Well, it's time to wind up this particular discussion. My thanks to Anand Vasu, Ashok Malik, Dileep Premachandran and Prem Panicker for taking part, and to everyone who took the time to comment. We've had divergent views on whether India is getting better at Tests or worse, and on Greg Chappell and Sourav Ganguly, and many suggestions about how matters can be improved. It is written into the DNA of sport that it defies consensus, and whether India go downhill or uphill from here, I'd expect such a discussion two years from now to have a similar divergence of views. That's the fun!

Comments will be open on earlier posts of this discussion for another two days, and will then be closed. Feel free to have your say until then. And do follow Cricinfo's coverage of India's upcoming tour to West Indies, where some of the questions raised in this discussion will, one hopes, find answers.

The questions that Amit poses are interesting ones, and I think Indian cricket is nearer to finding the answers than it’s ever been.

Are there enough world-class bowlers out there? Yes, and no. Some of the pace-bowling talent that has come through is outstanding. Provided they can stay fit and enthusiastic, and steer clear of the glamour-laziness route that plagued a couple of their predecessors, Munaf Patel and S Sreesanth will have a lot more to offer. Rudra Pratap Singh has already given glimpses of his potential, and Vikram Raj Vir Singh will certainly improve with time and experience. He certainly has the raw pace to trouble batsmen. The key is not to expect too much too soon.

As for the next step needed, I’d like to believe that small ones have already been taken. The National Cricket Academy and its feeders, the MRF Pace Foundation and other clinics conducted by the likes of Frank Tyson, are producing cricketers whose skills and fitness are comparable to their peers anywhere in the world. Time was when Indian fielding, with a few notable exceptions, was a joke. No longer. When Chappell reckons that Suresh Raina has the potential to be as great an allround fielder as Mark Waugh, you know that things have certainly changed.

General fitness has improved too. Look at someone like MS Dhoni, and the way he batted in the infernal heat at Jamshedpur. The running between the wickets is purposeful, the youngsters employ methods like relay throws, and most importantly, they look naturals out there.

As for being coach, well, those would be very big boots to fill after the sterling work done by John Wright and Chappell. Firstly, a settled selection panel to replace this ridiculous 12-month system. There’s only one place to look, and that’s Australia. Trevor Hohns may have gone now, but he and the likes of Lawrie Sawle put a system in place.

Secondly, we need to get rid of the celebrity syndrome. Great players don’t necessarily make great coaches or selectors. Most of them are not even remotely interested anyway. I find it laughable when people take potshots at the likes of Sanjay Jagdale because he wasn’t some legend in his playing days. At least he watches cricket, and is passionate about the team’s progress. How many so-called legends can put hand on heart and say the same thing?

The other area with obvious room for improvement is domestic cricket. You do get better contests these days with the Elite-Plate system in place, but a way has to be found to ensure that the best players in the land can play at least the final stages of the Ranji Trophy. If the BCCI really wants to flex its muscles with regard to the Future Tours Programme, these are the kind of issues it should be focusing on. At least have a month in February or March when the top players can play for their sides. You only need to look at Uttar Pradesh, and the presence of Kaif and Raina last season, to see the benefits.

Another thing a lot of us would like to see is transparency. Whether someone’s dropped or selected, all it needs is a line from the selection panel explaining exactly why. It stops the innuendo and the conspiracy theories. When someone like Sourav Ganguly, who led the side with distinction for years, is cast aside, the least he deserves is a good reason.

The last ingredient? Well, something that’s constantly missing thanks to the multitude of TV channels and newspapers who feel a pressing need to create a crisis even when there is none – patience. India has never been the best team in the world, and this team – good as it is in the one-day format – still needs a lot of work. A lot more appreciation of the efforts put in, and a little less effigy-burning, would be a good place to start.

This post is in response to the questions raised in this one -- editor.

Amit, the word 'produce' seems to imply a well-planned system, a well-honed assembly line, a premium on R&D.

When has that ever been the case with Indian cricket? Our feeder system has traditionally been the streets and gullies and maidans, where the emphasis is on batting and where bowling well is important only to the extent that if you could get a batsman out, you got a turn at bat.

There was a time when the West Indies in pace, and India in spin, had world beaters sitting on the sidelines unable to break in, because there were even better candidates ahead of them in line. Both nations presumed, at the time, that the well would never dry up, that they could dip the bucket in at will, and haul it up brimful. Both nations, now, are struggling to produce decent performers in what was regarded as their traditional strength.

That should tell us something – in an era where cricket is a high-profile industry into which many other industries are plugged in, you cannot depend on chance, on happenstance, to create your product. It needs thought, planning, sustained work.

We need to realize there is no magic bullet; nothing you can do that will translate into results next week. With that in mind, a good starting point would be to implement and fine tune a pyramidal coaching structure, with the schools, colleges, maidans and local leagues as the broad base, and age-limit, district and state-level teams the stepping stones to the top.

Today, systematic coaching begins only at age-level cricket, or later, by which point you've learnt all the bad habits anyway, and you've left the coach nothing to do but tinker.

Against that, consider a system where there is one national coach. Under him, and interacting with him on a regular basis, the state coaches; under this second tier, the district coaches; under each district coach, assistant coaches in charge of school, college and league-level cricket.

The benefit of such a system is in uniformity – since each tier works in close cooperation with the one immediately above, players working their way up the ranks won't find themselves spun around in circles, encountering new methods at every step.

The obvious add-on to that is continuity. The direction of a national coaching academy cannot be a political favor handed out in return for votes; surely it is ridiculous that the NCA has, since its inception, had its chief changed after every BCCI election? The director needs to be a paid professional, appointed for a specified duration, given a clear brief, and the authority to carry it out; with that responsibility comes its corollary, accountability.

The academy needs to be a year-round enterprise – a school that functions for a fortnight or a month in a year is not likely to throw up scholars of any quality in any discipline; cricket is no exception to that rule.

The national academy needs to plug in to the others dotting the countryside. Coaching today has been turned into a cottage industry by former players, all lobbying their respective state governments for land and facilities, setting up their own little operations and doing their own thing irrespective. Which is fine – but a national academy at the head of a loose confederacy of such private enterprise could be the logical next step.

You brought up the question of the new crop of bowlers. Even as recently as ten years back, the national lament was that a nation of non-meat eaters would never produce fast bowlers, remember? And a decade before that, a certain Kapil Dev was being told by his coach that an Indian fast bowler was an oxymoron, that taking up pace was a mug's game.

Now there is one popping up every other day, each capable of hitting the 140s. The moral of the story –- and this speaks to your question -- is, it can be done, if we want it done. In this department, we have progressed at startling pace – from producing one quality quick per decade, to producing a few every other year. I'd back the trend to continue – if only because success spurs emulation.

Our real problem is we don't have patience – as a team, or as a country. After every game, we start and keep up a drumbeat of criticism, very little of which is analytical; most of it is on the lines of 'Drop X, bring back Y, eviscerate Z'.

To an extent, selectors too have been victims of the malaise. Take for instance the case of Akash Chopra. After years of lamenting the lack of an opener, the John Wright-Sourav Ganguly combine unearthed the Delhi right-hander. They assigned him a role based on his strength – a role, happily, that the team needed filled.

He was told to be the anchor that counterpoints Sehwag's bludgeon; the result was a series of partnerships in Australia that held the new ball bowlers at bay, cushioned the middle, and created the platform for India's outstanding performance in that series.

He seemed to have most of his ducks lined up – tight defense, compact play, good eye for the single and with it, an ability to rotate strike and relieve pressure. It was a building block in the right place – so what did we do? We went 'Oh, yeah, well, the guy only gets 40s; he doesn't convert them; he doesn't score quick enough…'

So, on the back of far fewer failures than the 'stars' have had, out he went; in came the presumably quicker-scoring Gautam Gambhir – who, having learnt from Chopra's example, took to getting off the blocks like a scalded cat, looking to play shots at pretty much everything… he is now out, and we are back to looking for the next great brown hope.

Team building doesn't work that way – especially in the longer form of the game. The management – and to me that has to comprise coach, captain, selectors and the BCCI – has to have a goal, a vision, and the willingness to think long term.

From that base, they need clarity – and unanimity – about the sort of player they want filling each role in the team; they need to then identify the players who fit, or come closest, to those criteria, pick them, fine-tune them, set them goals – and keep the faith.

It will take time, and patience, and will – but in the end, it will achieve lasting results, where the chop and change policy we have relied on through our cricketing history will produce the odd win based on once in a lifetime individual performances, but nothing more.

This post is in response purely to the questions raised in this one -- editor.

Start at the boring bottom: work out what has happened to our fielding in the Tests, particularly our close-in cordon, who are the spinners' biggest allies when playing at home.

Our slip cordon has vanished, there is no specialist bat-pad/short legs and the result of that was there for all to see versus England-B in Mumbai.

When Rahul Dravid, our best first slipper in many years, drops three catches in a day, that's only a bad day. When he drops catches in four out of six innings, that is bad news. The close-in fielding needs work.

Twenty wickets get you wins and on dead, flat tracks, every half-chance you get to take one of those 20 wickets has to be snapped up or you fall too far behind and end up making Shaun Udal and Monty Panesar look like Ramadhin and Valentine or Bedi and Prasanna.

Play five batsmen (hell, play four if the fancy takes you) but always play the best.

To enable this to happen how about “flexibility” used in the long version of the game too?

Your country's top five Test batsmen are not Sehwag, Jaffer, Tendulkar, Dravid and Yuvraj (i.e. Mumbai Test line up and you swap Gambhir in there and that is still not your best); your best five Test bats are Sehwag, Tendulkar, Dravid, VVS Laxman and Yuvraj.

When you want to play your five best batsmen, then in order to do so, accept that you may have to (to use another trendy catch phrase) "challenge players", maybe Dhoni or Yuvraj or anyone else, by making them open.

At the moment it is "flexibility" in ODIs and "we will play the best men in the best positions" in Tests. Sound principles both but one of them is not working.

By trashing the Indian team's overseas Test wins in England, West Indies, Australia, Pakistan and Zim (stronger than they are now) between 2001-2004 to prove unrelated points, we do nothing but take away our own joy.

If the word 'decline' is too upsettting or inaccurate or politically incorrect then let us at least admit the following:

1. In two Tests in 2006 where the series was on the line, we have failed to bat out a day.

2. If Australia came touring tomorrow, we would be toast.

3. Two years ago at this time, you would have not said the same about the Indian Test team.

Call the phenomenon by whatever name you want.

This discussion was supposed to be about how India fares in the two forms of the game, but somehow got held up around the narrow subject of whether Greg Chappell is good for the team or not. Comparing the Wright-Ganguly pair with Chappell and Dravid is, at this point, somewhat premature. Firstly, Chappell and Dravid haven't been in charge for long enough to pass judgement on them. And secondly, causality can never be so simply ascertained.

There are a multitude of factors that go into the making of a team: the coach, the captain, the selectors, the times, the resources available. That last is a critical point: Wright and Ganguly would certainly have done much better had Mahendra Singh Dhoni been around in their time, and much worse if Virender Sehwag had not. It's a complicated business, determining levels of responsibility.

Anyway, to take this discussion off personalities, let me throw a few questions to the participants.

So my first question is: Is this something endemic to India that they produce world-class batsmen all the time, but never enough world-class bowlers at the same time? If so, are they condemned to being a second-rate Test side? And if not, do you hope in the new breed of young Indian bowlers that is coming up now?

Since this millenium began, there has been a change in the values of the Indian team. There's been a premium on fitness, on fielding, on, running between wickets, on psychological toughness, and so on. India's taken a noticable step up, but not enough to be consistent world beaters. So my second question is: What do you think is the next step that India need to take to get there? Do you think they're on the way?

My third and final question is this: if you were the coach of India, what are the first five things you would do to make this team even better? Particulars please: don't stick to generalities like "I would play more youngsters in the team." Who would you bring in, who would you leave out? What are the hard decisions you would take? C'mon, put yourself in Chappell's shoes and lay it out!

Although not a part of this discussion, Different Strokes contributor Krishna Kumar has an excellent post up on the topic we are discussing: "Bringing some perspective." Do read.

This discussion will, meanwhile, continue late tonight or tomorrow. It ain't over yet!

Coming into this debate I feel a bit like Yuvraj Singh did a few years back. It was great to be part of it, and to contribute, but perhaps I was a few places too far down the order, for Dileep Premachandran and Prem Panicker have already put the team well on the way to the target, leaving me with little to do. I think it has been quite comprehensively established that there is no decline to speak of in Tests, while in ODIs India have gone from being a team that went into the fifth match of a bilateral series 2-2 with such regularity that it was a joke, to one that presses so hard on the pedal that series are being decided at the earliest possible juncture.

There has been a quantum shift in what we want to do, and the "we" in that sentence is worth looking at. While all the stakeholders that are involved in Indian cricket broadly want one thing – success for the team in all forms of the game, it might be useful to see how the immediate, short-term, and long-term goals of these parties are set.

This sounds like a lot of theory, something Greg Chappell might say at a press conference. But if you actually bothered to look at how this team is going about its work day by day, you will know this is true. In times gone by there was a group of eight or nine players who were pretty much certainties to play. Of this group there was an unhealthy dependence on a couple of batsmen and a couple of bowlers to do the bulk of the matchwinning. Sure everyone else would contribute, they were international cricketers after all, but the onus of taking the initiative, or wresting it back, or making something happen was on a few tried and tested performers.

That's fine as long as things are going well. Hell, when you're winning, everything is ok – except for members of that permanently disgruntled lot who want to know why X is not in the team or why Z is getting so many chances even when you're winning series 4-0. When things are not going well, however, the pressure on the individuals expected to deliver increases to levels that are difficult to understand when you have never played sport at a high level or spoken to people who have and do.

People think, stunningly wrongly, that Sehwag is not feeling the heat now. "Ah Viru, he doesn't think about all that, he just turns up and whacks the ball." Sit down with him, have a chai, then you'll know. He is doing all he can to score runs, working with arguably the best batting coach in the world, in a team that is succeeding and backing him up, and yet things just aren't working out. For you and I, if things aren't working out at work, we at least have the option of quitting, and plying our wares elsewhere. It's as though Sehwag can walk away from this and begin batting for Bangladesh tomorrow. Really, there's nowhere for him to go, and every day people ask the same questions about when he is going to make a big one, how he will turn things around … they're well meaning, but it's pointless for Sehwag to try and explain it.

Fortunately, since this team management, while doing its best about Sehwag, is thinking more about the team's success than anything else, the results have not been hit. This is because more people are doing more things, much better than they did in the past, simply because it is being asked, no, demanded, of them, not by an overbearing schoolmaster of a coach, but by the environment they're in. Star former cricketers write columns about how Irfan Pathan is struggling under the load of batting. If they spoke to Irfan they'd know better. Dhoni batting up and down the order is another source for great concern. That, to some people, implies a lack of stability. Whose stability? One batsman's fixed position in the order or the team's? Ask any cricketer and he will tell you nothing offers more stability than winning.

While we're on the subject of asking cricketers things, one of the few things they all agree on (barring the odd Shahid Afridi) is that Test cricket is the real thing, while ODIs are something that have to be played. Of course, we don't believe them. They're only interested in making money as is the cash-obsessed BCCI. Why then does someone like Sachin Tendulkar, who, I might presume has a bit in the bank for a rainy day, choose to postpone a shoulder surgery so he can play Tests against Pakistan and take off the moment the ODIs come around? Because players are obsessed with ODIs and don't care about the Tests? I don't think so.

The way we respond to the Indian team, its individuals, its successes and failures, is as much a reflection of ourselves as it is of the team. If at any stage you link your own self-worth with the performance of the team – and enough fans do that and feel worse when India loses or a player is dropped – then you don't stand a chance of being happy, for that's the point of sport in the first place – you can never say what is about to happen. When we see failure, we look for people to blame, for conspiracy theories, something to lash out at. And in success we look to pick holes, because throwing pebbles at heroes is a national pastime. What's more, it's much easier, and more fun for some, to rant rather than sit down and try and get to the truth, to look at the things people do and the reasons behind them. That's hard. As a public we have grown more demanding, more obsessed with instant success, more impatient, and when the team doesn't deliver, we can't take it. After all, we're the paying public.

But it's not merely about paying. It's one thing to pay the fees at a college you're enrolled in, another to learn anything. You might still walk away with a degree at the end of your term if you work the system well. But real learning, now that is something no-one else can do for you. There are people in the Indian team that have internalised this, and are reaping huge rewards. It won't be such a bad idea for some of us to do the same.

A funny thing happened on my way to this pulpit – I lost my sermon. Or more accurately, found it pre-empted most eloquently by Dileep Premachandran.

Presuming for the sake of argument that the breast-beating over the Test side has to do with Greg Chappell's tenure as coach (a presumption based on Ashok Malik's kick-off argument about the coach's Machiavellian machinations), what exactly are we talking about?

During this period, India has played 31 ODIs, won 21, and lost 10 – a 67.74 per cent winning record as opposed to the 52.31 percentage the team totted up during the John Wright-Saurav Ganguly era. A 15 per cent uptick in winning percentage is not, in a nation that has burnt stadia and stoned players following ODI defeats, cause for more widespread celebration why?

I forget. Test cricket is the real cricket. It is what separates the boys from the men. The pajama version is good enough for the less traditional among us – but it is victory in Test cricket that endures; it is in the Test arena that memories morph into legend.

After all, everyone remembers Eden Gardens for the web of mystery Harbhajan Singh spun, for VVS Laxman's epochal knock, for Rahul Dravid's sublime second fiddle – but who remembers the score line of our last time-limit thrash?

That, or something akin, is the argument advanced when you presume to celebrate one-day success. To those advancing it, I have a question: Where were you when India and England, vying for the number two slot in world Test rankings, were playing in Nagpur, in Chandigarh? Why, in Mumbai, did we see more English fans than locals? Do you even go to watch Test cricket any more?

Not in your numbers, you don't. And by not turning up for Tests, and having to be turned away from houseful stadiums for ODIs, what signal are you sending to the administrators of the game?

There is, in every industry, two groups that take responsibility for the final produce – the producer, and the consumer. And of the two, it is the consumer that dictates. There was a time when we indicated that we saw a car as a lifetime purchase; that the car we bought after much agonizing needed to last a lifetime. We got the Ambassador. Times changed; we indicated a preference for sportier models – so look what's clogging our roads now.

Cricket is an industry, fans are the consumers, and the fan has over the past several years clearly indicated that he prefers the shorter form of the game. So again, we are surprised when the BCCI focuses on one-day cricket, at the expense of the longer form of the game, why?

Are we not getting exactly what we asked for?

Think back to late October 2000. John Wright was making an outside run for the job of national coach. He walked into the meeting with the BCCI honchos, and the first thing he said was, "Gentlemen, let's not talk of my salary; let us, instead, talk of what we can do with this Indian team."

He then outlined a vision of a national side that could shed its tag of poor travelers, a team that could perform in all countries and all conditions – and he was not talking of one-day cricket.

He sold the BCCI on that vision, and we collectively bought into it. We celebrated the first overseas win in a generation, we celebrated a Homeric epic against the all-conquering Aussies, we danced in the streets when the team fought Australia to a standstill Down Under and we joined the proverbial cow and jumped over the moon when our team won a historic Test series in Pakistan.

Fast forward, now, to May 2005, when the BCCI honchos met to select Wright's successor. Each applicant was asked to make a presentation – and the winning theme, authored by Greg Chappell, was how to take India to the top of the podium in World Cup 2007.

It was this vision the BCCI bought into (and in this age of calculated vilification, it might be worth pointing out that it was the previous administration that made the decision); it was this goal that was endorsed and, significantly, it was World Cup 2007 that signposts the end of Chappell's contract.

Any reasonable analysis would tell you we are nowhere near Cup-winning form yet; the same analysis however would also tell you that in the course of 11 months and 31 one dayers, we have taken significant steps towards getting there.

Before Rahul Dravid and Greg Chappell teamed up, Dravid had led India in 12 ODIs; his scoreline read 5 wins to 6 defeats and one no result. The Dravid-Chappell combine has now been at the helm for 24 ODIs; the team has won 17 and lost 7. And significantly, a team that routinely folded when asked to chase has just stitched together a world record streak of 15 straight wins batting second.

Stop the presses, folks -- the cup is half full.

Yes, the other half is empty. The two Tests we have lost during this period have been identical, in that both required the team to bat through day five against quality bowling sides.

It is in the fourth innings that patience and endurance, more than talent even, is tested – and twice we have failed the test. So when was the last time we passed? When, last, did we manage to save a Test batting fourth? As Dileep points out, any talk of deterioration implies that an idyllic state existed previously. Did it?

What those two failures, seen in context of the matches that preceded them, has shown is that Rahul Dravid alone has the cricketing nous, and the bottomless reservoir of patience, needed in such situations.

In the one day format, the team has thrown up a plethora of natural leaders – Pathan, Dhoni, Yuvraj, Raina, even the rejuvenated Harbhajan. In Tests, Dravid leads – but none of his mates has shown the legs to follow.

A leader with no followers is merely a lonely man taking a walk – and for the better part of a decade, Dravid in the Test arena has been just that.

I do not mean to suggest that Tests are not important. Nor that we abdicate the five-day game. But if we want our Test team to be the equal of the best, a good place to start is by saying it; by putting warm bodies in the seats.

That signals the producers that you want an all-round product, which in turn dictates step two: that the BCCI makes Test success (a firm grip on the number two slot, for starters) a priority item on the agenda of the team and its coach, which today it is not, and schedules more frequent Test series against significant opposition.

It is then up to the coach, the captain, the selectors, the team management, to do for the Test side what they have done for the one-day squad: identify the right people for the right slots, blood them, back them, hone their skill sets and meet the targets set for them.

In the interim, the one-day side – whose lack of mental strength, killer instinct and suchlike shibboleths we have long bemoaned – appears to have finally reached the corner, if not actually turned it.

Must we still gripe, and groan, and seek Machiavellian conspiracies behind every sightscreen?

India’s prosperity in the one-day game, and austere times in the Test arena should surprise no one that’s even remotely clued into the game. The more complex skill-sets needed for the longer version mean that revitalisation will take longer than it would in the one-dayers, where a fresh face or three can engineer an immediate turnaround. Frankly, it’s laughable to read anguished columns about India’s decline as a Test side. Decline implies a previous state of excellence, a tall claim for a team that hasn’t won a series of note outside the subcontinent since Rahul Dravid was playing schools cricket.

There were three great results in the time that Sourav Ganguly and John Wright guided the team beyond the turbulent waters of the match-fixing scandal. The first was a stunning home win against Australia, the result of three scarcely believable individual performances – VVS Laxman and Dravid (never forget that he was Butch Cassidy to Laxman’s Sundance Kid) at Kolkata, and Harbhajan Singh over the final two Tests. That was followed nearly three years later by a draw in Australia, albeit against a side lacking the irreplaceable Glenn McGrath, and an epochal first series win in Pakistan, against opponents riddled with problems.

The one-day side’s descent into hell was far more worrying. Having reached the final of the ICC Champions Trophy in 2000 and 2002 – when they shared the trophy with Sri Lanka – India were second only to a magnificent Australian side at the World Cup in 2003. Thereafter, they could put away only the minnows, with an abysmally ineffectual bowling attack and a batting order living on hype being no match for the world’s finest.

The reversal of fortune engineered by the team management since the home season started has been little short of astonishing. The dead wood has been ruthlessly chopped away, and some of the new faces introduced like Suresh Raina and S Sreesanth have the potential to be big players for years to come. But change being a painful process, there has been much resistance, both within the system and without. The resounding success of the one-day side has vindicated those that instigated it, and the relative failure of the Test team is just further proof that you ignore precocious talent at your peril.

India’s dismal defeat at Karachi had a lot to do with an innings for the ages from Kamran Akmal, but it also owed much to the fact that the team management were not given the team that they asked for. Had a Sreesanth or another right-arm pace bowler travelled across the border – those whose reputations were at stake had pleaded the case – there would have been no three-man left-arm attack of mind-numbing sameness. And had those in the know been allowed their way, there would have been no tampering with the batting order to accommodate individuals at such a cost.

What has been especially heartening about the one-day renaissance has been the journey away from the cult of the individual. Each man has been called upon to perform so many roles that it leaves little room for prima donnas or the lazy ones who hold those around them back. While Yuvraj Singh has grabbed the headlines with several innings of incandescent brilliance, the support cast of Tendulkar, Dravid, Raina, Pathan and, especially, Dhoni has been just as influential. The bowling spoils have also been shared around, with the likes of Pathan, RP Singh, Harbhajan, Sreesanth and Powar all producing match-turning performances. And while the lack of form of Sehwag and Kaif has been a worry, the cohesiveness and sense of purpose has been such that the team has endeavoured to nurse them through the rough patch.

Australia’s conservative approach, especially the failure to play the in-form Michael Hussey, cost them the Ashes a year ago. If it can happen to the best, you can imagine what a stick-in-the-mud approach will do to a team like India. Those that contemptuously dismiss the one-day game as an irrelevance also tend to be ignorant of recent history. Australia’s trek to world domination was based on the self-belief instilled by a World Cup win on the subcontinent in 1987, and three of the cornerstones of the side – Steve Waugh, David Boon and Geoff Marsh – were handpicked out of obscurity by a selection panel that included a certain Gregory Stephen Chappell.

At the same time, those that label Dravid a puppet captain haven’t a clue about the team dynamics. Dravid, as evinced by his sterling displays in times of crisis, has always had the ruthless streak that separates the very best from the merely good, and his captaincy, save for the odd blip like the Mumbai toss, has been clever, proactive and characterised by his leading from the front. If McGrath, Warne and Flintoff don’t think him a soft touch, we can safely conclude that those who do are either peddling a certain agenda or a little soft in the head.

Past glories may be recalled and celebrated, but cricket teams don’t win matches on the back of them. The sooner the winds of change wafts through the Test team – Munaf Patel and Sreesanth have already provided a welcome lungful of fresh air – the sooner the chances of it being as competitive and sharp as the one-day version. It would also help if people didn’t kid themselves with delusions of a grandeur that never was.

I blame Greg Chappell. I wouldn’t want to call him Dr Faustus – too literary and dramatic a metaphor for someone I’ve come to associate with low cunning – but he’s struck a bargain with the devil, in this case with one-day cricket.

Chappell knows he’s here for a year – I can’t see him sticking around in India after summer 2007. He knows he’s coaching the team of a society that can’t tell the difference between good cricket and facile victories against an English C team. He knows he’ll make a fortune if he wins India the World Cup. He’s ready to pay a small price for it – scupper the Indian Test team.

To be fair, Chappell’s done something right. As it happens, the “right stuff" has been limited to the shorter game. Beyond his jargon and pompous phrases – “flexibility”, “multi-dimensional players” – he’s given the Indian limited-overs team its most effective bunch of “bits and pieces” cricketers since the golden period between 1983 and 1985.

In that phase, players like Madan Lal and Roger Binny and Balwinder Sandhu – all honest triers and great fighters, but not quite Test superstars – gave the Indian one-day team a long tail, could bowl effectively, field hard. They provided India that extra zip that a team comprising just classic batsmen and classical bowlers will not have, not in the 50/60 overs format.

Essentially, a Kumble, a Dravid and three Robin Singhs works better in one-day cricket than does three Dravids and two Kumbles.

Chappell has recognised the value of this truism, taken it to its logical conclusion. Thus he’s packed the team with young men he can mould into “flexible” cricketers – a Pathan who can come up the order, a Kaif who can open the batting, a Raina who can be the incremental anything.

True, there have been some victims to this experiment – Ganguly has probably ended his one-day career a little before time, Laxman was never considered for the limited-overs team even when the super-sub rule (stupid as it was) was around to facilitate specialist cricketers like him.

Nevertheless, on the whole, Chappell has delivered results in the abbreviated version. Grant him that – he’s produced no aces but lots of jokers in the pack: players who can do a bit of this, a bit of that, and do it effectively.

Now move to Chappell’s big failing – Test cricket. To ease his way into the cockpit seat in the one-day squad, Chappell hasn’t been too perturbed by the sacrifices he’s got the Test team to make.

His one-day plan was premised on a need for young cricketers with simple, tabula rasa minds on which he could inscribe his ideas. He had no time for complicated and complex men, no patience to engage with experience, however talented. The wreck that VVS Laxman has become is there for all to see.

What did I expect Chappell to do with the Test team? Well, give it some thought, spare it some moments from all his cogitation about and obsession with the 2007 World Cup.

India’s greatest quartet of middle-order batsmen – Tendulkar and Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman – are ageing together. Instead of guillotining them, one by one, couldn’t Chappell have sat them down – explained why they didn’t quite fit into his one-day plans (three of them don’t, not even Tendulkar) and how, to lengthen, their Test years, he may want to rest and rotate them, keep them hungry that much more?

Under Chappell, India has seen Zaheer Khan and Ashish Nehra fade away – done in by an overdose of one-day cricket, washed out by a savage schedule. This wasn’t Chappell’s fault; they were already past their best when he arrived.

What’s his approach to their successors? Does he want Pathan to end up like them – slipping from Test strike bowler to one-day pinch-hitter who can bowl a bit?

What’s Chappell done to protect S Sreesanth and RP Singh and, even, Munaf Patel from early burn-out? Has he put his foot down and said: “No, Mr More, these are Test winners. They will not play one-day games, not on flat Indian pitches. They need to be nurtured.”

Where is the Chappell stamp on the Test side? Where is this allegedly cerebral cricketer’s sensitivity to traditional cricket, his understanding of player psychology?

I expected a Merlin, got only a Houdini. It’s sad; if you cherish Test cricket, it’s sadder.

To discuss this, we've assembled Anand Vasu, Ashok Malik, Dileep Premachandran and Prem Panicker. Over the next few days we'll talk about the various factors that have caused India's resurgance in ODIs and the dangers that lie ahead, as well as the reasons for their dismal Test performances, and what can be done about them. Watch this space.

Many thanks to the participants who agreed to take part in this discussion: Bob Woolmer, Gideon Haigh, John Stern and Sambit Bal were all pretty much agreed that the shift in the balance of the game is worrying, and something needs to be done about it. Some suggestions came forth: Bob recommended (here and here) that the bowlers be allowed to make the ball more conducive to reverse swing by rubbing it in the batsman's footholds; Gideon wanted artifically short boundaries to be restored to their original length as they "advantage a particular kind of mediocre slogger, introducing greater uniformity into the game"; and John mused on the prospect of allowing uncovered pitches.

What Bob and Gideon and John want is irrelevant, one would think, if the majority of cricket lovers like run-filled matches, for the cricket boards, understandably focussing on the bottomline, will cater to the masses. But is this a misconception? Do you want a contest between Bat and Bat or Bat and Ball? What about your friends, and all the cricket lovers you know? Are the default assumptions of the authorities all wrong? If so, how do you -- and I understand that 'you' are not one homogenous mass -- communicate this to them?

Thanks for all the comments so far -- comments on this and the previous posts will remain open until Sunday night. We hope you enjoyed the discussion.

A wicked thought flashed in my mind after two of the first three balls of the one-day match between India and England at Goa passed the off stump about a foot above the ground: what if this turns out be a sub-100 affair? Would the ICC send out inspectors under their new regulations for pitch monitoring? Would Goa become the first venue to be banished?

A pitch that isn¹t fit for cricket ought be banished. But who will decide what is not fit for and how? Physical danger to batsmen is a reasonable criterion. A Test match at Sabina Park was once abandoned because the state of the newly laid pitch was deemed dangerous. The other concern should be about a pitch making it impossible for players to exhibit their skills. A pitch that produces ankle-high bounce hardly gives batsmen a chance?

What do we then make of a pitch that produces 872 runs in 100 overs?

The pitch at Goa didn’t quite turn out to be the monster it threatened to be in the first two or three overs. But it remained a difficult pitch to score on all day, which made Yuvraj Singh’s 73-ball hundred truly special, perhaps even better than his hundred against Australia at Sydney in 2004. But in an ironical way, his innings eventually made the match much less exciting because it the match out of England’s reach. So even though the match in Goa produced the highest number of runs in the series so far, it was also the least interesting. Am I making any sense?

Like Bob Woolmer, I’m grateful for the many interesting commentaries on my remarks. This is clearly a topic that exercises many nimble minds, although some of my contentions many not have been completely grasped. Many respondents, for instance, took my reference to the 1984-85 Worrell Trophy series as being rheumy-eyed nostalgia. In these Panglossian times, it seems, one cannot even describe the past without being accused of trying to bring it back; my only purpose was simply to illustrate how different the game has become in less than a generation.

I think it’s worth contemplating what we would be saying if the issue was the other way around. What if the average one-day score was in sharp decline? What if Test teams were regularly being bowled out for 150? My suspicion is that the comments here would be twice as long, and thrice as anxious. The perception would be that the game was in crisis, and people would be recommending that the cricket ball be replaced by a beach ball, and bowlers be restricted to running in off two paces. As for bowlers getting smashed all over the park – well, we can live with that.

Cricket has that in spades: it is defined by survival, duration, changing conditions, and a huge range of skills paraded by turns. It’s nice to hear that one reader’s nine-year-old is excited by cricket as it is. But frankly, I don’t want the direction of the game determined by the priorities of nine-year-olds, enchanting as they are.

One sanguine commenter pointed out that cricket ‘evolves’. Up to a point. In the most basic sense, it’s true, what we are seeing is an outgrowing of what might be called the rationalist model of cricket brought about by higher levels of professionalism and more systematic modes of practice. But it is usually overlooked that the benefits of this dispensation do not bestow themselves evenly. While Ricky Ponting can undertake the drill of hitting a thousands balls in the nets before a Test innings, it is physically impossible for Brett Lee to bowl a thousand deliveries. Batting is an easier art in which to groove oneself; bowlers are more susceptible to the vagaries of the day, fluctuations of confidence, ration of luck.

To shrug your shoulders and say that cricket ‘evolves’, therefore, is simply a cliché. These days, in fact, it is no longer shaped principally by the eternal contest of bat and ball, but by a host of financial, commercial, political and bureaucratic factors. Again, I think, this is a good opportunity for us to reflect on why cricket matters, and what we enjoy about it.

And again, thanks to all those who corresponded.

Bowlers will tell you, with heavy heart and knackered limbs, that it's always been a batsman's game. Stereotypically, batsmen were the amateurs who ruled the game (and plenty else besides) while the bowlers were the professionals paid to amuse the amateurs by bowling at them.

But we do seem to have reached a strange point in the journey where one doesn't have to look hard for conspiracy theories. This is the age of the batsman yet within the last 10 years or so, there have been huge rows about ball-tampering and chucking. Bowlers accused of either or both have essentially been criminalised, treated with the sort of disdain normally reserved for aging rockers caught doing unspeakable things in south Asia. Yet there is barely a murmur and a stifled yawn when a manufacturer has to withdraw a bat from production because MCC deems it illegal. If Test batsmen the world over couldn't get the ball off the square then the reactionaries might have a point. But imagine where we¹d be without doosras and reverse swing: 200 for none at lunch and bored out of our minds, that's where.