanford… “give me the ball somebody, let me also slip one into this so-and-so’s rib-cage so they call me a tearaway tiger as well”. Yet, it is the batsman who is the star, with bounteous endorsements, multi-crore annual sponsorships, the bearer of a billion hopes.

Indian cricket is unique in that its star system is built almost entirely around batsmen, Harbhajan being the one exception. It’s not so elsewhere. In Australia, the stars are Warne, Brett Lee, McGrath. In Pakistan, it is surely the fast bowlers even if two of them are now fading. If New Zealand has any star, it is Shane Bond. In Sri Lanka, Murali is a bigger star than even Jayasuriya. India is unique — along with the West Indies to an extent — today to have only batsmen as its stars. No surprise that the two teams end up in the same lowly vicinity on world rankings.

Compare the rival pace line-ups today with India’s. None, except Australia. No other team has even two bowlers who consistently break the 140-km barrier. For South Africa, only Makhaya Ntini can do so; Pakistan has just Shoaib Akhtar in that class; England, Zimbabwe, the West Indies have none; Sri Lanka, maybe one in Dilhara Fernando; and New Zealand, one, Shane Bond. But why is this battery of new pacemen not achieving more for India?

Besides pace, swing and bounce, what great fast bowlers need is reputation, the build-up. Each time the Pakistanis discover a young bowler in the 140-plus band some Imran Khan hails him as the new tearaway ready to terrorise batsmen around the world. The Australians gave Brett Lee a month-long media build-up before unleashing him on India in his debut series of 1999-2000. Our batsmen had surrendered even before facing a ball from him. The South Africans similarly built Mornantau Hayward before our 2001 series there, and he did so marvellously against us even if now he’s been axed for being so wayward. The Indian cricketing establishment, team management, media, fans, sponsors have never given one of their fast bowlers such a build-up. Do you know, by any chance, the only Indian bowler to have broken the 150-km barrier since the speed-gun was invented? How come nobody hailed the arrival of Zaheer Khan, the Indian tearaway?

“Let’s face it,” Sunil Gavaskar once told me over a Chinese meal in Port Elizabeth during the 1992 series, “nobody likes to play fast bowling.” This from a man who scored more runs against genuine quicks — mostly without the protection of a helmet — than any other, Indian or foreign. Besides a reasonable pitch, the genuine paceman needs only two things. A reputation, to strike fear in the hearts of the batsmen and good slip-catchers. On both counts India’s pacemen should feel done in. You see Srinath cursing his own team-mates in the slips more often than he swears at the opposition batsmen. This is a double insult as most of the slip fielders are the batting stars who are also loathe to sprint around the boundaries. First they make the opposition fast bowlers look so much better by not standing up to them, then they make you look that much worse by dropping catches. Imagine what Srinath’s career record would have been if he had Ponting and Mark Waugh or Kallis and Klusener in the slips.

Imran Khan often asks how come India cannot produce genuine fast men. He dwelt on the theme once as we sat sipping tea in his Lahore house. “Kapil was OK,” he said, “but not really quick.” The only real fast bowler he had seen emerge from India, he said, was Srinath. “He is quick in the air, quick off the pitch, he is a match-winner and you are bowling him into the ground,” he said. He said India needed to preserve him as the South Africans were doing with Alan Donald. “Swing, line, length, you can teach somebody,” he said, “but pace is God-given and when somebody has it, wrap him in cotton wool and tell him, three times a day, that he is God’s gift to your team. Then he will win you matches.” On the other hand, how have we been treating our pacemen?

We have routinely taken young fast bowlers on full tours and used them only as net-practice bowlers for our batting stars. Promising fast bowlers like Tinu Yohannan, Amit Bhandari, T. Kumaran have been wasted. They suffer on both accounts. In domestic cricket, they don’t get to bowl at our star batsmen— who almost never play the Ranji or Duleep Trophy leagues now — and overseas they come up against the world’s best players of pace. Then, during the home series we produce square-turners or flat pitches so our batsmen can pile up averages while the fast bowlers cool their heels. Even at the nets they are afraid of bouncing at a star, just in case he gets upset. And in competitive domestic cricket he has no chance of measuring his skills against him anyway.

This is what has changed from the past. The last time we had a great batting line-up with Gavaskar, Vengsarkar, Viswanath, Mohinder Amarnath, we also had a very competitive domestic circuit, and the stars played in it. If that were the case now, you would not need to go overseas to discover that Ganguly cannot play anything that bounces, swings or generally passes him higher than his waistline and that Sehwag can’t even fend one dug into his mid-riff. No matter how much you love Ganguly, how long do you see him lasting against Zaheer, Irfan Pathan and Rakesh Patel at the fastish Vadodara pitch in a Baroda-Bengal Ranji match? The real protection racket in Indian cricket is the way these batting stars have been able to evade this phenomenon, the arrival of the genuine quick in our own domestic cricket. It is this mismatch that shows each time this famous batting order has a 57/6 kind of scoreline to its name.

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