Let’s go back in time to the period when Rahul Dravid was the India captain, and Greg Chappell the coach. It was a transition phase in Indian cricket, and a number of players established themselves. MS Dhoni and Irfan Pathan had made their debuts earlier, but they became important members of the team after the duo took charge. Then came new faces like Suresh Raina, Munaf Patel and S Sreesanth.
Cut back to the present. Rohit Sharma is the captain and Dravid the coach. It’s hard to recall a new face emerging during this regime. Youngsters like Shubman Gill, Shreyas Iyer and Rishabh Pant (the last two out injured at the moment) are around, but they were well-known players before the Rohit-Dravid pair took over.
That the team still reached the World Test Championship (WTC) final and the semi-finals of the T20 World Cup is due largely to what this dispensation inherited. Apart from Arshdeep Singh to an extent, the Indian team has not unearthed talent in the true sense of the word in the last few years. Not to hold them solely responsible for this, but captain Rohit and coach Dravid have more or less continued with what they had at their disposal instead of thinking out of the box.
Because the team is in the WTC final, this is not often talked about, but India might feel the pinch of this in the months to come. There is going to be almost non-stop cricket in the run-up to the 50-over World Cup in October-November, and the absence of a second rung is not a healthy sign. Chances of wear and tear of the body are high, and it’s not clear who the possible replacements are.
Once again, without pinning the blame on him for this, Dravid the captain and Dravid the coach have been contrasting personalities. In the former role, he was eager to do something new, blood youngsters. Promoting Pathan up the batting order happened during his tenure and the move paid dividends. Backing Sreesanth and Munaf also benefited the team. Raina became a player under him with support from Chappell.
But Dravid the coach has turned out to be surprisingly conservative. There has been no visible attempt to think out of the box or be innovative. It’s the same, old formula, match after match. Quite often, it’s the same combination too, barring injuries. It’s the same when it comes to strategies as well. What justified not giving Yuzvendra Chahal a single game in the big Australian grounds at last year’s T20 World Cup, when almost every other team fielded a leg-spinner?
This is not malign one of Indian or even world cricket’s all-time greats, who did a fantastic job with the India U-19 and India A teams. But it just shows that working with juniors and making players out of them is different from strategising for and dealing with the senior team. Dravid, along with skipper Rohit, have probably not been that good when it came to being innovative.
It’s a little early to say, but the next few months after the WTC final will show how costly this approach has been. As mentioned, there is no obvious second rung in sight, barring Suryakumar Yadav, Yasashvi Jaiswal and Arshdeep. The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s lack of clarity regarding the India A team of late is partly to blame for this. Fans will hope the sum total of all these factors does not become detrimental to the progress of the Indian team in the immediate future.