Exploiting home advantage

I learnt the fine art of fruit-picking when I was a student at the University of Southern California. In order to augment my finances, the official expression was: "to pay one's way through college," I took a summer job in apricot orchard in a place called Hemet. I was instructed that the skill lay in picking only that that was ripe and ready and not shaking or stripping the tree. How aptly this applies to bringing in new players into a test team.

The West Indies are paying a terrible price for shaking or stripping their team and in one fell swoop they got rid of Vivian Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Gus Logie, Larry Gomes, Jeff Dujon and the soon after, Desmond Haynes and Malcolm Marshall. The nucleus of a great time had been destroyed without giving any thought to replacements.

I am not at all surprised that Australia cut through them as a hot knife cuts through butter. And unless something in the nature of a miracle happens, they are doomed to being whitewashed. There has never been such a mismatch as the one we saw at Brisbane.

It came as no surprise that the match finished a little after lunch on the third day, it might have ended earlier but for some resistance from Chanderpaul. The West Indies team is shattered and one understands perfectly well the sentiments of someone like Colin Croft, the former West Indian fast bowler who says that the team should return home before more disgrace is heaped on it.

Sir Garfield Sobers who is in Australia too has expressed his disappointment and had come down hard on the coach, Roger Harper. What can the coach do? He's not an alchemist who can transmute lead into gold. It would seem that the talent has just dried up. The West Indies are due to host the World Cup in 2007. Will they even have a team by then?

I really feel sorry for Jimmy Adams, the hurt expression on his face, his best efforts not to explode in disgust shows a captain at the end of his tether. He does all that is humanly possible to motivate the team and now believes that a consultant should be brought in. When a team gets accustomed to losing, there is nothing that a consultant can do. There has to be basic talent before self-belief enters into the equation.

There are a number of factors involved in the eclipse of the West Indies. The youngsters, influenced by American television channels, which is what the West Indies get, are drawn to basketball. The West Indians have the height and the physique for it and making it big time in basketball is far more, is infinitely more rewarding financially. Then there are the tugs of different nationalisms and in a sense the situation is far worse than it is in the subcontinent where regionalism and ethnicity play their own divisive role. Only in cricket does the West Indies exist as the West Indies. In all other sports, they compete as individual countries as they did in the Olympic Games.

There is no other country that exploits home advantage the way that Australia does and which makes beating Australia in Australia immensely difficult. It starts with the itinerary. The first two test matches are invariably at Brisbane and Perth or Perth and Brisbane.

Perth, of course, is the fast bowler's dream wicket with its extra bounce and in Brisbane the ball seams about. Australia has the bowlers to exploit the conditions to the hilt and they are able to secure an early advantage and the visitors find themselves on the backfoot.

The Australians also have a pretty good idea of how their wickets will play, wicket-preparation not being a hit and miss affair. Australia's cricket is the best organised in the world with a domestic format superior to the English county system. They opt for quality rather than quantity. Add to that the tremendous pride they feel in donning the green, baggy cap.

There is no doubt that Australia is the best team in the world in both versions of the game and the present side under Steve Waugh can be compared favourably with Don Bradman's 1948 Australians. The key is that they have achieved a perfect balance between technology and human endurance.

Like the US elections, India's tour of Pakistan is far from being decided despite a ban on the tour by the Indian government. Efforts are still being made to get the Indian government to reverse what is termed as a harsh decision. The former president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, Rajsingh Dungarpur is making last ditch efforts. There is also considerable pressure of the cricket public in India. Clearly the Indian government seems to be out of step with its own public opinion.

It also seems illogical to me that India allows its team to play in tournaments like the Asia Cup and the ICC Knockout tournament where India and Pakistan came within a whisker of meeting in the final but seems to object to bilateral ties.

This is like the Curate's egg-good in parts. Either there should be a total ban on cricket relations or cricket should be separated from politics and the two countries be allowed to play against one another. We in Pakistan are keeping our fingers crossed.

As other Indian teams that have toured Pakistan have discovered, the cricket public in Pakistan may be partisan but it enjoys good cricket, as they enjoyed Sunil Gavaskar in the past and will surely look forward to seeing Sachin Tendulkar bat provided he doesn't make too many runs but shows us enough of the flashes of his genius.

I don't think the cricket public of the two countries should be robbed of a simple pleasure. God knows, their lives are hard enough. I count Rajsingh Dungarpur among my friends. He can be pretty persuasive and I hope that he will be able to convince the Indian government not to see the cricket tour with a closed mind.