The problems a winning team faces are quite different from those that a losing team has. Australia, the world's best team, looked anything but in Mohali; it was outbatted and outbowled, and most surprising of all, as Ricky Ponting pointed out, it was outfielded. Its most experienced bowler, Brett Lee, is struggling. His on-field battle with Ponting has helped neither himself nor his team. The received wisdom at the start of the tour was that India had the better spinners, but Australia had the better pace attack. Now it turns out India has the better pace attack as well. Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma have looked streets ahead of Lee, Mitchell Johnson, Shane Watson, and Peter Siddle - the foursome which gave the Australian bowling a unidimensional look. The Indians had the skill to reverse swing early in the innings while the Aussie struggled to do so at any time. In a brief career, Ishant has already snared the Australian captain half a dozen times, getting him either leg before or bowled with the ball which ducks in smartly. When Ponting was bowled on the fourth day, his expression suggested he could not believe it was possible for a fast bowler to do that in India - especially an Indian fast bowler. Zaheer Khan has matured into an all-round bowler capable of surprising batsmen with pace, swing and angle of delivery. Unlike most of his predecessors, he is as comfortable bowling over the wicket as round - clearly the rival batsmen aren't quite so comfortable. The scorecard reveals India's secret - there was not a single failure (if you discount V.V.S. Laxman's 12 in the first innings). Every batsman got runs, some of them twice, and every bowler claimed wickets. This is an unusual record - most Test matches are won by two or three outstanding individual performances. There was Sourav Ganguly's century, of course, and debutant Amit Mishra's five-wicket haul in the first innings. But it was skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni's 92 and 68, scored at a pace that allowed India to pull ahead quickly and declare when it wanted to that tilted the balance. Dhoni's captaincy was aggressive too - leading to the one problem the winning team has right now: what to do with Anil Kumble, the original skipper. The two men who handled his duties in the second Test - bowler Mishra and captain Dhoni did exceptionally well. Should he re-enter the team and upset its balance now? In any case, who should be dropped from a winning team to accommodate a captain and player who has rendered yeoman service to the country, but looked sadly out of touch in the first Test? It's a tough question, and will have to be handled with delicacy and tact. On the one hand, you cannot insult a player who has been one of the most distinguished ever in the annals of the game. On the other, you cannot discourage a younger bowler who has begun his career so well. A radical solution might be to rest Sourav Ganguly - after all, he is calling it a day and cannot be part of any long-term planning. That would enable India to go into the match with five bowlers, and attack. On the other hand, there will be a school of thought which believes that keeping the extra batsman means India can sit on its lead for the remainder of the series. This is the more defensive approach. In either case, it is a delicious problem of the kind that only successful teams can have - the problem of overchoice. __
