The heat?s on as India warm up

It is difficult to see Sourav Ganguly come out as a swashbuckling hero who will save India from the depths of the despair, writes Kadambari Murali.

It is hot — not normal hot, but the burning kind of hot. When, if you take a foot out of your sandal, it is difficult to put it back on because the leather burns up so quickly, the kind of hot when it is difficult to sit on a bench for long as your posterior is sure to get roasted.

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The temperature might not be all that high but in this town of open spaces sans any pollution, the heat is intense and the first thought comes to mind is that if it is so tough to stand and simply watch the nets for a couple of hours, how much hotter would it be to stand and field and play intense, competitive cricket over four days.

But that, as player after player and coach after coach has been saying over this tour of South Africa, is what professional sport is all about — dealing with the conditions as they come, and the players that adapt the best generally do the best.

This adapting to the conditions (the weather, the undoubted bounce and pace of the wickets in SA and their own fickle form) will be the challenges ahead of India as they take on the Jacques Rudolph-led Rest of South Africa at the Sedgars Park here in a four-day game from Thursday.

If they can back themselves and their own experience which, with the return of Sourav Ganguly and Laxman, is tremendous and takes us back to the nucleus of a very fine Test squad, this is a game they should try and do well in: Other than Rudolph himself and Justin Kemp, the man who made life hellish for the Indians for a brief blazing while in the one-dayer at the Newlands, there are only a couple of other familiar faces.

With Sachin Tendulkar turning out at the nets and Rahul Dravid saying “he is fine”, Dravid himself will be the only main bat to sit out the game. The focus and obviously a lot of pressure will be on Ganguly but the politics of that whole situation aside, it is difficult to see Ganguly come out of this as a swashbuckling hero who will save India from the depths of the despair they have sunk into.

The pacy, bouncy South African tracks are not his favourite type of wickets, nor has the former Indian skipper been in top form in the recent past. Still, in terms of sheer tenacity and spirit (when he wants), it is difficult to match him and he can never be written off, so it would be interesting to see how he does.

After a very early night yesterday, exhausted by the nine-hour flight to Jo’burg, the two-hour drive here and straight into nets, Ganguly looked refreshed and quietly focussed. He batted long against the bowling machine manned by Ian Frazer, even while a group of his colleagues, the coach, his captain and the entire Indian and South African media watched carefully.

It was quite a sight. Tendulkar, back from his minor elbow injury and wearing a new elbow guard made for him by John Gloster, batted two nets away; Laxman, who will also be under some pressure to prove a point, was on in between them; but the focus was obviously Ganguly.

This might just be a warm-up game but the stakes are high at several individual levels after a messed up one-day series, and at a collective level if they do not want to be utterly destroyed by losing to a Rest of South Africa side ahead of meeting the big boys. India have a lot to prove through the next month or so and Sedgars Park on Thursday is where they have to start.

Team

India (from): VVS Laxman (captain), Virender Sehwag, Wasim Jaffer, Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, MS Dhoni, Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, Irfan Pathan, S Sreesanth, VRV Singh, Gautam Gambhir
(It’s a toss-up between Gambhir and a paceman)