The Cracks Keep on Swallowing

Cracks. Dust. Dodgy pitches. They may as well all be synonyms for an Australian cricketer thinking about Indian conditions. After the progress of Waugh and Gilchrist's teams, it appears that Australian cricket has once again regressed to the depths of the abysmal, as far as subcontinental form is concerned. The series has only reached the halfway mark and the dogs are already out!
In all honesty, however, Phil Hughes really shouldn't feel so dispirited. After all, one of the best batsmen of his generation, good ol' Ricky Ponting, would rather have batted on ice than against Indian spinners on Indian pitches. 

England proved during the previous Ashes and India has proven all over again, that Australian cricket is short of ideas. Not talent. Just ideas. Domestic performance is measured after tests undertaken on domestic featherbeds. Australia's best bowlers are, more often than not, injured during international duty, which leaves international batting hopefuls to play against "next best" attacks. These are not the characteristics of a system that once produced two decades of some of the greatest cricketers seen in the modern game. 

Team India was a great cricket team two years ago. Many a whitewashed series since have well and truly exposed the existence of cracks that every Indian fan dreaded. Today's Team India should not be beating the Aussies in a manner so demoralising. A team must know it's plumbing the depths of despair when the enigmatic Ravindra Jadeja becomes a 'match-winning' Test match bowler! 

This Australian debacle can only be attributed to a poor domestic structure that churns out flat-track bullies and an administration that has lost the ability to stick to the over-arching principles that produced success in such abundance over the previous two decades. 

Fixes for these structural issues are not found overnight. There will be more failures and more reports and more discontent. Team India fans can only but look ahead to Mohali with utmost glee and anticipation.