Demystifying the opposition

Bruce Reid, in a recent interview to Cricinfo, said something that made me sit up: 'They (the Indians) were just not worried about individual reputations. They just played as they saw it. At team meetings they barely mentioned the names of the Australian bowlers. They played each ball as they saw it, but it was irrelevant who bowled it. I know they rated Jason Gillespie very highly, but they felt the more they talked the bowlers up the more of an issue they would become, so they hardly spoke of them.'

Back in 1996, I had interviewed Martin Crowe shortly before that year's World Cup; one of the aspects I was most curious about was how Crowe had shaped the New Zealand team's strategy during the 1992 Cup campaign.

During that interview, Martin said, 'The first thing we did was to demystify the opposition. In team meetings, we stopped referring to teams by name -- the opposition was just the yellow team, or maroon team, or blue team, or whatever.'

The reason, Martin explained, was that if the Kiwis talked -- and thought -- about the yellow team, it was just another team; but if they talked of Australia, that reference carried with it the daunting, confidence-sapping baggage of past defeats at the hands of the Aussies.

For me, it was just one more example of the degree, and extent, of mental preparation that goes into a team's back room work; to see the Indians thinking on those lines is another straw in the wind, that tells you how much progress the team is making, in the mental side of the game, in recent times.

That demystifying is most evident in the way the Indians have treated Brett Lee, their nemesis on the last tour. In the Test series that year, the debutant took 13 wickets for 184 runs, at an average of 14.15, a strike rate of 31.85 and an economy rate of just 2.67. He did equally brilliantly in the Carlton and United one-day series (with Pakistan as the third team), pulling in 16 wickets at 18.31, with a strike rate of 27.69 and an economy rate of 3.99.

Three years on, Lee, in the Australian Test side as its enforcer, walked into an ambush; with the Indians jumping on him with both feet each time he turned up to bowl, the super quick went 8 for 476 in the Test series, at 59.5, a strike rate of a wicket every 75.63 balls, and an economy rate of 4.74 that would have been a touch much for a strike bowler even in ODIs.

Back facing the Indians in today's game at the Gabba, Lee must have felt the recent nightmares coming on for an encore. Firstly, he suffered the indignity of coming on one change behind Williams and Gillespie; when he did come on in the 11th, he was promptly pulled and cover driven by Laxman for fours. In his next over, the 13th, Tendulkar got into the act with a straight drive, followed by a flick through midwicket. In the 15th, it was Tendulkar again, clubbing him through midwicket and then playing an exquisite square cut, to have Lee 3-0-30-0 while his mates gave away 59 runs in 12 overs (1/89 at the end of 15).

It is almost as if the Indians have taken a collective decision to brutalize the bowler, who ended the day 1/83 in his ten overs. Check out his performance against the various batsmen he bowled to today: Tendulkar took four fours off him, while scoring 27 off just 21 balls; Laxman matched the four fours, while taking 30 off 27; Dravid had one four while taking 17 off just 11 (a strike rate of 9.27), Yuvraj hit a four in taking 5 off four; the four batsmen collectively took 79 runs off 63 balls faced.

Taken in tandem with the Test series where even Parthiv Patel and Irfan Pathan were slamming him around in the Sydney Test, that is as complete a job of demystification as you would want to see.

The person smiling the broadest, in the Indian camp, will probably be Zaheer Khan. Ever since he got overly aggressive against Mathew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist in the final of the 2003 World Cup and got taken for plenty, there has been much talk of how the Aussies have been targeting him for especially severe punishment.

Zaheer absorbed it all, the battering during the recent TVS Cup at home, and the media writeups that focused on how the Aussies had the wood on him, and came back nicely with a five-for in the Brisbane Test. Now to see how much of this pressure Lee can take, how well he can absorb it, and when and how he bounces back.