Australian Cricket Coach Justin Langer Got It So Wrong: India's Historic Win Can't Be Put Down Just To Its Population

Australian cricket coach Justin Langer was complimenting India for the stunning Test series win Down Under when he said that there are 1.5 billion Indians and if you make it to the playing eleven then you must be really tough.

- Robin.David

Frankly, the comment is not as charitable as it seems at face value. It whittles away some sheen of victory from the Indian team. This wasn’t just another Test series win. This was a case of a bunch of benchwarmers comfortably beating the most powerful team in the world. Such a win cannot be reduced to just the size of India’s population.

Langer’s comment assumes that match-winning players are just lying by the roadside among the multitudes and the selectors have to simply play eeny meeny miny moe to select the best of the lot. It assumes no real effort must go into preparing a strong Test team given the wide range of players to choose from.

If this was the case – that India’s cricketing prowess came from the size of its demographics – then we should have been winning almost every other Test series that we played in the past 89 years. After all, we have always been the most populous country among Test-playing countries. We should not have won just 159 of the 546 Tests that we have played from 1932 to the end of the Australian series. We should have won at least half of those if not more.