Indian team's performance in SA is not surprising

Indian team's South African tour is almost half complete. I am not surprised by team's performance at all, I am not sure why whole of nation is surprised this time including our parliamentarians. If at all ever Indian team was real underdogs it was this time with the absence of Yuvaraj , Ganguly and Laxman (initially, well anyway it did not matter when he played) and rawness of our bowling attack. I am not sure how we expect this team to win against SA in their backyard with Dinesh Karthick coming in at number 5 considering the fact he was not even good enough to play for India some time back in the role of wicketkeeper batsman, Ravi Shashtri summed it up well when he said "India need to surprise me to beat SA".

Some people are of the opinion that the surprise and disappointment is due to the fact that team not competing well. I think it is does not matter the manner in which you lose unless you really get close and there are chances for both the teams to win. All these bad performances have definitely made Ganguly's bid for getting back really hard to ignore, if that happens our top order will read the same as it was couple of years back, this after all the talk of experimentations and blooding youngsters.

Among all the ruins there were some bright spots with the strong return of Zaheer with good bowing performances and some batting displays from Dhoni and Dravid.

Test matches will present even tougher challenge with more livelier pitches and no restriction on short stuff, I feel India are better test batting team on these kind of pitches because there will be not be any pressure to score runs at a faster rate, if we look at the dismissals of our batsmen in one day matches, most of the them were out edging the off stump line to either wicket keeper or slips and in test matches there is no need for it.

Test series prediction

There will as usual 2-0 loss with some bright batting performances from Tendulkar and Dravid at some stage with no bearing on results.

Hope there will be some fight in test matches at least for the sake of ESPN TV team, who have to consistently act sad in between all the good life there are having in South Africa…