Test cricket is mostly described in the worst possible cliches – that it resembles life since it gives you a second chance, that it tests your character, your grit, and your willingness to fight back, that it separates men from the boys – every bit of truism worse than the last one.
This isn’t necessarily the fault of those who speak of Test matches this way. The cricket establishment itself firmly holds these views and in fact actively rewards their reinforcement in media and commentariat.
It’s not really a matter of life and death by any means. But it does great disservice to the aspects that actually exceptionalise Tests not only from other formats of cricket but probably from every other professional sport. And that defining character is conditions and the advantage they lend to one of the teams, often the team playing at home.
While in most sports, the ‘home advantage’ is measured in intangibles like crowd hostility, travel fatigue etc., it takes a very real form in Test matches. A contest overwhelmingly favours the home team owing to their familiarity and mastery of conditions – pitches, weather, outfield, ground dimensions. A home team almost always possesses the better resources in all departments that can exploit those factors.
Winning away therefore is rightly regarded as the ultimate accomplishment in Test cricket but in process, enormous shame and ignominy is attached to losing at home – it’s the disrobing of a team’s honour, the erasure of its reputation.
For the twelve years that the Indian Test team held on to its enviable streak winning every series at home, it was never quite celebrated with any real sense of fervour. It was treated as the bare minimum that could be expected of a team that enjoys disproportionately better resources and infrastructure than the rest of the cricketing world.
For twelve years the Indian Test team held on to its enviable streak winning every series at home. Photo: bcci.tv
There was hardly anything worth writing poetics about in beating teams woefully inadequate for the most part at dealing with these conditions.
The tendency to not treat a formidable home record as anything more than a routine feat stems from a place of waiting for the team to eventually fail at guarding it and then making it a matter of collective embarrassment. And things unfolded exactly that way as New Zealand finally became the team to breach the Indian fortress for the first time since England did in 2012.
Having gotten thoroughly outplayed under two different sets of conditions at Bangalore and Pune, Rohit Sharma’s men now face the serious threat of being whitewashed at home should the tide not turn in time at Mumbai for the final leg of their home season.
For the first time in a very long time, a visiting team has firmly outbowled and outbatted their opposite numbers and the hosts have found themselves completely out of depth to throw a counterpunch.
Well, the streak had to end at some point and it’s not like nobody saw this coming. It was building up for at least a couple of years. India’s impregnable home dominance wasn’t as straightforward as most took it for. It took the coming together of a core group of players and for their respective peaks to coincide.
Many prominent ones from this group have already been moved on from. And those still around – Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, Ravichandran Ashwin, and Ravindra Jadeja – are all aging, wearing, or at the very least not the players they once used to be.
What made this pack succeed like no other Indian team before them was they covered all the bases. It showed in how they were able to remain constantly competitive on tough overseas assignments but at home they were practically impossible to beat. The first half of this period was characterised by Kohli’s phenomenal rise as a Test batsman.
In his wings, he had resolute and bankable comrades in Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane. While Rohit was relatively a late bloomer, it helped that his best years came at a time when runs started drying up for the other three.
But the strength of a batting unit only takes a team so far. It’s the quality, variety, and depth in bowling that builds for sustained success in Tests. And this is precisely where this particular team went a step ahead of every Indian team of past. Never had India boasted of an attack capable of ruthlessly bowling teams out in all conditions.
The spin wizardry of Ashwin and Jadeja meant India could often produce extraordinarily spicy wickets despite the knowledge that it could bring the opposition spinners in the contest. The team could afford risking lesser runs because the spin duo afforded them the confidence of bowling the opponents out even more cheaply.
Senior players such as Rohit Sharma are all aging, wearing, or at the very least not the players they once used to be. Photo: bcci.tv
And on days when the batsmen woke up feeling like big runs, the fast-bowling pack of Ishant Sharma, Mohammed Shami, Umesh Yadav, and – a little lately – Jasprit Bumrah made sure preparing truer and flatter surfaces was no problem either. India’s former coach Ravi Shastri, who himself oversaw the team during much of this period, once pompously proclaimed his team is agnostic to pitches and conditions anywhere around the world.
While Shastri’s words were characteristically hyperbolic, it indeed was the case while playing at home. And it isn’t quite the unexceptional feat as India offers a wide variety of pitches across different regions. But this team possessed all the weapons for any possible challenge thrown at them – batsmen capable of digging it out and scoring big, spinners adept at extracting life out of surfaces that offered modest purchase, and a battery of fast bowlers who carried patience, persistence, and pace in the right proportions.
Much lesser achievements and legacies have been celebrated in cricket with much larger fanfare. But somehow this incredible 12-year run has for the most part only been treated as something that ought to have happened; that there was nothing truly remarkable about this feat, that standards need to be set higher than celebrating mere ‘home wins’.
There’s an implicit assumption in this line of thinking that the Indian Test teams have always wielded this kind of home dominance. But a cursory look at the team’s record at home over the years will drill a hole in this fanciful narrative. The much heralded previous generations are now appraised way too flatteringly thanks to the force of nostalgia. But in their time, uninspiring stalemates were rather common at home.
On the other hand, the current crop in their best years – 2013 to 2022 were only beaten twice in 42 home Tests while only six were drawn. The win/loss ratio in this period is nearly three times better than the second best team’s.
Of the two losses, one came on the back of a Steven Smith classic that’s unqualifiedly the best innings played by a visiting batsman in India in a very long time. And the other one scripted by a masterful Joe Root double hundred with India missing two of its three frontline spinners. These caveats emphasise just how awfully hard it was for visiting teams to register even a solitary win, forget a series.
It’s of course not all come crumbling down overnight. The signs of a steady decline have been around. The win against Australia last year didn’t come cheap. England earlier this year manufactured situations that put India on the backfoot. New Zealand somewhat lucked out with getting to face them even further into the decline.
The difficulty in handling Mitchell Santner at Pune has had fairly recent precedents in Jack Leach, Ajaz Patel, Matthew Kuhnemann, and Tom Hartley. Ashwin’s lackluster spells have been more frequent than he’d like to admit while Jadeja has been a tad too wary of being swept from length and it shows in his speeds.
It’s rather easy to start clamouring for the veterans to be dropped. That’s what generates social media noise and YouTube algorithm actively incentivises reactionary petulance. None of Rohit, Kohli, Ashwin, and Jadeja should play another Test for India if those enraged by this loss had things their way.
It always takes a little too long in Indian cricket when it comes to transitioning from its underperforming superstars. That kind of intransigence is pretty much embedded in the country’s sporting ethos. But it may indeed not be too long before this group begins to perish, one at a time.
Finding replacements often seems harder than it is in reality. Photo: bcci.tv
Finding replacements often seems harder than it is in reality. There’s plenty in the first-class system banging on the door while many have already made their way in. The Test team should start looking markedly different before people realise. This loss was perhaps the final push that accelerated the process of transition.
Things aren’t getting any easier as India’s next few overseas assignments pose a very daunting task in front of an underperforming team. There’s every chance this group has played their last home series together. And should that be true, they didn’t quite get to leave behind the final memory they’d have manifested. But it’s puerile to view their legacy with a revisionist lens based on how it ended.
Greatness as a virtue is seldom duly recognised in its own time. Years pass, people come and go. And suddenly at some point in future, the past seems rosy enough to write effusively about. It won’t be any different for this team either. It ought to be but it won’t.
Remorse and execration are part of the deal. Once they run its course, suddenly someone will wonder whether winning 18 series at home on the bounce was slightly more respectable than they allowed themselves to believe. Who’s to tell though that by then, if Test cricket will even have retained its relevance for the realisation to truly matter?
