Gautam Gambhir is emerging as the leading batsman of the new generation © AFP

India’s magnificent performance that helped draw the second Test was nearly as satisfying as the comprehensive victory in the first, and for a very different reason. While the greatest batting line-up in the world has won Tests in style, once memorably after following on, it has sometimes disappointed by its inability to bat through six or seven sessions in the second innings. When the last century has been scored, and the final figures are tallied, greatness will be decided as much by the ability to win as the skill to bat on for a draw.

It has been a decade since India batted 180 overs as they did in Napier, to draw a Test match. That was in Mohali, when centuries from Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid saw them bat through 183 overs to save a match where they had been dismissed for 83 in the first innings.

By batting for over ten and a half hours, one of the side’s most attacking batsmen, Gautam Gambhir, indicated that at 27, he is emerging as a leading batsman of the new generation. He is also the allrounder of the new generation, a certainty in all three forms of the game. Among batsmen, only Virender Sehwag and MS Dhoni can make that claim.

Still, India’s batting should not take the focus away from their atrocious catching in the New Zealand innings. It is a long time since they have dropped so many catches close to the wicket. When you consider that the team has three players with 100-plus catches in Tests, it might be tempting, in the modern spirit, to call this their best catching side. But the habit of
not catching can be catching.

Much is being made of the fact that the New Zealand authorities have been excessively kind to India by preparing wickets that have drawn the teeth of their own seam bowling. Wasim Akram has called it cowardice. It is not that, but professional respect for opponents who have the better seam bowlers. The hosts will have to take a chance, however, for the final Test in
Wellington and go with a track that could just as easily backfire on them. But at 0-1 down you have to take the risk.

With that casual insouciance that comes easily to columnists who write on the game, I had predicted a 3-0 win for India after the first Test, and spent much of the first half of the Napier Test wondering how to make more palatable the words I was about to eat. Some years ago, one writer published a photograph of himself literally eating his words (and washing it down with
wine). It is more difficult to do now, since swallowing a computer is not easily done. So, I have a little more reason than the rest of India to thank Messrs Gambhir, VVS Laxman, Tendulkar and Dravid.

But the fact is, Twenty20 and IPL are rewriting not just the rules of cricket, but carrying it forward into the new century.

Many years ago in an essay on the future of sport, I had written that international sport would break away from the narrow confines of nationalism, time and place. The example I gave then were the Olympic Games, which was an exercise in jingoism (the examples are too well known to bear repetition here), and thanks to the arrival of sponsors and
professional athletes might soon become a set of competitions among corporate houses rather than countries. Coke and Pepsi and Adidas, and many such would be in the happy position of being able to call upon their players from across the world to participate in their colours.

This is already happening with Formula One. It is Ferrari versus McLaren versus Renault and so on. Drivers are professionals hired for their sporting prowess and not dependant on country of origin. It is Ferrari which wins, not Italy. The only concession to tradition is the playing of the national anthem, which, considering everything, is incongruous.

Now IPL is set to take cricket in the direction of Formula One. This is sport in the post-modern world, not restricted by boundaries, geographical or otherwise. The IPL’s claim that city-teams and city-loyalties were being encouraged always sounded hollow anyway. Now, with the caravan moving to England or South Africa, the spin doctors will try to top their original spin doctoring.

Cricket has long ceased to be a game over 22 yards, and become one that is played over 22 inches (or whatever is the size of your television set). This has already seen competitive matches in countries like Canada, UAE, Singapore, and Morocco which are hardly the bastions of the game. ‘Have television, will play’ is the motto, and it is in keeping with this that the IPL move - despite the tears being shed over it - appears to be
inevitable. The security concerns have merely hastened the process of an international league conceived in India being taken around the world.

That is why the franchisees are not particularly fussed. Firstly, there are enough Indians in most cricket playing countries who can fill a stadium. Then the Shah Rukh Khans and Preity Zintas can strut and wave for the cameras just as effectively from the Wanderers or the Oval. And audiences are just as likely to take to the mixed goodies that come with
having players from different countries in the same team.

Much as Bangalore loves Rahul Dravid, the crowd this year would be more keen on watching Kevin Pietersen. Kolkata worship Sourav Ganguly, but it is Brendon McCullum who sets EdenGardens alight. The IPL loyalties are more individual than team loyalties, more about continuous action regardless of who is providing it. The spin doctors got it wrong the first time. They should have focused on the boundaries (geographical) being erased rather than new ones being drawn.

Cricket, by its nature, is conservative. But Twenty20 is only incidentally about cricket, and therefore is under no obligation to respect hoary traditions. This is not such a bad thing if the more things change (in Twenty20), the more they remain the same (in Test cricket).

Briefly, in the last two away series, in Sri Lanka and Australia, India
seemed to revert to type as poor travellers, losing the opening Tests in
Colombo and Melbourne respectively. By winning in Hamilton they have
arrested that brief trend, and got back on track with their record in the
five years before that where they won first Tests in Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Zimbabwe and South Africa and drew the opener in Pakistan, West Indies,
Bangladesh and England.

For decades, India suffered from the First Test Blues where, after losing
the first Test they found it impossible to get back into the series. In
this decade, they have reversed that record to a large extent, and shaken
off their reputation as poor starters. Hamilton, therefore, is important
both for itself, and for what it says about the recent Indian teams.
Perhaps in the past, apart from the problems of acclimatisation, there was
also the mindset which was happy to settle for a draw at best. Captains
were reluctant to take risks, and in cricket, as in life, fortune tends to
favour the brave.

MS Dhoni is an attacking captain, New Zealand have one of the
weakest bowling attacks in international cricket while India have one of
the strongest batting line-ups. If Hamilton is any indication, anything
less than a 3-0 win for India would count as unsatisfactory. New Zealand's
best bet is to prepare seaming tracks that suit their bowlers, and hope
their batsmen fare better against India's medium-pacers.

In 1967, India lost 4-0 to Australia, and skipper Tiger Pataudi said at the
end of that series that "just as we were beginning to find our feet, the
series was over." A 2-2 finish might have been a fairer result, but by the
time the team arrived in New Zealand, India had found their bearings. They
won 3-1, the last time they won a series in New Zealand. Statistically, it
is still India's best performance abroad; it was also the first time
India had won the first Test of an away series.

One bad afternoon's cricket has spelt the end of India's dreams in the
first Test of many series. Even in the 1990s, a decade by when
professionalism in attitude and physical fitness is supposed to have
finally arrived in India, they continued to lose the first Test with
alarming regularity. Only twice in the decade, in Bangladesh and
Zimbabwe did they win the first Test. In 22 series abroad, they lost the
first Test 12 times. Before that, first-Test wins in Auckland in 1976 and
Lord's in 1986, merely served to show up the overall poor record.

Sourav Ganguly first began to reverse the trend, and now Dhoni has carried
it forward. If one decade's positive cricket has served to erase more than
half a century's uncertainty before that, then that might be the real
significance of the Hamilton win.

The one-day series in New Zealand is testimony to the amazing pace at which
this form has shed its complexity, rid itself of formula and arrived at a
simplicity that might, in the end, bring about its own ruin. A couple of
years ago, the complaint against the 50-over game was that it had become
too predictable, with a beginning, middle and end that, like Greek drama,
followed a pattern. The technical committee of the ICC then went about
introducing some complexity - the revolving substitute, the Powerplay -
which it hoped would shake the game up and make it more interesting.

However it is not legislation that is pushing one-day cricket now, but the
influence of Twenty20 that is making it advance to the past. Rather
abruptly, the game has been reduced to its simplest terms - hit into the
stands. And the ease with which batsmen do this is making a mockery of
tactics, field placings and bowling plans. There might be a shakeout soon
enough, with bowlers righting the balance with something new - but history
is against them. Bowlers haven’t had as much of an influence in the
shorter game as they’ve had over Test cricket.

In a sense, this is going back to the future, at least where Indian
cricket is concerned. In the 1970s, when India were reluctant players of
the then new one-day format, batsmen played as if hitting sixes and
boundaries was all that the game was about. Other countries had already
worked out that singles were important, and by the 1980s, Bob Simpson, the
Australian coach had demonstrated that reducing the number of dot balls
was crucial. Slog overs were designated thus.

Bowlers, especially medium pacers in the early days, focused on not giving
away runs rather than taking wickets. Then came the pinch hitter. But all
these changes took time. Generally, it was the World Cup that showcased
new tactics, which meant that the game evolved gradually over four years,
and then got it all together on its biggest stage.

But now Twenty20 has accelerated change, and appropriately enough, it is
India, the world champions who are spearheading the new revolution. They
have used the essence of the new format - with its frenetic hitting - and
adapted it to the one-day international. It has worked so well that the
threat of the extinction of the ODI has become very real.

For, if the 50-over game is identical to Twenty20, then one of
the two formats will become redundant, and the one most likely to be scrapped is the longer version. Survival for the three formats depends to a large
extent on keeping themselves distinct, separate from one another.

Can we really say all this after just a handful of matches? Yes, sometimes
you see a world in a grain of sand.

The philosopher Umberto Eco has written thus about pornographic movies, "whose true and sole aim is to stimulate the spectator's desire, from beginning to end, and in such a way that, while his desire is stimulated by scenes of various and varied copulations, the rest of the story counts for nothing. Substitute 'six-hitting' for 'copulations' and you have a pretty accurate description of the Christchurch one-day international.

Thirty one sixes were hit on the day, and cricket, ostensibly a game between bat and ball was reduced to a game between bat and bat. This was cricket as pornography, in the finest traditions (if we can use that word for a format that is so young) of Twenty20.

It was magnificent, they said of the charge of the Light Brigade (cannons to the left of them, etc), but it was not war. Likewise, the one-dayer was magnificent, but it was not cricket. How can it be when bowlers were around merely to play straight men to batsmen who supplied the punch with all the joy of stand-up comics?

I had written (on the ESPN website) before the start of the one-day series that it could see one-day cricket's first-ever double century. This was due to three factors - the size of the grounds, the form of the batsmen, and above all, the influence of Twenty20 where hitting into the stands was part of the fun.

Instead of getting to the pitch of the ball, batsmen had developed the technique of getting the front foot out of the line and swinging through. It meant that straight sixes were hit with across bat, or, as Herschelle Gibbs once showed, batsmen could actually swivel and pull the ball to third man.

Sadly, the bowlers are being taken out of the equation (although it might have been interesting to see how Daniel Vettori might have reacted to the carnage in Christchurch), and that cannot be good for the game.

The one-day game, it has been said often enough, is about batting. And when teams make over 700 runs in a day in perfect batting conditions, with flair and flourish, bringing joy to spectators, it might be churlish to complain.

Wasn't it wonderful to watch Tendulkar and Yuvraj and Raina and Ryder and McCullum? Yes, but as Eco said, a movie in which there was only copulation would be intolerable. Physically for the actors, and economically for the producer.

And it also would be psychologically intolerable for the spectator. For the transgression to work, it must be played out against a background of normality. In porno movies, time is wasted by showing actors commuting or climbing stairs or changing clothes or whatever. In one-day cricket, the wickets, the run outs, the fielding play the same role - that of reminding us of normality.

And then the sex - or the six - takes over.

	How the trauma has affected the talented, happy Sri Lankan cricketers will not be known immediately © AFP

I was in denial most of yesterday. Perhaps the terrorists didn’t actually mean to kill the players, I reasoned. Perhaps they merely wanted publicity. How could a rocket launcher miss from so close? Or a grenade refuse to go off? I was in denial because I had bought into the prevailing myth of the region - that cricketers would never be touched. Not in India, not in Sri Lanka, not even in Pakistan. No organization would want the adverse publicity.

But terrorists are not in the public relations business. They have gone beyond attracting minds and hearts to their cause and are perpetrators of the 21st century’s greatest threat, the motiveless murder. Old certainties have been overthrown by new realities; you can be the most stylish batsman of your generation and still be shot at in someone else’s war. You can be the finest left-handed batsman in the world and still take shrapnel in your shoulder on your way to work.

The physical scars will heal quickly enough. The players acted with remarkable dignity and displayed rare grace under pressure. The stories in the bus have begun to emerge - Kumar Sangakkara has written movingly about how he shifted his head slightly at one point and a bullet whizzed past his ear and thudded into the seat. In the evocative words of Joan Didion: ‘Life changes fast/Life changes in the instant/You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends’. Or, you sit down in the team bus.

How the trauma has affected this bunch of talented, happy cricketers will not be known immediately. They are like soldiers returning from war who have seen people die and know that they survived only because of enormous luck. Or, as Mahela Jayawardene said, because they had done something good in their previous lives.

They will replay in their minds the moments of sheer helplessness when they became sitting ducks in a stationary vehicle while masked men opened fire. To come back from that experience and bowl the perfect offbreak or place a drive between point and cover will not be the easiest thing to do. If some of the laughter and joy goes out of Sri Lankan cricket, it would be a pity.

Each player will have to deal with the demons himself, but they have one another to lean on - and men like Jayawardene and Sangakkara and Muralitharan to guide them. If players need group therapy or individual therapy to conquer their ghosts, the cricket board should pay. Or the ICC should. Or perhaps funds could be raised from across the cricket playing world.

Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I statement from New Zealand was brutally honest, if a trifle insensitive. But he knows now, as does every player anywhere in the world, that cricketers are no longer immune. Cricket reporting borrows heavily from terms used in warfare; sadly, now playing the game itself will be like warfare. Those in denial all these years have had a rude awakening.