Winning Tests not important, coming back alive good enough

Finally, I make it to South Africa. After having made a living out of describing this country purely based on imagination, now I have the chance to see how close to truth I really was. And, going by the little I have seen in the six hours I have spent here, I get a feeling that I was way off the mark. Johannesburg is far greener and cleaner than I thought.



The skyscrapers aren’t scraping the skies as I had imagined, and the people aren’t making me look like a Lilliput as I had almost certainly expected. I walked around the neighbourhood for two hours and I am still alive. It probably isn’t as dangerous as I had been warned about.

All I heard last couple of weeks was how unsafe Johannesburg and South Africa is. A close friend, not really the bravest of guys, told me how his company advises employees visiting Johannesburg to take a cab for a distance of even 100 meters.

A cousin, prone to the odd exaggeration, spoke of how almost anyone he knows who’s visited this city has been mugged. Another friend described how muggers in Jo’burg would mug and then shoot. No mercies.

The Johannesburg in my mind was as dark as Frank Miller’s Basin City, where locals dodged bullets on the road just as we Indians spit on it.

I suspect almost any Indian, including our cricketers, coming here for the first time hears the same stories. And suddenly, the reason for our team’s performance in this country seems to clear in my head.


Even before you leave India you get a feeling that returning with your life intact would be an achievement in itself. In the larger scheme of things, winning test matches seems far too irrelevant to bother about.

That also explains why KKR performed the way they did in South Africa, given that the community it represents isn’t particularly famous for its preference for physical combat. India’s much improved performance in the two World Cups held here was probably a case of players feeling secure in numbers.

But during a bilateral series, Indians can so easily think of themselves as being alone and hunted. At such times, even a Lonwabo Tsotsobe at the top of his run up can look like Samuel Jackson with a .32.

Raring to go

Fortunately, the Indian team is in Durban right now. And, after a few days of R&R, they are raring to go for the first test. Yeah… first. The previous game in Centurion wasn’t really a test. The South Africans weren’t quite tested and the Indians failed to appear. Other than Sachin, of course.

But, he doesn’t really count because he can make a century out of thin air. So, with the first ‘test’ becoming a practice game for India again, the team starts yet another overseas test series 1-0 down.

That’s where the good news ends. Word has it that so green is the wicket in Durban that Ishant and Sreesanth spent two hours searching for it. Finally, Bhajji claimed to have found it and then proved it by showing how none of his balls turned. It had to be the pitch, everyone concluded.

India’s record in Durban isn’t that bad. Every time we have played here, we have scored runs. In 1996, we scored 166 runs. In two innings. Despite the Centurion debacle, the Indian team of 2010 is unlike any other test team in our history. My gut feel says India will win at Durban. Zaheer and Sreesanth would fire and Viru would blast away. Graeme Smith may as well place his Third Man on the stands.