India Has Fallen

STATISTICS DO not lie. Between 2021 and 2024, India’s two best batters, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma, had an average of just over 30 against spin in home conditions. And they have each been dismissed multiple times to left-arm spin. Make no mistake, this is a worrying sign. Indians, it is time to accept, are no longer masters of spin. Rather, we do not play spin well, and Kohli and Sharma are examples of how things have gone south over the years.

In fact, the New Zealand series is a serious call-up for these two men ahead of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. For years, they have shouldered the responsibility of India’s batting. Both are greats of the game and yet it has to be acknowledged that both Sharma and Kohli have turned inconsistent of late. They are not the ones to have won India Test matches of late, and it is either Jaiswal or Pant or the middle and lower middle order led by Jadeja and Ashwin that has bailed India out time and again in the last 24 months.

Can Kohli and Sharma recover from this slump and do what Tendulkar did in 2010? Can there be one final resurgence for both these greats and can the Border-Gavaskar Trophy be a final hurrah? Or is it true that both are past their prime and much like the 2011-12 tour of Australia led to the retirements of Dravid and Laxman, this forthcoming tour could cost India dear and see the last of Kohli and Sharma?

The truth is there is a serious cause for concern. Of late, Sharma is trying to do in Test cricket what he has successfully done in white-ball cricket. He has given India some bright starts and it has been a refreshing approach in the shorter format of the game. In fact, that is what won India the T20 World Cup in the US and the Caribbean. But then red-ball cricket is different. It is also about leaving balls and not playing all of them. It is about patience and agreeing to look ugly. The success of Sharma as a Test opener can be attributed to these two things. In England, for example, in 2021, Sharma was prepared to buy his time. Stay patient. Get beaten, but not throw his wicket away. He was India’s best batter in the 2021 series in England and the recipe was conventional Test match batting. In fact, Sharma had once told me that after returning from England and while preparing for the IPL, he was still leaving balls outside the off stump. So much so, Mahela Jayawardene had to remind him that he was not playing red-ball cricket anymore. Leaving balls had become a second habit and it added to him as a Test match player. Playing shots of every ball is not Sharma’s red-ball game. He is too good to try and blaze away. He must get out of this rut.

Take the case of Joe Root. For a while, Root tried to change himself and play Bazball. He even got out trying to play a reverse sweep to Jasprit Bumrah in India. Trying to hit every ball is not his game. And it was only when Root made this mental adjustment that he started scoring big again. And now he is back at his absolute best and looking the best batter in the world.

That is what Sharma needs to do as a batter and leader. Unless the captain scores, the team will feel the pinch, and the lack of runs will also start to impact his leadership in the future. The Bengaluru toss call was baffling and preparing a turner in Pune was equally strange. India will need Sharma the leader to be back in shape in Australia and the process should start in Mumbai. He will need to make the mental adjustment and be ready to look ugly. That is what Test cricket is all about and Sharma is not an exception.

Kohli, too, is a worry. The dismissal against Santner in the first innings of the Pune Test is evidence he is not the same batter from some five years earlier. It was a full toss and Kohli played over the ball. Santner, too, was stunned and did not celebrate much. In fact, he did say the same in the press conference that he was a little surprised with the way it all happened against Kohli.

Saying things against Kohli is difficult in this day and age of social media. Whatever you say will land you into abuse. Millions will jump at you and start trolling. The social media army is toxic and maybe that is why most prefer to stay away. The truth, however, is staring us in the face. Kohli is inconsistent at the moment. Not that he cannot do it anymore, but rather the number of failures has gone up by much. He still can play the occasional fantastic innings and one would hope that it happens in Australia a few times over the next two months.

Does Kohli merit a place in the team in Australia? The answer is still yes. In the absence of Pujara, and I am of the opinion that India should have picked him for this one-off series, it is Kohli who will have to shoulder the bulk of the responsibility in the middle order. He has the experience and the mental fortitude to do so. Australia is not going to spin much and neither will there be much seam movement. Against bounce, Kohli should still be at his best, and that is where he can make a difference for India in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.

The two others who I want to mention here are Ashwin and Jadeja. For years, they have won India Test matches in home conditions and have been our greatest match-winners as a pair. Both, however, had a poor series thus far. And that is what brings me to the conditions on offer. Bengaluru was such that the spinners had little to do. The first day was all about pace and movement and in the fourth innings, India just had 107 runs to play with.

Pune, however, was different. On a turner, New Zealand spinners out-bowled Ashwin and Jadeja, and that is a worry for every Indian cricket fan. But it also merits the question—why prepare turners when you have the quality of Ashwin and Jadeja in the team? What turners do is level the playing field. With the extra help on offer, spinners like Santner or Ajaz Patel start to look that extra bit menacing, and Ashwin and Jadeja, who do not really need turners to ply their craft, are rendered kind of ineffective. The truth is India does not need to prepare turners with them around. They can still win India games on good batting decks and that is what they have done for more than a decade.

With the tag of invincibility finally broken, can India herald a turnaround from here on? Can Sharma, Kohli, Ashwin, and Jadeja be the lead acts in this turnaround? Or are they all past their best and is this a team in transition? We need answers to each of these questions and that is why Mumbai is no longer a dead rubber. Rather, it is a match of huge importance ahead of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy and as an Indian cricket follower, you expect things to turn for the better at the Wankhede.

Indian cricketIndian Test Cricketred-ball cricketRohit SharmaVirat Kohliwhite-ball cricket