Super superstition helps India to historic series win

I've now watched live India's winning moment at Headingley, Adelaide, Multan, Rawalpindi and Jamaica. No prizes for guessing who's been man of the match in four of those five tests.

After a disastrous opening day, I then decided to turn to superstition. Like I mentioned in a post during India's tour to Pakistan, superstition has a huge part to play while watching cricket.

On Saturday, I somehow chanced upon the formula. It was that I would not watch the game live for more than five minutes at a stretch. It worked like magic! West Indies folded up in barely two hours.

Yesterday, the same formula was applied. In fact yesterday was the first time during the entire series, including one-dayers, that I saw the end of the day's play. I missed the action in the second session since I was trying to sleep, while at the same time visualizing if tomorrow's headline would read "Sarwan leads West Indies to victory" or "India win series". I was fairly sure end of play yesterday would also mean the end of the game. The target was small enough to be overhauled in a day given the likes of Gayle, Lara, Bravo and Chanderpaul would be batting.

The winning moment, at around 4 am IST, made me immensely satisfied, especially since if the game hadn't ended yesterday, and if India were with a chance of sewing it up early in the day today, I'd have missed the moment since I'd neither be at home nor at the workplace.

What about the Jamaica pitch? I find Brian Lara's comments difficult to accept. No one is suggesting it was the perfect test match wicket. At the same time, it wasn't the poor wicket that he makes it out to be. For his argument that the wicket helped India's spinners, he seems to forget that his side's quicks didn't do badly either - Taylor got 9/95 and Collymore got 7/65. If India's spinners got wickets, it was because they were two top quality ones; not because the pitch aided spin.

In fact aside from maybe 3-4 dismissals (Lara's, Dravid's and Ganga's), there was nothing in the pitch which suggested that it was a terror and a minefield to bat on. If you had the ability and the patience, as Dravid (twice), Kumble (twice), Ganga and Ramdin showed, you could bat for a fair amount of time and get runs.

I really do hope the ICC doesn't apply its pitch benchmarks and rule that Jamaica was a poor wicket.

I know this is probably a post-facto justification, but I'd have maintained that the pitch was a good test match pitch even if the result had been different.

Labels: superstition