By Gulu Ezekiel

New Delhi, June 29: Despite successfully chasing a record total to win at Lord's the team management would do well not to paper over the cracks.

There are three areas where there will surely be some thought given before Sunday's match against Sri Lanka.

Magnificent though the six-wicket verdict against England on Saturday was, there is a pressing need to play an extra specialist bowler and drop one batsman. As the TV experts said time and again, if you can't win with six specialist batsmen, you can't win with seven.

There must be a question mark over Rahul Dravid continuing to keep wickets too. He took a smart catch standing up and pulled off a neat stumping too. But watching the ball go through his legs for byes, it was obvious that this stopgap experiment will come unstuck sooner or later.

Virender Sehwag set Lord's alight on his international debut in England, batting with a freedom and flourish that one has come to associate with his game.

Tendulkar on the other hand failed at number four. That will serve to stoke the currently hot debate about whether he should open or not.

Between the century opening stand from Sehwag and Sourav Ganguly and the unbeaten 131-runs partnership between Dravid and Yuvraj that saw India home, there was a scare as Ashley Giles continued with his leg-stump attack he had perfected last year in India.

But even though chasing 272 was never going to be easy, credit should really go to the bowlers for pegging back England after they had reached 167 for two in the 30th over.

At that stage the odds were heavily in favour of a 300-plus total. But some astute captaincy by Ganguly and the bowlers' ability to learn quickly from their early mistakes meant the batting was pegged back.

The launching pad by openers Marcus Trescothick and Nick Knight saw Ajit Agarkar and Zaheer Khan taken off the firing line to lick their wounds.

Nasser Hussain then took control after another piece of Tendulkar magic in the field had accounted for Knight.

Hussain rattled Harbhajan Singh by repeatedly reverse-sweeping the off spinner and Ganguly was forced to fall back on his second line of attack earlier than he would have liked to.

In the event that turned out to be a masterstroke as Yuvraj put the brakes on the scoring with his seemingly innocuous left-arm spinners.

Yuvraj made the batsmen force the pace and kept to a tight line, in the process picking up three vital wickets.

Zaheer and Agarkar then came back to bowl quite beautifully in the final overs with the left-armer producing some cracking yorkers that the batsmen had no clue to.

England could squeeze out just 48 runs from the final 10 overs and this made all the difference when India chased.