Frankly, if New Zealand do come up with a bowler friendly wicket and India cant cope with it, we need to at least ask some people to reassess this
"greatest Indian side of al times" tag with some important qualifications.
Why should we, the Indian fans, be defensive about a seaming track, swerving conditions etc unless our
"greatest batting line up" and
"most balanced attack" is not what we make it out to be ?
Bring it on Kiwis. We are ready for business . . . er. . . well we think we are . . . is it not ?
Okay so we are - ready for business that is, as an Indian side. Where does that leave New Zealand ?
From 204 for 6, Dhoni, Harbhajan, Zaheer, Ishant and Munaf added 175 runs for the last four Indian wickets. On the other hand, from 21 for no loss, the entire Kiwi batting line up added 196 for all the ten of theirs. There has to be a lesson in this. No I stand corrected. There IS a lesson in this, New Zealand would do grave harm to themselves not to see it.
I dont care whether you are for more grass or less grass on this wicket, home advantage or not, the fact remains that the conditions are surely more alien to the Indians than to the Kiwis. When this board was discussing what kind of wicket should be prepared for this match, I did not want to get involved in the argument as I do not like to where raw emotions (sometimes that reads just nationalistic fervour) are on display. Hence the post above. But now we are close to writing the final chapter of this match and this series and we need to put in perspective the vast difference in the two sides. It can be undone by planning for the conditions to bail you out. We have been doing that in India for so long and trust me, we have suffered inspite of a much larger pool of cricketing talent than New Zealand.
For so long, India had been hiding its inadequacies of lack of pacers and thereby of attacks that could bowl teams out in conditions different than existed at home. For so long this lack of pacers resulted in collateral damage in the form of batsmen, particularly opening batsmen, who were only exposed to benign wickets and benevolent bowlers making them sitting ducks (in more ways than one) when playing away from home. For so long, the batting averages of our batsmen were so skewed by conditions at home that no failure abroad, howsoever pathetic, wasn't so bad that a series at home could not fix it and ensure selection and feting by a fawning public with short term memory loss.
India, inspite of having arguably, one of the greatest middle order that has been seen in the history of the game, an inexhaustible stream of spinners ranging from the very good to the great have still been constrained by complete failure to make any consistent mark outside the sub-continent and that has been our tragedy. If there is one single factor which can be pointed at as the one which has contributed the most to this sad state of Indian cricket, it has been our tendency to hide our inadequacies with the convenient ploy of deploying tracks that would help us look better than we are.
Hopefully, The Indian board will realise that we need not do so any more so that we can build on this gift of a more than decent pace attack and a good pair of opening batsmen with the solidity of a technically proficient and vastly experienced middle order which is almost as good as it was on younger legs.
Kiwis are in a much worse situation. They do not have the talent. The pace attack is pathetic. Zaheer is not an all time bowling great but he could be a bowling coach to this Kiwi side but then so could some much lesser names in Indian domestic cricket one could think of. An attack that cant stop itself from bowling far too short, that when it makes any effort to pitch up bowls mainly half volleys, that hasn't bowled yorkers in an entire series (if there were a couple I may have missed them and that hasn't exploited the short rising delivery (as was done with Sehwag yesterday, in conditions which are at least not as bad as pacers in India face must have a lot of thinking to do. And none of that needs to be about how to make more bowler friendly tracks.
Yes New Zealand cricket has a lot of problems but trust me the wickets in New Zealand are in no serious short list.
By the way, it is tragic to see the best Kiwi bowler in the series doing drinks duty. Jeetan Patel is not a great off spinner and his off break doesnt 'break' much but he was the most impressive of the home bowlers in this series and inspite of the differences in their records, I am afraid, I do not think Vettori is a better bowler than him on unhelpful conditions.