Beating India in India in Test cricket used to be a career goal, a dream for most overseas teams. The ‘last frontier’ as the Australian great Baggy Green-er Steve Waugh termed it. Even he never managed to breach the fortress. These days, that dream is selling free, along with flight tickets to India. First New Zealand with a 3-0 whitewash, without their talisman Kane Williamson, and now South Africa, without their lodestar Kagiso Rabada. And Gautam Gambhir has been the coach who has watched Rome burn on both occasions.
Seldom has a long-held dominant home record been surrendered so meekly. Even West Indies’s Test embers at home flickered briefly after the retirement of Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. Australia are still hanging on to theirs and hence India’s two triumphs there are treasured. South Africa too denied India even after AB de Villiers, Hashim Amla and Dale Steyn retired. Losing isn’t a crime, but India have given up the ghost, whimpering out without a fight. It says much that they started the final day of the Guwahati Test with the announcement that drawing is like winning.
India’s thought process has been strikingly muddled. On what basis, especially after the debacles against New Zealand, did Gambhir think a scrambled omelet of a pitch at Eden Gardens with four spinners could work for him? A look at his own dressing room would have revealed the batsmen’s inability to cope.
The former coach Rahul Dravid used to obsess about the pitches. But he knew what tracks suited his team – that’s how India rebounded in the home Test series against England after the first Test loss, with as inexperienced a middle order as it’s now. Gambhir inexplicably hasn’t yet shown that he knows what pitch suits his boys. It’s as if he had a personal wish to try playing with four spinners on a Kolkata akhada and see what happens.
When Axar Patel, second best batsman of that Test after Temba Bavuma, nearly dragged India to a heist, Gambhir dropped him for the second Test to draft in Nitish Reddy. As has been detailed in this newspaper, Reddy’s potency with the ball has been severely depleted due to frequent injuries. And yet every time, he comes back without a solid run in domestic cricket.
That rule isn’t just for Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli to avoid rustiness, it’s a route for all these youngsters to learn their art too and get some miles in. The team management has been talking up Sai Sudharsan’s skills against spin that the selectors have observed in domestic cricket, and so what do they do? Drop him from the Kolkata Test.
Gambhir might like the personalities of a Nitish Reddy, Harshit Rana, Dhruv Jurel but clearly they aren’t Test ready yet. Jurel doesn’t seem ready yet for the Indian tracks; he still has the all-hard-arms pushing method, and allied with the locked-in side-on position, it’s not judicious at home.
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Gambhir is a proudly stubborn man, who has the admirable confidence to stand up to the critical legendary Indian cricketers of the past, and do his own thing. But the flip side is that rationality can suffer. The Kolkata pitch or his team selections here are evidence enough.
To be fair to him, there is a limit to what a coach can do on certain aspects. Does KL Rahul need to be told to be braver, use his feet and not just lunge forward from the crease with very low hands like he did in the first innings or lamely waft as he did in the second? Does Yashasvi Jaiswal need to be told umpteen times that he cannot throw his hands to manufacture cut shots to balls without width. Even Viv Richards didn’t do that. Does Rishabh Pant need to be told as a stand-in captain he doesn’t have to charge a pacer for a slog. In the few times that shot has worked for him before, he would target the smash over off-side field and not across-the-line heaves. When it was clear that Jansen is peppering a bouncer trap, does a message have to be sent out to Nitish that he can’t have his bat up as a magnetic prop to attract the ball.
When the failing is two faceted – of skill and temperament, then the least a coach can do is not to make muddled choices of personnel and pitches. Gambhir has done both. And India have lost both Tests to bury a proud home Test record. Especially, if the defense is that this is a team in transition, the tactical moves made haven’t been sensible.
Not long ago, teams used to extensively prepare for a India series. Queue up first-class tour games, or have long customised camps with designer pitches where they would have big fans blowing up sand, loudspeakers to mimic crowd noise. How to quell the inner demons when the turning ball revvs up and dips from above the eye-line, and finding a way to cope, was a life-long pursuit. Even someone as accomplished as Ricky Ponting couldn’t find a way despite years of travelling to India. Now Senuran Muthusamy has a game-turning hundred, Marco Jansen almost got a blistering one.
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Playing Test cricket in India used to be a bewitching dream for overseas players, now it’s a nightmare for Indians.