Dravid's lapses, and the dilemma of debutants

Over the last three years, Rahul Dravid has been the rock in the Indian batting line-up, bailing the team out time and again in both forms of the game. However, every batsman - even someone as dependable as Dravid - will inevitably have the occasional slump, and Dravid's came in the Videocon Cup in Zimbabwe, when five innings fetched him a mere 64 runs at an average of 12.80. Dravid's run even in one-day matches has been so exceptional that the last time he went through an entire series of more than three matches without getting a half-century was in New Zealand in 2002-03, in a series which will be remembered for the green, seaming tracks which ensured that no batsman consistently got among the runs. Leave aside that series, and you'd have to go back to the Coca Cola Cup in 1999-2000 when Dravid failed to register a fifty in a series of more than three games. (Click here for Dravid's series-wise averages.)

While the lean run is surely just a temporary blip, what's just a little more worrying is the manner in which he has been dismissed in these games. Four out of five times, the ball sneaked in through the gate or off the inside edge to knock back the stumps. One of the features of great players is that they usually protect their stumps better than the others - Sunil Gavaskar was only dismissed in that manner 53 times out of the 286 completed innings he played in both Tests and ODIs (18.53), while the corresponding percentages for Sachin Tendulkar and Javed Miandad are 16.73 and15.94.

In fact, Dravid's trend of getting bowled started in India's home series against Australia last year, when Glenn McGrath and co. breached his defences three times in seven innings. Out of his last 43 dismissals in international cricket (combining Tests and ODIs) since June last year, Dravid has been bowled 13 times - that's three out of every ten innings, which is well over his pre-2004 rate of 18.54%. Admittedly, he hasn't done too badly in either form of the game during this period, averaging 56.06 in Tests and 40.42 in ODIs, but being such a perfectionist, that's surely a trend he would have noticed himself and would be striving to correct over the coming season.

Dilemma of debutants
How does a team prepare for the future while ensuring that the present isn't compromised? It's a dilemma for any side - to go with the tried and the tested, or offer a chance to a new face? Australia have a method which seemed to work, but which is now being questioned in the light of their struggles in the ongoing Ashes series.

As the table below indicates, Australia have been extremely choosy about handing out the Baggy Green: since January 2000, only nine players - Simon Katich, Nathan Bracken, Martin Love, Shane Watson, Michael Clarke, Nathan Hauritz, Andrew Symonds, Brad Williams and Shaun Tait - have made their Test debuts in the 68 matches their team has played. West Indies and Zimbabwe have both been forced to blood in more debutants than they would like to because of various factors, and Bangladesh played their first Test only in November 2000, but among the other teams, Pakistan, India and New Zealand are the teams with the highest turnover ratio, with a debutant coming in every two Tests.

Test caps since Jan 2000

Team	Tests	Debutants	Tests/ debutant
Australia	68	9	7.55
England	75	26	2.88
South Africa	65	24	2.71
Sri Lanka	55	21	2.62
New Zealand	48	22	2.19
West Indies	69	32	2.16
India	55	26	2.12
Pakistan	51	27	1.89
Zimbabwe	42	28	1.50
Bangladesh	38	40	0.95

(Stats contributed by Muhammad Usman Sharif)

When triangulars test the patience
Meanwhile, India, New Zealand and Zimbabwe got together and played six meaningless one-day matches when it was obvious even before the first ball was bowled that the home team would not make it to the final. One-day cricket is already struggling to hold its own in the face of Test cricket's revival and Twenty20's freshness and excitement. In such a scenario, tepid triangular series are doing nothing to help its cause. Since the 2003 World Cup, 12 triangular tournaments have been played, and in seven of those, the finalists have been identified at least one match before the last one. As you'd expect, in most of them - six out of seven - either Zimbabwe or Bangladesh have been involved. The only exception was the NatWest Series in 2004, when England were bumped out with one league match still remaining.