I made -what I would call- an noteworthy observation while hearing members of our world cup winner team doing commentary during a tight match. I specifically noticed their approach towards the game and couldn't help comparing them with current cricketers. While they were assessing a bowling change in the match saying the bowler is useful in given situation as he is slow and mostly accurate, if you make an offside cordon and bowl consistently offside … and stuff like that, a recently retired cricketer described the same situation as the bowler being ‘trusted’ by the captain to handle the situation, and bail his team out. Then he laid on the rhetoric of the bowler having a knack for taking wickets in tight situations, having a golder arm and stuff like that. He probably finds a bowler talking wickets in tight situation- a surprise.
This gives you an insight of how bowling change is being regarded in modern Indian cricket and how it is different from yesteryear’s cricketer’s approach.
Dravid, for example, makes bowling changes as and when needed but also at times seemingly just to carry out proper bowling-over distribution among all his bowlers. We have seen, especially in many tight matches, that he often misses out on various potential bawling options. We have seen him, at least once forgetting what bowling options he has at all, haven’t we?
This lack of planning, when a bowler is asked to bawl, this ad-hawk-ism about bawling changes pressurizes the bowler to do a lot more thinking then he should require to. Look at an Australian or a Kiwi match, the captain looks like in control all the time. You hardly feel that a certain bowler is being ‘trusted’. The captain looks like having a plan. Because he has a plan you would also see him admonishing a bawler when he thinks the later is not bowling to the plan.
You would hardly see Dravid giving indications of being in control, a bowler looks like being on his own most of the time.
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