Slip-shod win

India’s 9-run victory in the 2nd ODI was marred by ragged and embarrassingly butter-fingered fielding

BRISTOL: Four dropped catches and at least 25 runs squandered through misfields will have diluted Rahul Dravid’s euphoria somewhat after the victory at Bristol. The Indian team’s fielding — to do some plainspeak — was simply atrocious.

The captain himself caught a steepler superbly to dismiss the dangerous Matt Prior to bolster his man-of-the-match ratings after the hurricane 92 he had made earlier. But India’s performance in the field throughout the England innings otherwise, the skipper will agree, was ragged and embarrassingly butter-fingered.

Ganguly dropped two, one of them at slip trying to catch a slash from prior with one hand, which even Mark Taylor or Mark Waugh — the best close-in catchers in contemporary cricket — would always have put both hands out for. A while later, the former captain put down a not-too-difficult return catch off Pietersen.

Earlier in the same over, Ganguly had had the mortification of seeing Mahendra Singh Dhoni fail to grab an edge from Pietersen’s tentative jab at a gentle outswinger. There would have been a heavy price to pay, had young Piyush Chawla not bamboozled England’s best batsman with a first ball straight `un that went between bat and pad.

The fourth catch to go abegging was Ian Bell’s when he slashed RP Singh to third man where Ramesh Powar’s battle against his girth failed him, and he put down a sitter. Bell went on to make a fine half-century, and fell just in the nick of time for India to complete a narrow 9-run win.

To compound the problem, Munaf Patel and RP Singh were sluggish, and with neither Ganguly nor Dravid exactly greased lightning in the field, the Indian team resembled a bunch of sickly men in an infirmary rather than a bunch of international sportsmen competing on the field of play.

Right through this tour, India’s fielding has been below par, putting greater onus on the batsmen and more particularly the bowlers. Dravid was quick to admit after the game that this was becoming a serious concern, but frankly, there seems to be no immediate solution in sight.

Robin Singh, an extraordinary fielder in his time, has been the fielding coach on this tour, but has struggled to improve the standards. One tour is a short time, admittedly, to bring about big changes, but there are serious lessons to be learnt from this experience. While the batting appears to have been stable, and the bowling shown remarkable improvement, the fielding has declined starkly.

In limited overs cricket, where the weightage given to fielding should be as much if not more than the other two functions, India appear to have got the logic upside down. England’s players will be quick to exploit this, unless the skipper deploys some harsh words to get his fielders to at least get the basics right.