By Joy Bhattacharjya

Possibly the cruelest blow to the Indian team after a third heartbreaking loss in the current One Day series in Australia was Man Of The Match Glen Maxwell’s post match statement. The Australian all rounder claimed that the Indian batsmen were probably making sure they got to a milestone, and were ending up about 25-30 runs short – and that was finally the difference between the teams.

This is not the first time that Australian players have made statements to that effect, on and off the field of play. Mathew Hayden famously said in 2004 that countries like India suffer because their batsmen slow down in the seventies and eighties, and almost all sub-continental teams had the problem.

How much of truth is there in those statements? There is a definite policy among Australian teams to take the attack to the opposition, and usually they have one player leading the charge. Any allegation that gets the opposition team off balance is welcomed and an integral part of the Australian team approach. So, there is definitely a certain amount of gamesmanship involved.

But there is a certain truth to one part of the allegations, and it has little to do with our coaching system or any generic streak of selfishness in Indian players. The truth is that New Zealand, which has a fourth of the population of Mumbai city is approximately four hundred times its size. There is far more space for sports and training facilities. Any kid even half good at a sport has a long, extended opportunity. But in India, players get a small, extremely limited opportunity to show their wares. And rising as a player in that system requires a lot of skill, but also a certain amount of ruthlessness and individual focus.

Few kids in India continue to be selected on the basis of technique and class, the pressure is just too much. They need to last at the crease and they need to make every opportunity matter. So any batsman emerging through the Indian age group system has had to have looked at the scoreboard throughout his career and decided to make it count.

It has its benefits. Over the past two decades, India has always had a series of talented batsmen looking to get into the national team. Tough hardened campaigners, who have slogged and battled their way through the intricate Indian age group system. But the same system tends to exhaust and blunt the edge of bowlers, particularly fast bowlers. It is interesting that most genuine fast bowlers who have come into the senior national team of late have been outsiders. The likes of Ishant Sharma, Umesh Yadav and even Mohammed Shami have played very little age group cricket.

Pakistan, on the other hand has a fairly chaotic junior cricket system, and therefore gets far more raw unpolished talent picked up at the senior level. As a result, their batting talent seems to be hit and miss with a lot of talented players who fail to deliver on their potential – often because of their lack of focus and discipline.

On the other hand, they get a lot of talented quick bowlers who have not been worn down by the system and rapidly improve as they learn new skills in their first few years at the top level. Like almost everything, the biggest handicap of a system often turns out to be its biggest advantage as well!

On the whole, the Indian age group system will produce a certain quality of batsman, and if he does have a tendency to look out for himself, the national coaches have enough time and ability to work that out of his system. Which is why Rahul Dravid’s appointment as national U 19 coach was an inspired choice. If anybody needs to teach a generation to play for their team and country, they could not find a better teacher than the hero of Hamilton, Kolkata, Adelaide and a score of other cities. On balance, that could end up being the most important decision taken in a difficult time for Indian cricket.