Team India’s two few good men

India’s runaway 2-0 lead in the six-match one-day series against Pakistan has been built largely on the contributions of Virender Sehwa...

India’s runaway 2-0 lead in the six-match one-day series against Pakistan has been built largely on the contributions of Virender Sehwag and Rahul Dravid — and, latterly, the pyrotechnics of MS Dhoni.

That’s the good news. The bad news, obviously, is the flip side: the other frontline batsman are yet to perform.

Between them, Tendulkar and Ganguly have scored 23,426 runs in ODIs; in the two matches of this current series, they’ve together scored 15 runs.

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Yuvraj and Kaif, too, are on a sticky wicket; they’ve together scored just 38 runs in the two matches.

How important is Sehwag? In the last five ODIs, he’s scored 21 pc of the team’s total runs; on the one occasion he was out for a duck, against Bangladesh, India lost the match. In 12 previous ODI innings, when he had just one substantial knock — a half-century against Sri Lanka — the team lost seven matches, every one-day tournament and every series.

But even Sehwag’s contribution pales against Dravid’s. Even when Sehwag was struggling with the bat before his current rich vein of form, Dravid had been scoring consistently for India. In the last 23 matches he has scored 904 runs at an average of 47.5 — 15.9 pc of the team’s total. In fact, in the last 10 ODIs, Dravid has had an astonishing run with five 50s and a hundred and 22 pc of the team’s total runs.

The others? Even though each player has got a fifty to show through this lean phase in ODIs, which began with the Asia Cup in July 2004, a collective effort has been elusive. The same team that had a potential match-winner for every situation is today too dependent on Sehwag and Dravid to fire.

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There is a lesson to be learnt by India here from the drawn Test series against Pakistan.

In the six innings against Pakistan, Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir strung opening partnerships of 113, 85, 80, 23, 98 and 87, with Sehwag doing the bulk of the scoring.

Yet India only managed to draw the series. The greatness of a team is measured by how they anticipate a problem and react before it occurs. Australia do that brilliantly well; it’s time India followed suit.