The good thing about captain Virat Kohli is that he does not make excuses. When India missed their chance to create history and win the series in South Africa for the first time, Kohli did not point to the close calls that did not go in India’s favour. The Indian skipper did not point out the DRS issues which were certainly heating up the team under the collar. Kohli did not take into account whether luck could have favored his team more when the batsmen were beaten up or there were catches that went hand in hand. Instead, he focused on where his team had gone astray.
“We have batted a lot. Of course, batting failure has been the reason, no doubt about it,” Kohli said. India’s top order didn’t set up matches well enough for their bowlers to do their job. Kohli also admitted that his team, usually mentally tough and intent on hitting with the first ball, did not maintain the intensity, as they have in recent overseas victories.
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“There was some lack of concentration on our part even in critical moments. I thought South Africa did better in those crucial moments and absolutely deserved the win. One of the challenges we have faced is to capitalize on the momentum when it is on our side,” Kohli said. “Whenever we’ve done that, we’ve won games. But on the other hand, when we didn’t do that, we lost the match because of 30-45 minutes of cricket where we batted poorly.
There have certainly been passages of 30-45 minutes in this series in which the team has batted badly. But, more importantly, there have been very few sessions in which the team has batted as they should have. The partnership between Mayank Agarwal and KL Rahul in the first innings of the first Test seems like a distant dream now. Then there was a stand between Ajinkya Rahane and Cheteshwar Pujara which made it understand that a corner had been turned. Both of them remained as false mornings.
The trend for India over the past two years has been their inability to take collective responsibility for the batting and score big runs on the board. This was exposed very clearly in this series. Only once did the team make more than 300, and thereafter their scores read 174, 202, 266 and 223 and 198.
These are not the scores of the team that claims the collective experience of this Indian team. These are not the scores of a team that can dominate the opposition bowling attack, or at least blunt it. When you don’t have enough runs on the board, it becomes impossible to put pressure on the opposing team. This meant that South Africa were always able to either be in control of the game or touch the distance needed at any point in time.
If you think about it, South Africa was nothing special with the bat either. Throughout the series, not a single batsman from the home team scored a century – although Dean Elgar was unbeaten on 96 at the time of victory in the second Test. And yet the inexperienced South African batsman managed to lift his team. A gem has been unearthed in Keegan Peterson, South Africa. He looks childishly young but is tall enough to play over 100 first-class matches and therefore understands his game very well and also knows what it takes to be successful at the top.
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Rassie van der Dussen is much talked about in South Africa, and although he didn’t manage to score big, he showed the right temperament to get the job done in two chases. Sometimes, it’s about making the most of what you have, rather than hoping for something you can’t, and so was the case with South Africa in this series. India had big names, big contracts and the wow factor coming into the series. But reputation doesn’t make you win matches, perform. And in that sense, the home side was able to rise to the occasion, almost with India slowly but surely fading.
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