By Shamik Chakrabarty at Eden Gardens
For 123 minutes, Washington Sundar had dropped anchor at one end. He was doing his job, but India failed to build partnerships around him. In the end, it came down to the makeshift No. 3 and the extra all-rounder in Axar Patel, whose inclusion forced a rejig in the batting order.
The excellent Temba Bavuma, the South Africa captain, made a surprise bowling change at the High Court End. Aiden Markram’s fastish off-spin replaced Keshav Maharaj’s left-arm spin and it did the trick.
Markram bowled an off-break that landed on off and straightened. As Simon Harmer was saying at the end of the second day’s play, on Bunsens, straighter ones are the most dangerous. Washington was deceived and walked back to the pavilion. India were 72 for 6, effectively 72 for 7 with Shubman Gill recovering in a south Kolkata hospital, chasing 124 for victory.
It soon became 77 for 7 with Kuldeep Yadav’s dismissal. The writing was on the wall. A few lusty blows from Axar offered a glimmer of hope, but the game was all but done. India succumbed to 93 all out, with Gill unable to bat, and lost the first Test by 30 runs. They played Russian Roulette with the Eden Gardens pitch but failed to dodge the bullet.
To make it clear, Eden curator Sujan Mukherjee wanted to water the surface until one day before the start of the match. But the watering was stopped as, according to an insider, the Indian team management wanted a drier 22 yards. “Even we didn’t expect the wicket to deteriorate so quickly. Looking at it the day before the game, even the morning of the game, I thought we all thought when we watched that first couple of hours that it was a good wicket. So it did deteriorate quite quickly, which was unexpected,” Morne Morkel, India’s bowling coach, had said.
The soil here, with predominantly silt-clay content, disintegrated fast. Last year against England, India had won the five-Test series 4-1, playing on good pitches. In England this summer, where placid pitches were laid out, they returned with a creditable 2-2 draw. Why Gautam Gambhir & Co wanted to return to last year’s New Zealand series template, pitch-wise, was anyone’s guess. The plan backfired.
Yes, India missed their best batsman, Gill, on this pitch. But with a line-up that had batting up to No. 8, an implosion like this was unexpected. Resplendent in his 55 not out in the second innings, Bavuma served a batting blueprint for this deck. Some of the wickets that India lost during their chase, KL Rahul’s, for example, were down to good deliveries and the pitch playing tricks. At the same time, some batsmen failed to show the required application.
Never did Rishabh Pant look so vulnerable against spin as he was today. It wasn’t about scoring just two runs off 13 balls. It felt like Simon Harmer, the Player of the Match, put him out of his misery.
As stand-in captain, Pant also erred by not starting Day 3 with Jasprit Bumrah from one end. The 47-run eighth-wicket partnership between Bavuma and Corbin Bosch proved to be the game-changer. Post-match, Gambhir, however, defended the team tactics.
Brief scores: South Africa 159 and 153 (Temba Bavuma 55 not out; Ravindra Jadeja 4 for 50) beat India 189 and 93 (Washington Sundar 31; Simon Harmer 4 for 21) by 30 runs.
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