What was an Indian cricket fan’s biggest nightmare midway through this extremely fruitful decade?
A fair guess would involve a playing XI not including Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly or VVS Laxman up against a fearsomely nasty Australian attack on a bouncy Perth track.
How, then, would said Indian cricket fan deal with a squad that’s missing not just these four legends, but also more recent luminaries such as Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Yuvraj Singh, Harbhajan Singh or Zaheer Khan?
Will the television sets be turned on at all? Stuffed to the gills with non-stop action, first in the form of a never-ending Indian Premier League and then the disastrous World T20 campaign, will the 50-over format seem too slow, too long?
These, and a few other questions, should be answered when the second-string Indians take on the new-look Sri Lankans and unglamorous Zimbabweans in a tri-series that could aptly have been named the ‘What Lies in the Future Cup’.
The Indian squad left for Zimbabwe on Tuesday evening, and Suresh Raina — addressing his first pre-tour press conference as India captain — was all smiles as he answered sundry questions put to him with various combinations of the words ‘promising’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘relaxed’.
He promised that the team would give it their all. “If we put up 250 on the board, it will seem like 290,” he said, explaining that the squad was ‘young’ and ‘fit’. It’s unlikely that he was taking a dig at the seniors, some of whom recently found themselves on the wrong side of a fitness controversy.
He said that the team would do well as they had a lot to prove and the opportunity they had now wasn’t one that came along too often, that each of the 15-member squad would be out there to prove they had earned the right to wear the India jersey with compelling performances in domestic cricket and in the IPL.
He also denied that there was pressure of any kind, that the tour wasn’t the double-edged sword that people were making it out to be: Win and it’s no big deal, but lose and you’ll be taken to the cleaners. His confidence was infectious — “Keep it simple is the advice I’ve got from (Mahendra Singh) Dhoni” — but will they cop no flak if they, for example, lose a game to Zimbabwe?
“This team’s strength is in the fast bowlers, and the spinners and the batting line-up,” he said when asked to list his team’s strengths, “and the fielding.” And weaknesses? “There are none. I like to think positive,” Raina smiled. Despite probable pitfalls, this team’s biggest challenge will not be how they square up against some of Lankan young guns or how they turn on the style against the unfancied, and slightly underrated, Zimbabweans. Their real challenge will be convincing people back home (at least those who are watching) that the future of Indian cricket, one without today’s household names, isn’t as scary as it sometimes seems.
