Shamik Chakrabarty
First up, some hard numbers… Since October 2024, India have played nine Tests, losing seven. In any sport, this is a sackable offence as regards the head coach. In football, the coach would have been sacked in the morning.
At Headingley, India became the first team to lose a Test despite five individual hundreds. They scored 835 runs over two innings and, yet, lost the game by five wickets. After the defeat, some pundits spoke about how the tourists were tactically outsmarted by England. To put things in perspective though, playing against a side that had one-and-a-half bowlers – Jasprit Bumrah and Ravindra Jadeja – it was easy for the hosts to have a plan and execute it to perfection, especially on Day 5, when before the rain break, the pitch went into a slumber.
Shubman Gill, the new Test captain, failed to assert his authority on the field and as former England skipper Nasser Hussain said on air, at times it felt like India had “three-four captains”. All said and done, India still probably would have won the first Test without seven dropped catches. Yashasvi Jaiswal alone spilled four.
But fielding profligacy wasn’t restricted to the butterfingers Indians only. England, too, dropped four catches during India’s second innings, giving reprieves to both KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant. So, was the problem Leeds-specific?
England players call Headingley a “hard-catching ground” because of the dark patches in the stands. And R Sridhar spoke of how slip-catching in Blighty comes with a far greater degree of difficulty. “Conditions are dark and there’s a lot of wind,” the former India fielding coach told RevSportz. “The Dukes ball wobbles, and there’s a big slope at the Leeds ground. Also, the background with the crowd in England can be a challenge.”
A lot of players in this Indian team, including Jaiswal, are playing Tests in England for the first time. The new slip cordon sans Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma struggled to come to terms to fielding a couple of feet below the pitch level. Then again, it’s Test cricket and the players are expected to make the necessary adjustments. Sridhar concurred. “Sometimes, some people do it early, some people take a little bit of time,” he said. “So, let’s see how it goes in the second and third Test before making the assessment. I think we should cut them some slack. We should talk and revisit this conversation only when we have a greater sample size.”
He rewound to his fielding drills in England – preparing the players to take catches on the blind side. “See, what happens in England is sometimes you can’t sight the ball from the bat,” said Sridhar. “It is a bit tricky country to be a good slip fielder. And a lot of catches come. The Dukes ball swings a lot and stuff like that. So, what the trick I used to do was increase the volume and increase the reaction drills.”
The ex-fielding coach, whom Ravi Shastri had called “the best in the business”, elaborated: “We had a drill where the fielder cannot see where the ball is coming from. You know, we created an obstruction and fed the balls from underneath the obstruction. We used various kinds of balls to simulate. I’m sure it’s already being done there in the Indian team camp in England.”
The impediments notwithstanding, Jaiswal, in particular, didn’t cover himself with glory. “Yeah, it has happened twice,” said Sridhar. “He (Jaiswal) has gone down that road where he dropped one and then he ended up dropping two-three. It happened in Melbourne before. Now it has happened again. So, this is something he needs to work on. I think he needs to work on his recovery from the error aspect of his fielding.”