The lost world

Colombo, August 30: Indian cricketers could be seen doing some heavy last-minute shopping at the Colombo airport duty-free on Saturday, on their way back to India after what had been a rather taxing tour of Sri Lanka.

Blame it on the Beijing Olympics, which coincided with the series, but it didn’t exactly get top-billing over the last three weeks. One other reason could be that the Cricket served up lacked the famous Lankan flavour. A closer inspection of the 3-2 scoreline does indicate that the side playing mediocre cricket beat the one that was downright poor, and under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that India’s first-ever ODI series win in the island nation failed to impress many.

Every single match in the five-ODI series was decided after one of the two sides collapsed— and India only slipped twice. Also, luck played a big role in the results as the side that won the toss invariably won the match.

Low-scoring contests

To count a few positives, this one-day series was distinctly different from what the norm has been of late, at least in the subcontinent: high-scoring games. Not once did the total come in the vicinity of 300 — in fact, the highest score was 247 by India in the fourth one-dayer — and to see small totals defended successfully in this era of slam-bang cricket was heartening. The series belonged entirely to the bowlers even though Mahendra Singh Dhoni walked away with the Man of the Tournament award for his crucial knocks.

The batsmen struggled to find their feet against both spin and pace. Yuvraj Singh started with a bang, scoring a whirlwind 172 in the warm-up game, but could muster up just 72 in the five matches. Despite that, he remained in contention for the bike that went to the man who hit the maximum boundaries.

Only six batsmen from either side could aggregate more than hundred, while star players such as Kumar Sangakkara (37) and Gautam Gambhir (36 in four games) were among the biggest flops.

Virat makes a mark

But while many big guns fired blanks, India’s find in this series with the bat was Virat Kohli. The 19-year old from Delhi rose to the challenge of facing the new ball and looked confident—in fact, his dismissals could actually be attributed to overconfidence. Dhoni, in his mellowed-down avatar was effective, but that meant there was no one to pinch-hit in the lower-order.

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