The effect a team's bowling has on its batting

India's reliance on their batting in overseas Tests should in theory be well understood. Outside of Trent Bridge 2007, Perth 2008, Kingsmead 2010 and Sreesanth's Test at the Wanderers, India's wins and draws outside the subcontinent in the last two decades have been based on batting the opposition out of the game or at least turning in a serious batting performance that left the game on an even footing. And even in these relatively bowler-dominated wins, the batting efforts were commendably solid.

Generally, though, a lot of blame is laid at the batsmen's door and theories abound about Indian batsmen not being able to adjust to conditions that are foreign to them, because often in the losses there is a collapse or two. Quite often, a lack of courage in facing up to the short, fast ball and technical ineptitude against such bowling are highlighted as the reason for India's poor overseas record. It is only very recently that bowling weaknesses have more explicitly come under the scanner. Still, the sort of multiplier effect that bowling has on a team's batting abilities continues to be mostly ignored. Generally bowling and batting continue to be analysed in isolation.

Barring a particularly barren period in the early-to-mid '90s, Indian batting has done reasonably well against pace. Even in the salad years of Clive Lloyd's West Indies, India's batsmen did no worse than everyone else, and often better. Indians generally didn't hook or pull, but you can't exactly accuse Sunil Gavaskar, Gundappa Vishwanath, Mohinder Amarnath, Sandeep Patil, Yashpal Sharma, Dilip Vengsarkar, Kapil Dev or even Chetan Chauhan of backing away against extreme pace.

What India missed then and now is a good set of fast men. Of late, to add to this, there is the shortage of a couple of bowlers who can hang about when batting.

Batting, inherently, is a nervous task that puts you on edge. If batting is further required to bail you out every single time, that compounds things further. A good bowling side puts the batsmen in a freer state of mind. Even 250 is enough, you think; and frequently 250 becomes 300 as you bat with less inhibition. Lower-order recoveries look less fraught. The opposition quite often starts losing the plot in the face of lower-order resistance partly because every run assumes increasing significance in the face of a serious bowling attack. Good bowling has a multiplier effect in more ways than one.

When Pakistan faced up to the might of West Indies in the mid-to-late '80s and early '90s, the reason their batsmen (apart from their bona fide great bat, Javed Miandad) actually made a decent fist of it was because they had a penetrative bowling attack. Although you could argue that a batsman like Ijaz Ahmed had a good record in Australia because his back-foot play was strong, equally, I suspect he wouldn't have played so well there if he wasn't backed up by Pakistan's persistent fast-bowling threat.

When West Indies lost three or four early wickets in a heap in their prime in the '80s, nearly always Jeff Dujon, Lloyd and Larry Gomes (helped by Malcolm Marshall, Andy Roberts and company) got them out of trouble because with every run scored, the impending doom of facing up to their fast men became larger for the opposition. There can be no greater sign of this pressure than catches being dropped in the face of lower-order runs. I lost count at one point in the '80s of the number of times Australia had West Indies in trouble at 100-odd for 4 and then completely lost their way, with the number of dropped catches reaching embarrassing proportions. It might not be a coincidence that the slip fielders who dropped a lot of these catches were batsmen.

It's remarkable how rarely this fairly obvious correlation between India's lack of good fast-bowling options and their batting collapses is made. I wonder whether it is because frequently a lot of analysts and fans underestimate the difficulty of batting. They forget how much of a mental thing batting really is, and how, conversely, batting becomes combative when it is braced by the presence of a threatening bowling attack. And how, as a corollary, when you are in possession of a strong bowling attack, opposition bowling often runs out of ideas at the suggestion of a lower-order fightback.

It's equally remarkable how the many batting collapses of visiting teams on turning pitches in the subcontinent are rarely linked to their not having good spin-bowling units. Sure, teams have batsmen who are relatively better at handling their home conditions, but the absence of a good bowling unit that suits away conditions puts the batting order doubly on the defensive. Often in such cases, batting weaknesses appear magnified. Even a couple of good bats (Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen, in the recent past) might pull the team through in away conditions in the presence of an attacking bowling unit.

It's quite clear that India's young batsmen have been doing a commendable job in the absence of a thrusting, incisive bowling attack. It might even be argued they have performed better than their more illustrious seniors at corresponding stages in their careers. The Indian bowling attack at present has the pace but nowhere near the consistency required to be a constant threat. This too shall change given the right type of advice and environment, because the physical abilities are in place. But till such time that the bowling develops this consistency, analysis of batting failures needs to be set in the context of this effect that bowling tends to have, and young batting orders must continue to be granted that much more leeway.