Bluster comes to nought as loss exposes batting, strategy

Shikhar Dhawan (28) made just 15 off 57 balls on Saturday.

AT 65/6 as Wriddhiman Saha stumbled off with his head bowed, India’s hopes were not just dented; they were hanging by the skin of their teeth. Ajinkya Rahane was the only one of their ‘specialist’ five batsmen left in the middle, and they were now left with their all-rounder designate, R Ashwin, and the tail.

But it wasn’t Ashwin, the team’s lead spinner and a useful lower-order batsman with two Test centuries to his name, that walked out to bat. It was instead another off-spinner with two Test centuries that emerged from the dressing-room, much to the surprise of everyone at the Galle cricket stadium.

It was obvious why India had chosen to send Harbhajan Singh ahead of Ashwin. They had scored at a rate of less than two-an-over till then, and they hadn’t really pushed the game along as was promised by their team director Ravi Shastri prior to the match.

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That was after all expected to be the modus operandi of the team’s mission aggression. And Harbhajan, with his reputation of being the irreverent slogger, had walked in as the ‘pinch-hitter’. As captain Kohli would reveal later, his job was to go out there and get things moving. “Get that quick 30 or 40 runs and put pressure on the opposition ,” as Kohli would describe the plan.

Seven deliveries is what Harbhajan lasted for. Six of them he either defended tamely or pushed to the infielders. Whatever the plan was, it clearly seemed lost on Harbhajan. Eventually he was out, poking at a Rangana Herath delivery sliding into him.

He stood his ground, at first to check whether a diving Kaushal Silva had hung on to the catch. Then he walked off the field so slowly, you would imagine he was given a rough decision. He was replaced by Ashwin and as we know now, the Indian challenge fizzled away soon after.

Harbhajan’s promotion in the order wasn’t the only time Kohli & Co had made a decision which led to raised eyebrows. It wasn’t the only time the young captain looked confused with his decision-making either. It wasn’t the only time the muddled strategy of the Indian team involved Harbhajan either.

He was the second spinner picked in the mix going into the Test. But you wouldn’t have thought so the way he was used across the two innings. More often than not, he was brought in as an afterthought. The talk leading up to the first Test was all about India’s quest for taking 20 wickets, and the urge to play five bowlers in that pursuit.

In many ways, the strategy didn’t really match up with the experience or the personnel at hand.

Valour can be misunderstood as over-confidence if it is not worked around a stable foundation, especially if it looks better on paper than it does at ground-level. Once India did choose five bowlers, it was obvious that one of them would be under-bowled. And also that the captain would be obliged to bring him on when one of his lead bowlers was in need of a longer spell.

On Saturday, Herath and Tharindu Kaushal showed how spinners depended on bowling lengthy spells, and how they worked out opposition batsmen in tandem, how they hunted them down in pairs. But Kohli would bring on Harbhajan just when Ashwin or Amit Mishra, his two lead spinners, were in the middle of an incisive spell. Take the second session’s play on Day One. Ashwin had run through the Sri Lankan top-order on the first morning bowling from the Pavilion End. He was getting the ball to rip and snort off the tacky wicket, and had troubled every batsman facing him.

But still it was Harbhajan that Kohli brought on from the same end, and that too for a seven-over spell from that end. It wasn’t until half the session was through that Ashwin returned, and he immediately ran through the Lankan lower-order.

Rohit, a misfit at No.3

If his bowling changes were shrouded in misperception, then the batting-order India chose was even stranger. This obligation to stick with Rohit Sharma at No.3, just because they have anointed him as the one capable of changing games on its head from that position also came a cropper in Galle.

The Mumbai right-hander looked out of sorts, and out of depth against both pace and spin. Unlike his city-mate, Ajinkya Rahane, who was the lone spark in the batting disaster that India dished out on the fourth day. Over the last 18 months, Rahane has proved to be the only accomplished and competent among the Indian batsmen to counter pace, bounce, swing and spin-like he did against the marauding Herath. Yet he finds himself stuck at No.5. With India’s strategy to play only five batsmen, it also means he ends up invariably batting with the tail, and steadying the ship rather than being the anchor in the top-order. And it is befuddling that the team management doesn’t see that.

Playing five batsmen is a punt more than a strategy. And when one of those five is fighting for his spot rather than cementing it, like Rohit is, it only makes it seem all the more questionable, almost silly. More so with Murali Vijay, the stabilizer for India over the last two years, injured, India not only were a batsman short-though they wouldn’t admit it-they were also guilty of misreading the pitch.

Prior to the first Test, Ravi Shastri had declared — it did seem more like a declaration than an announcement —that India would go in with four bowlers if they thought there was enough in the pitch. There was enough for Herath anyway to run through them. It was a loss that just didn’t leave Kohli’s young troops in a mess, it also showed up their strategy as being based more on false bravado and machismo than tact. You just wonder whether they can even recover from this debacle in less than a week’s time.