The Big Story: Stumbling in South Africa

When Virat Kohli and Ravi Shastri address a press conference, there is never any shortage of bravado. “We know exactly what we need to do come game time,” said India’s cricket captain Kohli, upon arriving in South Africa. “We know how to win Test matches.” Added India coach Shastri, sitting alongside the captain: “We look at the pitch and adapt to the conditions. Every game is a home game. It’s as simple as that.”

And yet, here we are, two Test matches later, and India’s abysmal overseas record has been extended by the count of two.

Team India, having arrived in South Africa as the Number 1-ranked side, went into the first Test without a single practice match. They arrived just over a week ahead of the first Test, cramped for time because they had just played a full series against Sri Lanka at home.

As Kohli has pointed out after both defeats, his team did manage to push South Africa in each of the matches. In Cape Town, and in Centurion, India were in with a real chance of winning when the final innings began. The bowlers had delivered, albeit with some hiccups. It was up to the batsmen – the stars of the side, the big money-makers, the strength of the team – to bring it all home.

With the exception of Kohli, not one batsman did their reputation any good. They talked the talk, but when it came to implementing it, this batting line-up stumbled around like toddlers in playschool. Mistakes were repeated between the two Test matches. New mistakes were conjured out of thin air. In Kohli’s own words, this team did not come here to play the way they have done.

It is not that the fans were expecting Kohli’s men to conclusively outplay South Africa on their home turf. But they expected a closely-fought series. They expected India to play like the best team in the world. They wanted Kohli and Shastri to live up to their own expectations. In the end, nothing much has changed for India’s ability to pull off winners away from home.

The Big Scroll

Anand Katakam gives you five charts that show India’s daunting challenge overseas.

Here is the full text of Kohli’s fiery press conference.

Punditry

  1. The ultimate guarantee of justice lies with the justices themselves, writes Upendra Baxi in the Indian Express.
  2. In the Hindu, Karan Thapar argues that the focus should be on what the four dissenting judges of the Supreme Court said rather than how they said it.
  3. In the Economic Times, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay writes the Supreme Court must be fortified from claims of being in cahoots with the government of India.

Giggles

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Arnab Chakrabarty, a “renegade pupil” writes about the late Buddhadev Dasgupta, the sarod legend:

“Dasgupta’s formal training in music commenced in 1943 under Radhika Mohan Maitra (1917-1981), who was the son of a Bengali zamindar from Rajshahi (now in Bangladesh). Maitra’s unlikely friendship with Prafulla Mohan Dasgupta, a music-loving civil servant in the colonial administration of Bengal, led to the former’s acquisition of his foremost disciple – Buddhadev, who was PM Dasgupta’s elder son.

This was certainly the best-known instance of a bright and academic young man from outside the aristocratic patron class taking up serious study of Hindustani instrumental music in Bengal. The emergence of Dasgupta and the sitarist Nikhil Banerjee as front-ranking performing artists paved the way for young people from middle-class Bengali families to learn Hindustani music, and as Max Katz argues in Lineage of Loss: Counternarratives of North Indian Music, contributed to what he calls a ‘Hindu middle-class appropriation’ of an art in which hereditary Muslim musicians once reigned supreme.”