Victory in Vizag

Everything about this match seemed too good be true: the bowling was startlingly quick, the grass ridiculously green, the stadium rimmed by hills was too picturesque to be Indian (used as we are to half-built, barbed-wired, bamboo-strutted hell holes) and we won with overs and wickets to spare. This was our last international game before the World Cup. It doesn’t come much better than this. Someone pinch me.

Even the speedgun seemed to be on steroids on Saturday. Agarkar, Sreesanth and Zaheer all averaged around 140kmph, with Agarkar occasionally nudging 145 and the Sri Lankan bowlers, specially Malinga were even faster. ‘Slinger’ Malinga clocked 148 every other ball. And here I was thinking that the only quick bowlers in the sub-continent came from Pakistan.

If this game hadn’t happened, Dravid couldn’t have dreamt it up. All the players critical to our batting came off: Yuvraj coming off injury, slaughtered the bowling, Ganguly kept up his amazing run of form and Sehwag nearly made a fifty before he tried to do a Ranatunga by walking a single only to discover that Sangakkara wasn’t auditioning, as Sehwag was, for the title of most laid-back cricketer in the world. Older fans will remember the News Read at Slow Speed on All-India Radio. Well, this was Sehwag’s cricketing tribute to that programme: the Single Run at Slow Speed. Moved by a vulgar competitive spirit foreign to the Nawab of Najafgarh, the Sri Lankan keeper ran him out. Fancy that.

Best of all, the new boy came off: Uthappa juggled and dived his way to three catches, then made Sehwag look like Mr Sedate while clubbing the Lankan seamers for fifty two scored at a strike rate of 140. A hook that helped the ball over long-leg for six was particularly satisfying: a nice swivelling old-fashioned hook shot hit off the back-foot unlike the modern preference for the firm-footed whack that clears square-leg or even mid-wicket.

The bleak, joy-denying ghoul that lives in every Indian fan, whispered in my ear that what the match really showed for the third game running was that the Indian bowling was incapable of running through a side after its opening bowlers had blown the top order away, that Sehwag had a moment of discomfort against the short ball on a benign batting wicket, that the stand-and-deliver technique that finally got Uthappa dismissed was likely to be found out by Asif, Bond, Lee and Co. and finally that Harbhajan was a spent force going through the motions of off spin bowling, but I shook the doomsayer off and concentrated on what had happened.

And what had happened was this: chasing a more than decent total, against respectably fast (if not terribly disciplined) bowling, without the aid of Tendulkar, Dravid and Dhoni, we creamed ‘em.