The scorecard will forever read, South Africa beat India by an innings and 90 runs.
India 1st Innings 76 all out – in 20 overs, 109 minutes.
And not a single plausible excuse; we had even won the toss. How many of us anticipated this?
Apparently only a few.
That is strange.
For more than two years we have persistently fooled ourselves. For a while our Testmatch standards has simply been ignored. We are running out, if not already have, of fallback options.
We had employed supposedly the best batting coach. To develop test-class players we may have thought.
We thought wrong.
Did he give us any good batsmen at the end of his tenure? Nope.
Came a new management, new thinktank, with a quickfix vision, to equate our twenty20 success to our Testmatch capabilities.
To be able to bat for a max of 20 overs and then follow it with energetic fielding we were assured was always the winning formula.
Indulge our new captain’s instincts.
Ignore the disappointment and disillusions of the old workhorses.
We are also blessed with armchair pundits and has been club cricketers who screams from blogs to forums – asking for the poor fielders to be axed immediately. And to replace them with young legs, all cracking good fielders, but haven’t the foggiest on how to play a test innings.
In Ahmedabad, our fielding was appalling, but our batting was atrocious. If our poor fielding leaked runs, our poor batting cost us the match, and perhaps the series.
But our management will not be the slightest bothered.
For we are champion of twenty20s, what better a promotion for the big money crunching IPL.
Testmatch cricket, that is for the cricket poor nations.
We, the BCCI, have the means to buy up all the cricket boards and still have enough spare in our coffers to kill off any one that challenges our stronghold.
The writing has been on the wall for a while, it took a bit longer to become explicit. Did we just witness the beginning of the end of Indian Test cricket?
Is it time now for the world of cricket to split into two? – the twenty20 playing nations and the rest – for the money or the sport.
If not, BCCI will make sure that Test cricket simply dies out everywhere.
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