After the surrender at Lord's on Saturday, the hacks and cynics will be out in force. They will rant and rave about how India lack killer instinct, about how Sachin doesn't fire when it matters most. The pseudo-intellectuals might read deeper meaning into this. Our lack of a killer instinct is cultural. We are, after all, the land of ahimsa.
Humbug.
My take is that India, England, Pakistan and South Africa are evenly matched teams. Who wins on a particular day is down to chance. India have had a run of bad luck in clutch games. It has happened to South Africa. It happened to Ricky Ponting against Harbhajan Singh. Our boys aren't playing worse than usual in clutch games.
In case old friends are wondering if I've suddenly become a sentimental apologist for mediocrity...no.
I believe the bad luck theory mainly because a very similar hypothesis has been rigorously testing in baseball. For generations baseball had a rich mythology about clutch-hitters, great batters who score when it matters most. However, when trained statisticians examined the data, there was no evidence at all that the fabled clutch hitters did any better in clutch situations than in other situations. A purely random event had spawned a rich and convincing mythology. Read Money Ball by Michael Lewis for more fundas (strongly recommended if you like this post). Or just look up clutch hitting or Bill James on Wikipedia (link below)
Clutch hitter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Similar academic quality analysis showed no evidence of the equivalent in basketball - a Hot Hand, when a player who is in the Zone shoots baskets at will. The memorable sequences of great shots in basketball are fully explained by chance. The mind sees patterns where there are none.
There is a real opportunity here for an ambitious statistician. There is little or no rigorous statistical analysis of cricket data in circulation.
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I have seen professional sportsmen lose self-belief at crucial moments in their careers. I saw it most recently in the Twenty20 finals when Carl Greenidge of Gloustershire, Gordon Greenidge's son and Andy Robert's cousin, went to pieces bowling the last over. I saw Jana Novotna slip into that same state of mind during a Wimbledon final against Steffi Graf. Zaheer might have been in that state of mind in the 2003 World Cup finals. Though, he seemed too wound-up rather than going-to-pieces. We might have gone to pieces against England in Mumbai in 2005, when we collapsed to Shaun Udal.
That sort of mental disintegration happens to people of all races. It is rare. It didn't happen on Saturday. The dice just rolled for England.
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