Let’s give Gautam Gambhir an ear before we give a mouthful. He says this very team, only three months ago, without Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, with a new captain, drew 2-2 in England which was arguably one of Indian cricket’s finest hour. I was a genius then, am I a lunatic now?
These very Indian batters did something which no set of batters—not your Dravid and Tendulkar; Ganguly and Laxman; Gavaskar or Vengsarkar etc—ever managed in England. We had one score of nearly 600, three straight totals of over 400 and four over 300s—that is 8 out of 10 completed innings! Shubman Gill, KL Rahul, Yashaswi Jaiswal and Rishabh Pant, among themselves, hit ten centuries. Ravindra Jadeja and Washington Sundar had hundreds. You then saw them as diamonds — now as mere roadside pebbles who ought to be kicked in the first drain you come across.
Gambhir, and we too, need to take a closer look though. Indian batters prospered because England hardly had any spinner in their bowling arsenal. Young Shoaib Bashir, still learning his craft, played in only three of five Tests. He still took 10 wickets which only a few managed for England. So first issue identified and Gambhir better agree: Indian batters are no longer good players of spin.
You become good players of spin only if you are constantly exposed to that diet in your daily meal. Now you don’t need to scan stats to agree that our top players don’t play first class cricket. That is a game which is spread over 360 overs and not 40 overs of a T20 match. Not a match where you could get away with four overs and 40-60 balls of slog-hitting without any attacking field. Not a pitch which changes nature every day, where concentration and intensity is required over 30 hours and not three hours of hit-and-giggle.
The spin bowlers our batters are exposed to are ones who push the ball through. You can’t blame these spinners—they play white-ball cricket where your economy and not your wicket-taking ability matters. Where you need to dart your deliveries quick enough so batsmen don’t come down the track and hit your over sight screen. Test spinners are more liable to give a rip and loop and dip which test out your defensive play. There are close-in fielders breathing down your neck. The thumb rule is: If you don’t have a good defensive technique, you are not fit to be in Indian Test team.
Again the answer is simple: Our Test batsmen need to play more domestic cricket. Axar Patel, Ravindra Jadeja, Washington Sundar are not the ideal spin bowlers for your preparations. They are all bad-wicket bowlers—at best of restrictive kind. Kuldeep Yadav is top-class of course but his confidence has taken a hit for he clearly is not Gambhir’s favourite. Why? You would ask.
Because in Gambhir’s playbook, being a good spinner is not good enough. You need to be good with bat also. It explains why our Test team is one of allrounders and not specialists. Washington Sundar could be asked to bowl over 50 overs which he did in Guwahati. A Test prior in Kolkata, he was batting at number three. In entire history of Test cricket, you could count only a few on fingers who could hold their place in a Test team both as a bowler and batsman. Garfield Sobers, Ian Botham, Imran Khan, Jacques Kallis…and maybe Ravindra Jadeja. You can’t pick even Kapil Dev merely on his batting skills.
So Gambhir can’t get away by suggesting its a team in transition. He is not grooming but destroying Washington Sundar. Only a superhuman can devote equal hours to be good in both batting and bowling. One of the two department has to come as a bonus. If he is a frontline bowler, a few handy runs at number 7-8 are most welcome. If he is a number three batter, a few restrictive overs from him should be embraced.
So two problems are clear as daylight:
One, Indians need to be better at playing spin bowling.
Two, hoping for a few Test allrounders in playing eleven is pure fantasy. Test cricket is one of specialists where batting order ought to be fixed. Floaters don’t work in five-day cricket. A number three batter approaches his innings entirely different to how a number eight batsman does. Just as a reminder: Washington Sundar batted at number 3 in Kolkata and at number 8 in Guwahati. This is a recipe to finish and not blossom a Test career.
Gambhir could also be faulted for too many bowling changes in his Test line-ups. Where are Akash Deep, Prasidha Krishna or Anshul Kambhoj who played in England? Did India really need to play four spinners in Kolkata? Wasn’t Axar more suited for Guwahati given you were playing with just two specialist batsmen in Jaiswal and KL Rahul?
Insight into “Grovel” remark
South African coach Shukri Conrad’s comment on “wanting-to-make-India-grovel” upset millions of Indians. Instead, we need be thankful to him. This is what Conrad said:
“And then, obviously, we wanted the Indians to spend as much time on their feet out in the field, we wanted them to really grovel…”
This template would be copied by other teams visiting India. South Africans identified that these Indians, bred on white-ball diet, would disintegrate if made to stand on their feet for 150 overs and two days. Thus they showed no hurry to speed up scoring. It was obvious Indians, with exhausted limbs, neither had focus or intensity when it was their turn to bat. It didn’t matter in England because there we batted first in all but one of five Tests. When in only instance England batted first at Lord’s, and batted long, we suffered.
This is good enough post-mortem for India going forward in Test cricket. Those you think should be a part of your Test team, must play domestic cricket at all times. The damage was apparent in examples of Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli. Even batters of their stature and class, had no clue against quality spin of New Zealand because they had literally forsaken domestic cricket for over a decade.
Two, Test cricket must be incentivised for your next generation in seeing merit to sticking to this format. If you keep ignoring the domestic performers, like you do with Abhimanyu Easwaran, who has 27 hundreds from 107 first class games in last dozen years, or Jalaj Saxena who is four scalps shy of 500 wickets in 20 years of first class cricket, you are not acknowledging hundreds of hours spent on the field in honing their skills.
Nobody would look to be Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane of tomorrow. Those who can’t hit sixes and do reverse sweeps or switch-hits, would see no future in sticking to game. Parents would look down on them, coaches would turn their back, and your Ambanis and Goenkas would have no time for them.
Gambhir vs Chappell
Today Gambhir’s reign is seen as disastrous as it was with Greg Chappell some twenty years ago. There are some similarities and not-so-similarities on other issues. Both were not happy with the presence of big stars in the team. They were happy dealing with younger talents. Both possessed massive egos — not the kind of persons a cricketer would go to with his problems. Both seem to lack humour and were not easy-going. Both are stubborn individuals.
But Chappell’s credentials were out-and-out in Test cricket. Gambhir’s is T20 cricket. Chappell is an acknowledged thinker and intellectual of the game. Gambhir is not. Gambhir’s stature is also not one of Chappell who is one of all-time greats.
It would be wrong to put all our ills on Gambhir’s door. He has done his bit of damage but Indian cricket suffers from structural problems. Its soul today is corrupted by obscene money and there is no room for purity.
There has to be a reason why cricketers would sweat and shed blood on cricket field when everything a sportsman aspires to, they get on a platter after one season of IPL. Not just Gambhir, even selectors must take flak for being enamoured with IPL’s glamour and not paying attention to some obscure domestic match being played at some obscure venue and finding some obscure mention in newspapers.
Just one example would suffice: Why Hardik Pandya has forsaken Test cricket? Because he admits he can’t stand up to the challenge of five-day cricket. He is your megastar in white-ball cricket but sees himself misfit in Test cricket.
Indian cricket’s stakeholders too need to make a distinction between apples and oranges. Damningly, I suspect they don’t have the courage to choose good, worthy players only because the latter don’t make headlines and are not signed up by franchisees for obscene money. The selectors appear not jury but fanboy of cricket’s moneybags. What good could one really expect from them???
