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 If you could film India play one-day cricket in black and white, it would feel just right; occasionally arresting and charmingly dated. You can still enjoy Mughal-e-Azam or Shree 420, or marvel at Madhubala and weep with Dilip Kumar, but neither of those would challenge a Dil Chahta Hai for a contemporary cinema award. This Indian team would look good in the retrospective section of a film festival for there is still much to respect and admire.

But one-day cricket is about the business of winning cricket matches as modern cinema is about filling multiplexes. This team can still win, they have beaten South Africa and England in recent times, but increasingly they need too many things to be in their favour; there aren’t too many degrees of freedom, if ‘x’ doesn’t work there isn’t another ‘y’ to step in. So the batting must outscore the opposition by a minimum of thirty runs and since only the top six score runs, they must outscore the opposition top six by at least fifty or sixty runs. You can’t expect a movie to succeed if the hero can deliver only a certain kind of dialogue; it might, like with Sivaji, but it won’t all the time.

And so Rahul Dravid knows what to do to win, but cannot always do it because individual players are quite excited by the idea of being dated as well. He is like a scientist who knows that a reaction will succeed at 250 degrees but is stuck with a burner that only provides 200 degrees. Fielding and athleticism are either individual passions or team diktats; where individual passion is absent, the directive must work. The problem is that if the directive is enforced, there aren’t enough players to put on the park.

Look at fielding in the deep for example. You need quick legs and strong arms so the two can be kept down to one and the boundary down to three, even to two sometimes. Look around this squad and find five players who can do that. Yuvraj Singh, Dinesh Kaarthick, Ajit Agarkar, Robin Uthappa, Sachin Tendulkar, maybe Gautam Gambhir, Rohit Sharma and Piyush Chawla. Decent list? Okay, if all of them are playing but certainly not when four of those cannot find a place. And what if the captain wants Yuvraj inside the circle? Who goes out? Ganguly can’t, Dravid can’t, Zaheer can’t, Powar can’t and Munaf certainly can’t. And what about RP Singh who, as a young man should be here, there and everywhere but isn’t. That is about thirty runs gone straightaway, assuming no catches are dropped.

Interestingly, India have always been a decent catching side, but even that seems to have been left behind, like baggage increasingly is at Heathrow. To me it suggests that people are switching off in the deep, not expecting, let alone beseeching, every ball to come to them. Indeed, that last expression isn’t the most appropriate either because the ball is not expected to go to the fielder but the other way around. And so, India are effectively a bowler down because the fielding is expected to play the part of an extra bowler in limited overs cricket.

So why have we come to this stage? Because we have always looked upon fielding as an additional degree not as basic education. Not everyone can be a Jonty, or a Ponting or a Symonds or a Collingwood. But if you want to be an economist you must know mathematics, if you want to be an athlete you must know a fair bit about food and diets. That is why I believe, and I remember saying this five years ago, that coaches at India’s hyped but ineffective academies must take most of the blame. If a 17-year-old isn’t told that without being a fine fielder he is compromising on his future, then the teacher is no good. Neither is the student but sometimes you need to be shown what you cannot see.

You can understand not being good divers on a cricket field given that, unlike snakes, humans don’t molt and have to live with the skin they are born with. Indian outfields, especially those that youngsters have to play on, are too hard and dry but that is one very good reason why they must learn to reach the ball quicker. However, there can be no excuses for being slow in the outfield, not learning to anticipate and for not developing a good throwing arm. And absolutely none for dropping catches.

They stopped making black and white movies many years ago. It’s a quirky thing to do now!