India get into order under Anil Kumble’s stewardship
En route to Alur, across the sprawling “NICE” expressway that leads you to Tumkur, there is a banner on which is painted a growling leopard’s head. The caption reads: “Caution. Don’t hit leopards.” Given the speed at which the generally vehicles zip off, the pictorial warning goes rarely noticed, but suddenly there is a feeling that you are treading into sort of sinister wilderness. Which is actually not the case, as apart from a few green splashes of groovy canopies, steep slopes and standalone boulders, there is nothing remotely suggestive of anything wild or bestial. Instead, you could see picnic spreads and selfie-obsessed teens.
The town, though, is a tangle of small streets and narrow service roads that flank the highway. One of those service roads take you to the gates of the KSCA Cricket Complex, where a bunch of kids are imploring, some with miniature bats in tow, the snarly guards to let them in. Smart ones smuggled themselves in through the unfenced backside of the stadium. Some were chased away by a couple of policemen. Smarter ones embraced the informal photographers’ enclosure, feigning themselves as one of the crew.
The background of the ground doesn’t make for vivid postcards. But there is something quaint about it, with trees lining the boundaries and the general absence of concrete structures, barring the platinum jubilee pavilion and a couple of hydraulic land excavators. The scoreboard is so miniature that from a distance it looks like an open, mini refrigerator. Around 10.30, Anil Kumble and his corps lumbered onto the pitch. The coach straightaway went about measuring the run-up of his fast bowlers before he had a huddled chat with Ishant Sharma, Umesh Yadav and Bhuvneshwar Kumar, all three intensively listening to the coach’s counsel.Virat Kohli then joined them, setting the 13-man field (occasionally 14, when Kumble joined them). Shikhar Dhawan and Murali Vijay trooped in. And to give it serious-match feel, there were two umpires as well.
The idea was to simulate a Test match situation, albeit with a few tweaks. Like every batsman had to be dismissed twice, an over will be split among three different bowlers with three different balls. At a time only the fast bowlers will bowl at them. The three spinners would then take over. The batsmen had to bat the entire 90 overs, while the bowlers had to pluck out 20 wickets. A kind of compressed Test match.
