CricDigs Blogs

India has been performing rather credibly over the last two-three seasons in test cricket. This has largely been due to the combined effort of an incisive bowling attack and some very good batting performances. The bowling continues to look good but the last six months or so have set off some tongues wagging about the fact that the middle-order is losing its credibility. For starters, Dravid’s from has nose-dived and he no longer looks capable of resurrecting the innings. On the other hand, Ganguly has bid his final goodbye to the game and his replacement — Yuvraj is still trying to cement his place.

Now, once again, the much famed Indian middle order has struggled against the Englishmen. They did so against the Lankans and during the first half of the test series against Australia and are again struggling to get going against a restrictive England bowling attack. However, I still truly believe that we shouldn’t rush into making conclusions. A string of few poor performances from the likes of Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman shouldn’t lead us into taking drastic actions. The reasons are simple:

o We cannot possibly replace such world class performers overnight. Just look how Aussies are struggling to plug the holes left by McGrath, Warne and Gilly’s retirement.
o There aren’t any immediate replacements so good that they can be actually looked upon as worthy contenders for filling these shoes.

Seriously, the likes of Kaif, Raina, Rohit Sharma and even Badrinath don’t look like real world beaters. True, unless tried we shouldn’t be creating a perception about their talent but from what has been seen so far, only Badrinath looks like good enough to be given a decent run in the middle order. The most probably solution lies in picking and persisting with at least one of these young talents for one particular series and finding out how good he really is. This way when the present giants of Indian batting do decide to step aside or are actually dropped from the squad we aren’t left clueless, searching around for probable worthy contenders.