The recent ODI series win is one of India's finest triumphs - not adjacent to 1983 and 2011 World Cups, but closer to the 1985 WCC
Skipper Virat Kohli (right) and Shardul Thakur celebrate a South African wicket during the 6th ODI at SuperSport Park on February 16 in Pretoria. Pic/Getty Images
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The manner in which the Indian team have gone about rubbing off memories of the losses to South Africa in the Cape Town and Centurion Tests and masking them, if you like, with a splendid Test win in the third Test at Johannesburg, has been first-rate, fabulous and fulfilling.
A convincing victory on a difficult Test strip at The Wanderers, and then a landmark 5-1 one-day series win over the Proteas reflected India's prowess more than South Africa's weakness. While skipper Virat Kohli impacted the series with three hundreds in six one-dayers, the performance of wrist spinners Yuzvendra Chahal and Kuldeep Yadav was outstanding. Not only does it bode well for India's 2019 World Cup fortunes, it also opens up visions of India prospering with a two-man spin attack in an overseas Test series — ie. Ravichandran Ashwin bowling in tandem with Kuldeep. Chahal, of course, will be happy to wait for his opportunity in the premier form of the game. Yes, the spinners will encounter some difficult pitches overseas, but India's arsenal will not be short on ability and guile.
One must hand it to the MSK Prasad-led selection panel, as well as the team bosses here. Not many sides would have kept a class act like Ravichandran Ashwin and the accurate Ravindra Jadeja out of their one-day ranks to nurture two young spinners instead. Kuldeep had the South Africans at sixes and sevens, while Chahal proved that the best strikers of the ball had to view him as a danger man. In fact, taking both of them on was fraught with danger.
Many pundits take great pleasure in giving the Indian Premier League a big spray, but there is every chance Chahal would have improved bowling against big guns regularly in the Twenty20 extravaganza. After becoming Royal Challengers Bangalore's highest wicket-taker in 2015 with 23 scalps, he bagged 21 the following year, and 14 last year.
Where the wily Kuldeep is concerned, there will be situations where batsmen will succumb to him without a fight. Kuldeep keeps coming back at batsmen without much scarring from what happened the previous ball, over or match. For example, he got belted in the Johannesburg ODI by David Miller, Heinrich Klaasen and Andile Phehlukwayo, but that didn't faze him in the slightest. In Centurion, a few days later, he bowled as if nothing had happened. This spirit can be attributed to his personality, but some of that is also because team management has backed him.
The ability to counter top-class spin bowling is probably at its lowest worldwide and it's high time getting runs against spin bowling is given equal, if not more, importance as opposed to performances against pace bowling.
It's also every cricket board's duty to do everything in their power to produce players with a 360-degree game. Cricket can never be healthy with players and teams adorning 'tigers at home, lambs abroad' tags. India are well on their way to shedding that. And, although they have yet to win a Test series in Australia and South Africa, they have shown fangs dangerous enough to help them conquer those peaks in coming years.
I reported on the 2006-07 one-day series in South Africa where India lost every game. The last match at Centurion was a dead rubber. In the three previous games, India didn't cross 200. They managed just 200 in Centurion, but the result was the same. This year, India went into the final ODI at the same venue in a dead-rubber situation as well, but now the shoe was on the other foot. Head coach Shastri would have remembered commentating on that 2006-07 shellacking and would have felt proud of the current bunch, even though one can give that Graeme Smith-led side credit for being a far superior one.
JP Duminy, South Africa's senior pro, was not coy to admit that the Indian spinners worked out the conditions well. "They've bowled a touch slower than our spinners. They haven't bowled the ball full enough for us to get to the ball, to hit down the ground. That's where we have been successful in South African conditions, and they haven't allowed that," he said. That is also a thumbs up to the support staff. The just-concluded one-day series will go down as one of India's finest triumphs — not adjacent to the 1983 and 2011 World Cup wins, but closer to the 1985 World Championship of Cricket (WCC), where present head coach Shastri played a major role. And if there was a car and Champion of Champions award for this series, like in 1985, it would have surely gone to his captain.
Kohli has shown exceptional drive to deserve every plaudit dished out for him. I've not reached out for the Oxford dictionary to describe Kohli's brilliance, like Shastri urged a journalist to do last week at Centurion. Instead, I turned to John Arlott's Book of Cricketers for the great writer's description of English batting icon Jack Hobbs, which holds true for Kohli: "Runs were to him (Hobbs) the products of a craft which absorbed and satisfied him." Hobbs was the game's original master. Kohli is certainly the present.
mid-day's group sports editor Clayton Murzello is a purist with an open stance. He tweets @ClaytonMurzello Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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