Off Stump

The worst thing that could happen to Indian cricket in the next week is for them to win at Nagpur and square a series in which they have been thoroughly outplayed. Now I didn't have as visceral a reaction as say Siddharth Vaidyanathan but maybe that was because the result was not a surprise. England worked hard after the defeat in Ahmedabad whereas the Indians seemed to play with an attitude that suggested that they could just turn up and win. Culturally, we Indians tend to go easy on ourselves given half a chance and (in case we win in Nagpur) the temptation will therefore be to ignore the continuing decline the side is and focus only on short term changes. The rousing World Cup win in April 2011 can now (in hindsight) clearly be seen as the end of a long successful period after which the team needed renewal. The signs were replete through the rest of the year but the team and management kept turning a blind eye. 0-4 bashings in England and Australia were conveniently put down a

The eight day gap between the end of the second Test in Mumbai and the start of the third in Kolkata is longer than any for India (during a series) in recent memory. While it has allowed the tension to build in a nicely simmering series, the flipside is the amount of dross generated by large parts of the media about the team in general and Dhoni and Tendulkar in particular which is taking attention away from what's turning out to be a great series to watch. Now I'm not an apologist for either of them and fully agree that they have dug themselves into holes of their own making primarily. Tendulkar should probably have retired at the end of the Australia tour along with Dravid and Laxman paving the way for one of Rohit Sharma or Manoj Tiwary (or both) to be tested at home over ten Test matches before the series of away tours from the end of 2013. And while Dhoni is easily the fittest cricketer on the planet, the burden of captaining India across all three formats (two of which