The realisation of what happened yesterday has finally started to settle in.
At least it has for poor Suresh Raina who’s currently going through the five stages of grief for his test career: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and trying to force our BCCI rep to eat a Hawkeye printout showing his lbw dismissal sailing over the stumps.
It’s all part of the healing process, so the lads gave him lots of encouragement.
Gave him the printout as well, to be honest.
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It’s all change at Team India HQ, with Virender and Ishant being medevaced back to their loved ones in the Samsung corporate tent at the Singapore Grand Prix, whilst fresh reinforcements are being issued from the IPL finishing school at Innsbruck.
Not sure who the two new squad members are – for ease of reference I’ve put them down on my squad sheet as ‘flat track bully A’ and ‘medium pace trundler B’ – but I’m sure they’ll ease into the team I’m moulding around the current apple of my eye, Amit Mishra.
India’s spinners need to take a close look at Amit’s performance at the Oval and say to themselves, that’s the standard I should aim for. Not his bowling obviously, I accept that was disastrous. But he batted brilliantly and fielded like he wasn’t afraid of taking grass stained trousers back home to his mother.
That makes him what I like to call a multi-dimensional player. Two dimensional to be exact, which might sound like he’s a cartoon character, but is actually twice as many dimensions as most of the squad members.
And that, of course, is India’s current weakness. The one dimensional player. The dot.
What can you do with eleven dots? Send H I 5 in Morse code? You can’t win a test series with that. It doesn’t even make sense.
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Hope Indian fans understand I’ve never been able to reproduce the same success in ODI’s that I’ve enjoyed in tests.
Afraid tour results may take a steep decline from here on in.
Thankfully the draws against Somerset and Northamptonshire are already in the bank.