Shamik Chakrabarty in Ahmedabad
Mohammed Siraj had a mini stumble, as he alighted from the team bus. “Easy,” said KL Rahul who was in tow. The Indian team sans two local boys, Jasprit Bumrah and Axar Patel, turned up for their practice session at Narendra Modi Stadium here on Tuesday afternoon, but it was an optional session and nothing should be read into the absence of the two players who, along with Shubman Gill and Kuldeep Yadav, arrived in Ahmedabad pretty late last evening, after their Asia Cup assignment in Dubai. The first Test against the West Indies starts on Thursday and India will have a full training session tomorrow.
Two days before the start of the game, the pitch at Motera looked green, and a bit damp. It’s been drizzling here intermittently over the last few days and shaving off the grass to make the surface a rank turner looks unlikely at the moment. Given the gulf in class between the two sides, the pitch factor is somewhat redundant. But with the horror show against New Zealand last year, and a home series whitewash on the back of their mind, the team management is unlikely to take the Bunsen route again for home matches. A pitch that would gradually become good for batting is expected to be their go-to option.
Usually, when a home Test season begins, the focus stays on the players. Gill would be leading the side in India for the first time, but Roston Chase’s troops will have to punch way above their weight to test his captaincy mettle. The two-match Test series against South Africa that follows would increase the degree of difficulty. South Africa, after all, are the world Test champions, irrespective of whoever they played on their way to the World Test Championship final.
This time, though, the focus should be firmly on a support staff as well, given India’s fielding profligacy of late. T Dilip as the team’s fielding coach, isn’t covering himself in glory, with catches going down for fun. India dropped 23 catches in the five-Test series in England, which eventually proved to be the difference between winning the rubber and eking out a creditable 2-2 draw. At the Asia Cup, the team spilled 12 chances. In a field where India were the giants, the dropped catches didn’t come back to haunt them. Against tougher opponents, they would suffer unless there’s a course correction.
If slopes had caused problems for the fielders in England, then it was the ‘ring of fire’ in Dubai. “One of the challenges we encountered especially in Dubai Stadium is the lights are slightly different; it’s more of a ring of fire, which are on the dome basically rather than the poles, which you usually come across,” Dilip had said in a video posted by the BCCI on its social media handle. The bottom line, however, is that at this level, those excuses sound a touch hollow. “What is the fielding coach doing,” former India leg-spinner Amit Mishra recently said during an interaction with a news agency.
After the disaster Down Under last winter, the BCCI did a support staff rejig. Sitanshu Kotak came in as the batting coach, while Abhishek Nayar (the former assistant coach) and Dilip were handed pink slips. The latter was then reinstated in his position. The team’s fielding performance over the last few months suggests that the hierarchy probably made a mistake. The home Test season is about to get underway, and if catching continues to be India’s bugbear, the BCCI might have to pull the plug.
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