Saurav is experiencing bad patch phenomenon

Saurav is experiencing bad patch phenomenon
Sanjay Manjrekar

It needed a visit to India for the Australians to change their trusted old method of playing one-day matches. They included five genuine bowlers in theside as opposed to four and batted steady, rather than aggressively to put up a good total on the board.

After having won the all important fourth one-day, it will be an approach that will stay with them for a while now. Building up a big partnership was Australia's motto today. Mathew Hayden and Ricky Ponting provided it. Mathew Hayden will be one player who won't be a candidate in the, now famous, rotation system of Australia. He came back in this match and winning ways came back for Australia. His consistency has been just amazing on this tour. He has not had a single failure in any of the international innings. Completely contrary to Ponting who had no success in India, until Vizag happened to him. When in form there are few better sights in cricket, than Ponting. He is purely classical in his stroke play. And when a top-class batsman comes back to form that's the way he does it. By getting a hundred.

India was really tiring towards the end of the Australian innings. They were in the field during the warmer half of the day. The sea breeze later in the day made things a little easier for the Australians. Just a 15 minute break and Tendulkar and Ganguly India's two most important batsmen came out requiring to bat out of their skins. Not an easy task. Although Tendulkar played another gem of an innings. It is Ganguly who is becoming a concern for India. For the first time in his career, Ganguly is staring in the face of the phenomenon called `Bad Patch'. One of the unique feature of Ganguly's career since 1996, when he actually arrived on the international scene, was that he had not known a bad patch. In five years of International cricket, normally, a batsman is paid a visit by that unwanted visitor `bad patch'. Because Ganguly has been such an exceptional player in one-day cricket as well. His failures though not prolonged have often been over shadowed by his huge success in the limited over variety. If youremember, Ganguly did not have a great Test series, recently in Australia but scored two centuries in the following one-day championship to make his mark on the tour. It is for the first time that we are seeing Ganguly fail both in Tests and one-dayers at the same time. I believe Ganguly is an outstanding player and sooner than all of us expect he will back to playing those fluid one-day innings we have grown to enjoy. It's the Test match form that is the real test for him. That, is the more difficult one to find.

Coming back to the match when you have your star players Ganguly, Tendulkar and VVS Laxman back in the pavilion in the 25th over, when chasing 339 runs to win. There can be only one result. A result that we saw. But, not before Harbhajan Singh and Zaheer Khan gave us evidence of the fact that everyone is really tiring out there. (SportsNet Syndication)