KOLKATA // The build-up to this game is worth reading into a little. Pakistan, at least from the words of their coach Waqar Younis, looked to be coming into it in a bit of a strut.
They had won an opening game against a dangerous opponent and won it well. India had lost their opening game, apparently entangled in a web of their own making.
They will be under pressure, Waqar said. We are more confident than we have been in the past against India, he added.
By itself there was nothing wrong with what he said. He is the coach and he is entitled to talk his team up.
The problem is, coming in, Pakistan did not look like the team Waqar was talking about. In came Imran Khan for a pep talk. Then Wasim Akram was in their ears at the ground. If there had been time, you imagine, they might have visited a psychologist, too.
All of which is also fine, too, except it felt like they were straining for something. Trying to grasp some last-minute mysterious motivational force that had hitherto been missing and that would be the resolution to their woes.
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What did India do? They relaxed. Only three of them trained two days before the game. They did not seek out the experiences and words of wisdom of former greats.
They knew, as Ravichandran Ashwin was at pains to point out, that they had not become a bad side overnight. They knew they did not need to do anything special except trust in the way they had been playing for the last while.
When MS Dhoni was asked how India continue winning against Pakistan at World Cups and World Twenty20s – a record that now reads 11-0 to India – his first sentence in a longish answer was all that was needed: “We keep everything the same.”
It said all that was needed about the current balance of power between these two sides: India ascendant and confident, Pakistan bluffing, harrying, hoping, desperate to somehow paw their way into this rivalry.
Dhoni knows that streak will fall one day. There is a pressure on India, too, to maintain it, as he pointed out. But he did not feel the need to react to that pressure, in which nutshell lies the genius of Dhoni and his India side.
And broadly, to that balance, is how this match played out.
India backed the XI that had lost to New Zealand. Pakistan decided to fiddle, partly because they read the pitch wrong. They thought it might play better even than the one they played on against Bangladesh.
But also, perhaps, they did so because they did not truly back themselves to play as they did against Bangladesh.
Dhoni also did not read the pitch entirely accurately as it turns out – he did not expect the amount of turn his spinners got, but he knew, broadly, that the moisture in it would help his spinners.
That is another point. If cricket had people who could accurately forecast the nature of pitches, then we would be talking about a different sport altogether.
The pitch may now not come under the kind of scrutiny it would have done had India lost, but that is besides the point: if a pitch is bad for cricket, it should, in theory, be bad for both sides.
This was difficult, sure, especially for the side batting first. But the story of Pakistan’s batting is well known. It is the prime cause for their slide in limited-overs cricket. It is a deeper malaise than just coming across a tough pitch one day.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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