Rebuilding Team India

And then it fell apart. The start of the new year has been far from happy for the Indian cricket team. But the undoing of a great era rarely ever happens quietly, or behind closed doors. On January 1, news of a divided dressing room was published in a leading Indian daily, the leak entailing stories of an angry coach Gautam Gambhir (whose short tenure at the helm has been riddled with losses, including India’s first Test series loss at home in 12 years) lashing out at his players after the defeat in Melbourne, arguably the most humiliating of India’s recent defeats.

A day before New Year’s Eve at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, at the fag end of what had been an enthralling, gnarly and see-sawing Test match, it looked like Rishabh Pant and Yashasvi Jaiswal had saved the game for India with some gritty, backs-to-the-wall batting in the post-lunch session. Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and KL Rahul had all been dis[1]missed in the first session, so Pant and Jaiswal—the cogs of Indian cricket’s new era—respected the situation and smoth[1]ered the bowling, ensuring no wickets fell at all in the second session. With two well set stars at the crease to begin the final session, coupled with the fact that India had seven wickets left in hand, a great Test match was due to end the way some contests ought to—without a winner or a loser.

Until Pant took on a part-time bowler and holed out in the deep; and the rest of the team collapsed like a house of cards. “Bohut ho gaya (enough is enough),” Gambhir is reported to have shouted, the leak detailing his my-way-or-the[1]highway threat to his players. If that was the news Indian cricket fans woke up to on the first day of the year, the second—the eve of the final Test in Sydney—wasn’t any better. It was Gambhir who attended the press conference and not the captain, as is tradition, indicating that Rohit would possibly be dropped from the XI for the final Test.

Gambhir was then asked point blank if Rohit was going to feature in Sydney. He replied that they would take a call after studying the surface on the morning of the match, which was all revealing. The captain of the team is always the first name on the sheet, and his selection never hinges on the condi[1]tion of the pitch, unlike with, say, the presence of a specialist bowler. But Rohit’s poor form, which is putting it lightly given that he has a top-score of 10 in this series in Australia and has shockingly amassed only 31 runs in five innings (seven fewer runs than tailender Akash Deep has scored in just three innings), has put paid to all his privileges. The questions around his selection only grew as the day progressed, even as the team tried out a new slip cordon, one without the familiar figure of Rohit in it.

Whether or not Rohit Sharma will drop himself for the Sydney Test (at the time of writing the match hadn’t begun) is not the point, for the truth is that an era is coming to an end, just like it did when Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble retired within a few years of each other. It was into those oversized boots that the core of this team walked and grew dutifully, Rohit, Kohli, R Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and Jasprit Bumrah taking Indian cricket onwards and upwards for the next decade or so. But professional sport can be a rather merciless place to exist in, and the clock isn’t ticking very kindly on some of these names. Wholly out of the blue, Ashwin retired from international cricket in the middle of this ongoing series and not so unexpectedly, Rohit and Kohli, two men in their late thirties, are not finding runs as easily as they did in their pomp.

But answers are already being found. In twenty-somethings Jaiswal, Pant, Nitish Kumar Reddy and 31-year-old Bumrah, India OPENINGS already has a great core to build a Test team around. What then is really ailing the Test team? That answer perhaps lies in the machinery and the way the game is administered and fashioned. With various forms of white-ball cricket—T20s, 50-overs as well as the three-month long season of the Indian Premier League (IPL)—taking up so much of the calendar, the appetite and endurance to find solutions in a five-day game are diminishing and it has had a great, immediate and tragic impact on India’s recent losses in Test cricket. Which is per[1]haps why India’s batsmen have often tried to hit their way out of trouble, because it works ever-so-well in the other formats. The ability to wait it out is a dying art, as is the quality it takes to play spin in the subcontinent, which Indians were once masters at. But on a spinning track in Pune, New Zealand’s Mitchell Santner, a left-arm spinner who had never taken a five-wicket haul in Test cricket earlier, ended up taking 13 wickets across the game and the Indians could come up with no answers whatsoever.

All that would have been fine had the shorter formats wholly replaced the oldest one in modern-day cricket. But that is far from the case. Test cricket is in fact even more significant now than it perhaps ever was, thanks to the World Test Championship (WTC), which is played cyclically over a period of two years followed by a playoff final between the two best teams on the table, which gives great relevance to every single tour and series. India will mostly not make the cut for the final in June, despite having been in top position until September last year, just before the wheels truly came apart. If they are not South Africa’s opposition when the match at Lord’s unfolds, it will be the first time India wouldn’t have qualified for the final, having made the cut on both previous occasions, even though they ended up losing both times (first to New Zealand, then Australia).

Not making it to Lord’s could well be a good thing, for it will give the already-transitioning Indian side even more time to rebuild, and perhaps even start from scratch. Their next Test as[1]signment begins immediately after the WTC final, in and against England. Will Rohit be there? Or will the great Kohli, on the verge of 10,000 Test runs, make the cut? It’s hard to say at this point. But first there is the small matter of finishing the ongoing series in Sydney, with the Border-Gavaskar Trophy still very much on the line at 1-2. How Gambhir and Rohit choose to approach this game, in terms of composition and style of play, should give plenty of clues (if not outright answers) at the shape of India’s future in Test cricket, which will go on to see better days, as it always does, once the transition is complete.

Gautam GambhirIndian cricketMelbourneRohit Sharmateam buildingVirat KohliWTC final