Have they lost the plot?

He missed the next game in

St Kitts, scored a patchy 52, and faded out in the four Tests that followed. Just 80 runs came from his bat in the five ODIs that he then played in. The man who had spearheaded Chappell’s five-year vision for Indian cricket was fading, leaving a gaping hole in the batting line-up. And the slide began.

This is where, probably, Chappell should have first eased up on the accelerator, fallen back on Plan B: experience. VVS Laxman was the obvious call, Sourav Ganguly a desperate one. But what did we have instead: Suresh Raina, who was just being eased into international cricket under Yuvraj’s shadow, Dinesh Mongia, who had been tried before and discarded, now Dinesh Kaarthick, a wicket-keeper who is at best a good stroke-player.

The centre cannot hold

IN the next 14 games, the middle-order collapsed — any hope of a revival from Yuvraj was snuffed out with that knee injury during the kho-kho game before the Mohali match against Australia in the Champions Trophy that tore up his South Africa ticket. Skipper Rahul Dravid was forced to come down the order, leaving a huge question mark at No 3, but did that help?

Raina buckled under pressure, the thinktank wasn’t sure what to do with Mongia, who got just two games after that 63 against Australia in Kuala Lumpur, Mohammed Kaif was too unsure about his place in the side to hold his own batting up, and Kaarthick has only flickered.

And if all that was not enough, the top-order gave away. Virender Sehwag has been struggling since those two 90s in the West Indies series, Sachin Tendulkar has gone into a shell after the comeback 141 in Malaysia, Wasim Jaffer showed he was better off in the five-day version. And with just nine games to go, the World Cup is many, many stretches away.

The result: Chappell’s vision to set up a pipeline and prevent a disaster when the greats finally pack their bags is still in place, but the process has been hit — badly. Laxman is finally back for the last one-dayer in Centurion today, Ganguly is booking his comeback ticket for the Tests.

Of course, the team management would point to a couple of other factors that led to the crisis in South Africa: lack of adequate “bounce” practice, preferably at Mohali, before this series, and the 11-day Diwali break after the win against England in the Champions Trophy that “took away the momentum”. Maybe, even the timing of this tour.

Couldn’t hear the alarm?

BUT the first alarm should have been raised much before, during the West Indies series. That was when the first cracks started spreading across the team psyche; that was when repeated one-to-one sessions with a couple of very senior players may have brought them on the same page as the team management. Harbhajan Singh, always an extremely emotional package, took his omission from the first two Tests of that series very badly. Yuvraj began to struggle, then Virender Sehwag’s focus just fell apart after that magnificent 180 on a belter during the second Test at St Lucia where rains on the fourth day robbed India of a certain win. And just when the team needed a good stretch of one-day games to get things back on track, calm those nervous twitches, the Sri Lanka tournament went down the drain — South Africa pulled out after a bomb blast, rains ensured the tri-series never took off from there.

What next? Another tri-series — this time against Australia and West Indies — on the dodgy pitches of Kuala Lumpur where any solid batting could have happened only in the nets. Whatever plans the Indian thinktank had of re-jigging the batting line-up was rushed through. Sehwag initially agreed to come down the order, but baulked later leading to more “experimentation”.

It was time for the second alarm. But Laxman remained in cold storage, even the youngsters started getting jittery, the crucial second match of the Champions Trophy against West Indies went down the drain.

And finally, South Africa — the third and final alarm. What has happened here in Durban, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth has already been debated threadbare. But what we need to look at is what those three losses may lead to, even if the team, stung by the criticism, is desperate to get one back at the Centurion today.

* Virender Sehwag, one of India’s brightest stroke-players in recent years, is in danger of losing his place in the side, maybe forever.

* Mohammed Kaif, best fielder and strike-rotator, will find it tough to pick up the pieces one more time in what has at best been a stop-start career

* Suresh Raina, with tremendous potential, may now be a regular Ranji Trophy fixture.

“They have to apply themselves to the task,” says Sunil Gavaskar. Yuvraj’s injury is a huge blow, both competitively and because a left-hander gives you another style of play at the top, writes South African batting great Barry Richards.

Turn back the clock

SO is it time to trash Chappell’s vision? No, because India really need to start looking at the future and ask themselves: what after Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman?

Sack the coach? It’s the easiest route, but definitely not the wisest. What can Chappell do, or even his successor, when chairman of selectors Dilip Vengsarkar admits that the reserve bench is empty? It would be foolish to deliver the verdict based on their performance here — the pitches here have no resemblance to the slow-low tracks that are taking shape in the Caribbean.

There’s also those eight games in India before that — four against the West Indies, and four against Sri Lanka. Time enough for our batsmen to free their arms once again on the off-side, on the up, and get in a century or two to exorcise the demons of Africa. Sehwag can still be salvaged, Tendulkar can regain the crown, Raina can hang in there, Dravid can smile.

But the immediate answer, probably, lies is a consensus approach, a process of repeated interaction with a healing touch, after which every player emerges convinced about the vision, committed to the process. Yes, there’s still time to turn the batting clock, there’s still hope.