By Shamik Chakrabarty in Guwahati
Simon Harmer’s comment at the post-match press conference felt ironic. “The Indian players are still very good players of spin,” said the South Africa off-spinner after returning with 17 wickets from two Tests and bagging the Player of the Series award. “It didn’t work out for them in this Test series, but I can guarantee you that they will be hurting. They will come back stronger. They are a class act, they are world-class players.”
Make no mistake, Harmer wasn’t trying to rub salt into the wound and there was no sarcasm attached. He was magnanimous in victory.
The hard numbers, however, tell a sorry tale. Collectively, the Indian batsmen averaged 15.23 over two matches and for the first time in a home series the team failed to score 250 in any of the innings. Harmer, and also Marco Jansen in Guwahati, laid bare the tattered fabric of Indian Test batting, and getting caught in a spin web by an off-spinner should continue to haunt the players for a long time if they care for red-ball cricket.
Moving away from the A-listers, the likes of Saqlain Mushtaq, Muttiah Muralitharan, Graeme Swann and Nathan Lyon, off-spinners running through Indian batting in India has happened before. John Bracewell, Shaun Udal, Jason Krejza and Todd Murphy had their moments in this part of the world. But those were one-off occasions. Indian batsmen looking clueless against off-spin in a full series has never happened before. And by Harmer’s own admission, he is not quite at the elite level where the greats belong. The fact of the matter is that the majority of the batsmen in the current Indian Test squad, the one picked for the two-match series against South Africa, aren’t good enough.
Overloading the Test squad with average all-rounders at the expense of specialists was always going to be a recipe for disaster against a team like South Africa in the game’s purest format. Five all-rounders played in the first Test in Kolkata, Ravindra Jadeja, Washington Sundar, Axar Patel, Rishabh Pant (wicketkeeper-batsman) and Dhruv Jurel (wicketkeeper-batsman). In Guwahati, Nitish Kumar Reddy replaced Axar. The latter is an excellent white-ball player but not a Test specialist. As for Reddy, he simply doesn’t belong and probably has played his last Test for a long time. Jurel is a good back-up wicketkeeper, but it ends there.
“We can’t put things under the carpet,” Gambhir said at the post-match press conference. “Come the white-ball formats, if you get runs in white-ball formats, suddenly you forget about what you have done in red-ball cricket. That should never happen. Because red-ball cricket is a completely different challenge to white-ball cricket, and is a completely different challenge to what you get in T20 cricket. There needs to be different skill sets.”
India’s team composition was contradictory to the head coach’s assessment. If the hosts needed an extra batsman in Guwahati, why didn’t the team management go with a specialist top-order batsman in Devdutt Padikkal, or Akash Deep in case they needed an extra bowler? If Padikkal was going to be one left-hander too many in the batting line-up, any specialist right-hander, Ruturaj Gaikwad or Sarfaraz Khan, for example, could have been added to the squad. Reddy looks like a fish out of water in Test cricket and his inclusion in the playing XI didn’t serve any purpose.
The blame lies equally at the selectors’ feet as well. Are they picking players for Tests based on their IPL exploits? Two selectors travelled to Australia for an inconsequential white-ball series. Do they regularly turn up for Ranji Trophy matches? The likes of Shams Mulani continue to be ignored, not even India A call-ups, despite performing brilliantly season after season. This correspondent so far has covered two home Ranji Trophy fixtures of Mumbai, against Chhattisgarh and Himachal Pradesh. No national selector was present.
India’s Test fortress has crumbled and the BCCI must have taken note. It remains to be seen how Indian cricket’s governing body reacts to the debacle. Gambhir has called for prioritising Test cricket.
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