It's not just cricket.

Mercifully the test series against Australia has come to an end. Australia thrashed India comprehensively and the Australian media has been withering in its contempt for the gutless performance. Australian pitches are rock hard so that their fast bowlers can bowl in-swinging short pitch deliveries that rise to the throats of the batsmen and are very difficult to fend off. The Australians are crowing because Indian batsmen, conditioned to the slow-and-low pitches back home prepared to suit our spin bowlers, capitulated. In the end we lost all 4 tests, the first by 122 runs, the second by an innings and 68 runs, the third by an innings and 37 runs and the fourth by 298 runs. However the Australians were crying when Douglas Jardine used the same conditions to unleash Harold Larwood in, what has become known as, the Bodyline series in 1932. The only difference is that these days you are allowed no more than 5 fielders on the leg side. Thus the Australians will any tactics, from abuse to deliberate blocking a batsman taking a run, to win. But what about our fellows? Raised to superstar status by an adoring public and earning hundreds of millions of rupees they think that they are the best in the world when they are about average. The tragedy is that they are infinitely better than what we had in the past. At one time Indian batsmen used to shuffle towards square leg when facing fast bowlers and no one wanted to open the innings. It was so bad that we had to play 2 wicketkeepers, Engineer and Kundaran, to open against Wes Hall of the West Indies. It was Sunil Gavaskar who first stood up to the fearsome Holding and Roberts in the West Indies series of 1971 which India won 1-0 and Gavaskar finished with an average in excess of 150. His achievements were all the more remarkable because those days batsmen were not provided with helmets. There are many things wrong with Indian sports. The main problem is that every sports body is controlled by politicians and civil servants who use their positions for foreign tours with family and friends and for enriching themselves. Watch out for the London Olympics. Administrators will outnumber our athletes. They will occupy the best accommodation forcing athletes to sleep on floors and will slink away like craven jackals when we return with nothing. Unless we excise the disease ignominy will be our fate.