Bangalore: In a subcontinental World Cup where matches are more often won by batsmen, India had to rely on plan 'B' - with the spinners getting them out of the jail batsmen put them in, while warming up for the big event on a Sunday evening at Bangalore.
A packed stadium but no sight of Sachin Tendulkar or Zaheer Khan, the first impression that Team India gave was that they wanted to save their spearheads and not expose them to unfortunate injuries in matches of trivial importance. Continue reading below
Coming to the match, it wore the look of a World Cup warm-up only deep into the evening. Until then, it was slapdash batting and butter-fingered fielding by the hosts against determined ODI champions in intimidating yellow.
To the crowd's delight, India came into their own after leg-spinner Piyush Chawla turned the match on its head with a spell of 4-31, with Harbhajan Singh's 3-15 doing the clean-up act for a 38-run morale-boosting victory. But the account Indians gave of themselves in batting was least inspiring – a total of just 214.
Brilliances were there, but only specks of it for a nearly packed M Chinnaswamy Stadium. But when you have your No. 4 to 7 scoring 1 (Yuvraj Singh), 11 (MS Dhoni), 12 (Suresh Raina) and 32 (Yusuf Pathan) respectively, it's not going to win you World Cup matches consistently.
At the top, Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir seemed to have made the wrong choice. Returning from injury, the openers tried to get their touch back through scratchy defence than attack, which is their virtue. That finally accounted for Gambhir, who made just six.
Virat Kohli began well but Ricky Ponting caught Kohli's pulse by spreading the field around, choking the promising youngster until he threw his wicket away. Yuvraj looked all at sea during his 7-ball stay and was out-thought by Mitchell Johnson with a bouncer.
Sehwag finally got going after a few hits and misses and made a welcome fifty but Ponting cleverly used Jason Krejza as bait to send back the dangerous Sehwag. He misjudged Krejza’s flight and had little time to change his shot, which ended up as an under-edge onto the stumps.
Dhoni and Raina couldn't make notable contributions to the scoresheet. While Dhoni's poor run extended against Johns Hastings' shrewd variations, Raina was found feeling for the ball outside the off-stump to edge a simple catch to wicketkeeper Tim Paine.
There was a notable effort made by Pathan to improve his game against short-pitched stuff. He did succeed to some extent by seeing the pacers off and hit a couple of signature sixes. But running out of partners, Pathan had no choice than to go for the broke. That's when he top-edged a David Hussey delivery after hitting the part-timer out of the park twice.
Some welcome runs came from tailenders R Ashwin (25 not out) and Ashish Nehra (19), which eventually turned out to be the difference between winning and losing.
But the Indian batsmen can't expect that to happen every time. Tailenders or bowlers are not going to win all the matches for you. The batters have to get their act together, especially when playing in the subcontinent, and the warm-up games is the time to set-right your game.
It seems the Indian batsmen haven't learned from the mistake they made in the last ODI against South Africa, when Yusuf Pathan's century went in vain because none of the other recognised batsmen applied themselves.
