Worshipping false gods?

The manner of defeat can be more horrifying than defeat itself and I don’t think MS Dhoni or Gary Kirsten missed the obvious.

The Asia Cup slipped through fingers. Worse, Indian batters can’t play spin!

For the uninitiated, India has traditionally been the land of rope tricks, hemp, fakirs, tweakers and batters with supple wrists. Lo and behold! One more myth lays shattered.

It’s not about one Asia Cup or Ajantha Mendis’ bag of tricks. Let's admit Yuvraj Singh, Rohit Sharma, Robin Uthappa and Suresh Raina (did you say Dhoni himself?) are veritable duds against spin. And interestingly, they don’t exactly fancy the rib-ticklers either!

At least Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid or VVS Laxman played spin better!

Are we worshipping the false gods, who, at best, are mere murderers of medium pace on docile tracks? Is Team India’s ODI future in safe hands?

But this was not supposed to be the case in this spin-fertile land where more tweakers sprout than ferns. You grow up playing them in serpentine bylanes, main streets on a bandh day, school grounds, practice nets and on full 22 yards at every level upwards. Then how come the sheer prospect of facing a spinner leaves you with paraplegic footwork and leaden wrists?

Consensus is Yuvraj is outrageously gifted, while Rohit is perhaps the best thing to come out of Mumbai since Tendulkar. Raina on the other hand is tipped, by the venerable Wisden, to define cricket in the next decade.

I’m afraid, unless this yawning chink in their armour is fixed, they would remain perpetual pretenders to the pedestals.

Image: AFP