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Time to kill

Three quicks and one spinner, or two apiece of pace and spin? Kumaran or Agarkar? M S K Prasad or Nayan Mongia? Laxman at six, or Vijay Bharadwaj? Gandhi or Laxman to open?

Less than 24 hours to go, and the mailbox here is gigabytes full of opinion, argument, analysis. And there's more of the same, coming from the Indian camp.

Perhaps the most significant statement, from an Indian point of view, came from Kapil Dev when he said the team has been analysing Pakistan's 0-3 disaster against the Aussies, and learning lessons from it. Thus, Kapil has had the quicks practising a much fuller length in the nets, since he reckons Pak machismo, as evidenced by a tendency to bowl too quick, too short, ended up giving the Tests away to the opposition.

A fair call, that, and India's bowling fortunes will in fact depend to a large extent on the length the seamers can maintain. Short, and they will be pulled and cut to ribbons. Pitch it up, and with their ability to make the ball move around off the seam, they could end up surprising a few before they are through.

One aspect that hasn't been talked of much, though, is what Pakistan did with the bat. Consider this: Put in to bat in the first Test of the series, at the Gabba, Pak weighs in with 367. And follows it up with 281 in the second. You would think, wouldn't you, that a team that can put up 648 runs in a five day game stands a better than fair chance of winning or, at worst, squaring the game?

But no, they lose. And kicking off a 3-Test series with a defeat, first up, is a surefire prelude to disaster.

The more interesting statistic, if you are analysing that first Test defeat, is this -- of a total possible of 450 overs for the match, Pakistan manage to play just 191 (117 in the first innings, a mere 74 in the second). Leaving Australia all of 259 overs, give or take four for change of innings, to play around with. Pakistan, thus, played the time game badly -- and lost.

The trend in fact continued through the series. At the Bellerieve Oval, Pakistan -- again inserted -- put up a total of 614 in two innings -- but manage to bat only a touch over 200 overs. And again, left Australia too many overs to play with -- the effect of which was really felt when, in the Australian second innings, Gilchrist and Langer got together for that match-winning partnership. With overs in hand, the two could -- and, as they said in post-win interviews, did -- enjoy the luxury of playing it ten minutes at a time, planning and constantly reshaping their strategy at every stage, knowing that at any point, they had both options -- shut shop and play for the draw, or push for the seemingly improbable win -- open to them.

The WACA saw Pakistan at its batting worst -- 20 batters managed to last out a total of 124.4 overs spread over two innings.

You've got to wonder, as you get into the countdown for the first Test between India and Australia at the Adelaide Oval, whether this was one of the lessons coach Kapil Dev has been drilling into his wards. The Indians in recent times have shown a tendency to fret just a touch when they are out in the middle and the boundaries aren't coming -- a mindset they will need to readjust if they want to get off to a good start in this series.

Adelaide, judging by the reports coming in, is likely to prove a fair to middling batting track, at least during the first innings. So what constitues a good total? The bookies Down Under seem to think that 375-400 is fair dinkum for the first innings -- but from the point of view of match strategy, there is going to be the heck of a difference between getting 375 on the board in 130 overs, say, and doing it in 170.

For starters, that is the difference between the second team starting its innings sometime in the afternoon session, when conditions are generally at their most benign, and late in the evening, when naturally strokeplaying openers are forced to rein in and focus on surviving 8-10 overs.

Look at it from the perspective of the opposing captain. If Steve Waugh gets back into the hut having seen his team dismiss India for 375 off 130, say, he's apt to be telling his guys, 'No sweat, guys, the game still has 320 overs to run. We've got the time, gameplan here is play cool, play safe for starters, look overall to bat out around 200 overs, we should have 550 or more on the tins then and that's a winning platform, with 120 overs left for a second shot at the Indians.'

Make that 170 overs gone, and for the captain of the side batting second, the equation drastically alters. He's got only 280 overs left to play with. He figures he needs at least 100, 120 of those to take the opposition out in the second innings. That leaves anywhere between 160-180 overs to match the first innings score, and add at least 200 to it in order to put the opposition under pressure.

And that means taking more risks than you would, if you had overs to play with. And we all know what happens, happen you take that one or two risks too many -- a couple of wickets go down, and suddenly, the initiative shifts to the bowling side.

More than team composition, equally in importance to the length Messers Srinath and company bowl, this could be the make or break factor for India. If the batsmen can curb their impatience in the first innings of the first Test, rein in their natural strokeplaying tendencies and focus on batting the Aussies out of the game in terms of overs, they will have started off their campaign in just the right fashion -- by giving the home team reason to readjust the strategy that saw them down Pak three Tests to nothing.

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