Looking Ahead to Australian Tour

I write this at the end of the second day of the 1st cricket test between Ind & Pak. The game is interestingly poised & maybe over the course of the next 3 days India might manage to pull of a victory. But if U were to use the 2 days of our game and look ahead into the Australian tour then, it feels more and more that it is our batting that will make or break (a whitewash) that tour. Australia in all likely hood will post 500+ scores on those wickets against our bowlers & we will have to respond with similar scores to stay afloat.

Shoaib Akthar knocked out our openers in quick time here & when he has not hit full form yet. What would happen when these openers on the Australian wickets face up to a Bret Lee. We will have to counter it well by having batsmen who will be able to score quick runs against Lee & company. A dour batting of a couple of hrs for few runs will yield nothing beyond postponing a result by couple of hrs. The more I think of it the more I feel we need Shewag in the team for Karthick & maybe Yuvraj for Ganguly.

We cannot read too much into the success of our spinners in the ongoing test match, the likely hood of Kumble repeating his performance from last time is probably remote. Our pacers are in no form to counter the Aussie batting, our batsmen & their rate of scoring is the only hope.