Australia’s crushing win in the tri-series on Sunday, I believe, is best described by a basketball term: slam-dunk.

The game was too one-sided to sustain interest especially after India — chasing a mammoth 289 — had lost half their side before the score had reached 100. But in a broader perspective, this result makes the tournament even more intriguing.

Australia are ahead of India in the points table now, but only just; Sri Lanka are still below India, but only just. In fact, the positions could have been reversed for the Lankans lost two matches by the proverbial whisker. Given the kind of matches that have been seen yet, it would take a brave man to predict which two teams would make the final.

I am not condoning India’s shoddy batting performance on Sunday which revealed more madness than method. What one saw was irresponsibility thinly disguised as aggression. Batsman after batsman swished and swooshed at deliveries outside the off-stump without giving themselves time to judge the pace and bounce of the pitch and paid the price.

Brief as it was, Sachin Tendulkar played a particularly grotesque knock — something he’d like to forget in a hurry. It’s more than a month since he made even a half-century and this must worry him and the team management more than the much-touted 100th century. All said and done, Tendulkar’s return to form is crucial for India as the tournament goes ahead.

To top it all M.S. Dhoni, not just captain, but also India’s best batsman in the tri-series, has copped a one-match ban yet again for not completing his quota of overs in time. In this instance, I think the verdict is harsh because the match had far too many stoppages — not the least for a faux pas by the third umpire which added a touch of farce to the proceedings.

While time so wasted is obviously adjusted, it does break the momentum of the match and increases the onus on the fielding captain more than any other participant. Sometimes the spirit rather than the letter of the rule, I believe, should prevail. About the only relief from the ban on Dhoni is that India’s rotation policy would now come into play willy-nilly!

But while all this adds to India’s problems, there is no cause for deep dejection or being overly critical. A top view of what’s happening in international cricket in the past year or so presents a topsy-turvy scenario. For instance, Australia were badly thrashed by Lanka just the other day. Extending the argument, England have shown astonishing form in the ODIs against Pakistan after being thrashed in the Tests.

My surmise is that because there is no clearly dominant side — like the West Indies between 1975 and 1990 and Australia between 1990 and 2006 — such swings will be frequent till one of the five or six sides competing for top honours surges ahead.

These swings have also been wild — teams which look brilliant one day, are pedestrian the next — which many former players attribute to T20, and the ‘erosion’ in technique and temperament consequently. The surmises and theories are obviously empirical and need greater research to ratify (or reject) them, but at the very least, I venture to say, the sheer unpredictability has made current international cricket riveting.

Talking of T20 cricket, the compromise worked out between the BCCI and the Sahara Group douses the controversy. The compromise is by all accounts fragile: I understand that all franchises are not in consonance with allowing Pune Warriors a fifth overseas player.

A former Indian cricketer close to the power-that-be I met last week thought it was a good idea to increase the ‘foreign quotient’ for all teams to raise the standard of the IPL.