Team India look to fix tweaker troubles
Colombo, July 24: Visiting teams have found the going tough in Sri Lanka, their spinners’ inability to crack the code being the major reason. Demands on travelling spinners are varied in these parts of the world. Perseverance is the key to slow bowlers here and Pragyan Ojha and Harbhajan Singh were not tight enough to force mistakes from the Lankan batsmen.
Unless there is a marked improvement in this department, buying 20 wickets will be a difficult job. The limitations for fast bowlers are many.
In the first Test, Harbhajan bowled 30 overs in the first innings, going for 98 runs without a wicket. Barring a sharp chance to Gautam Gambhir at short leg, the off-spinner did not create any notable opportunity.
Ojha was a bigger disappointment. From the 28 overs he sent down, 115 runs were scored and he beat the bat genuinely once in the entire innings, one that turned past Mahela Jayawardene towards the end of the first day. In the second innings the two spinners bowled 5.1 overs for 35 runs.
Harbhajan is the leading wicket-taker in the world (among active bowlers). His record of 355 wickets at 31.28 is justifiable, given the nature of pitches, broad bats and smaller grounds. In eight Tests in Sri Lanka, Harbhajan has 23 wickets at an average of 43.08, too high for a spearhead where the next best bowler is Ishant Sharma with 69 wickets.
“It was tough for the spinners. There was turn and a bit of bounce on the first day where the moisture helped them. After that the wicket settled down well and it became difficult for them. A bowler like Muralitharan had to toil for nearly 25 overs to get his last wicket. It is an example of how things turned out,” said Dhoni. Harbhajan and Ojha might have found support from their captain but there can be no excuse to the way they operated.
Harbhajan’s best hour in Lanka came in Galle, 2008 where he bowled India to a 170-run win with match figures of 10/153.
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