All's well?

India has won 6-1. Right? Wrong. Sri Lanka has lost 1-6. And that causes me to put a pause to the euphoric celebrations going around in the country.

We have 4-5 match winners now. Right? Maybe. The debutants have admittedly made better contributions than performances by earlier experiments. Still, I have a bit of a question mark over MS Dhoni given that his success owes as much to Sri Lanka's profligacy in the field than his clean hitting. Raina, Venugopal, RP Singh and Sreesanth need to prove themselves against quality opposition and that too, outside India before their promise starts deserving reputations. Only Irfan Pathan seems to have added a batting dimension to his contribution to the team.

In International Cricket, consistency separates champions from the pretenders. India needs to show that they have truly turned the corner by repeating their performance against South Africa, Pakistan, England and West Indies. Then we can start talking about being World beaters, champions or other such terms. Else, we'll soon start hearing about the danger of 'wholesale changes' & 'tinkering' if South Africa 'finds us out'.

Zaheer Khan needs to be brought back and the support staff should work with him to improve his fitness. He is a quality fast bowler and with teams such as South Africa, Pakistan and England we'll miss him. Sreesanth & RP Singh might even benefit from his presence and India could rotate them as per the situation in the series.

Another player we still miss is a quality spinner to support Bhajji. Murali seems like a stop gap arrangement at best and we need to quickly draft in new blood to be ready in time for 2007. Wonder whether Chawla is the right choice.

In a nutshell, the victory over Sri Lanka could be the beginning of a Golden Run or a flash in the pan. My gut tends towards the latter mainly because 1) success was achieved against a clearly under-performing team thereby over-stating our capability, 2) the balance in the team is skewed a bit too much towards experimentation making the team raw and 3) we are yet to prove ourselves abroad.

The jury is still out on Team India but this is one time, I hope I'm wrong.