By Shamik Chakrabarty in Kolkata
Between October 2024 and November 2025, India have played six Tests at home under Gautam Gambhir as their head coach. They have lost four. It’s a diabolical record and a sackable offence for a coach in any sport. In football, the chant would have been: “You’re getting sacked in the morning.”
As Cheteshwar Pujara said on Star Sports, the team going through transition is a lame excuse. “Look, I don’t agree with one thing that the Indian team losing in India due to transition, it cannot be digested,” said the former India stalwart. “See, if an Indian team loses in Australia or England because we are going through transition, that can be accepted. The talent this team has, you take out the records of all the players in first-class cricket, Yashasvi Jaiswal, KL Rahul, Washington Sundar batted at No. 3 in this game (Kolkata Test), Shubman Gill, all of them have excellent records in first-class cricket. And despite that, if we are losing in India, then there’s something wrong.”
The problem ostensibly lies in the thought process of the think-tank. The decision to play two Test matches, Pune and Mumbai, against New Zealand last year on snakepits after 46 all out in Bangalore had backfired spectacularly. The first Test against South Africa at Eden Gardens showed that Gambhir & Co didn’t learn from their mistakes. From Sourav Ganguly to Pujara, almost every former great has opined that the Indian team management should trust the world-class bowling unit more and play on better pitches at home. Gambhir, though, has a mind of his own.
Eden curator Sujan Mukherjee is known and respected for preparing good, sporting pitches. For the first Test also, he wanted to water the deck until the match eve. But the Indian team management wanted a drier surface and on their request, watering was stopped. The national team was playing and Mukherjee cooperated.
“The curator was very, very helpful and this is exactly what we wanted, and this is exactly what we got,” Gambhir said at the post-match press conference. Credit to him for not throwing the curator under the bus, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that he erred, yet again, in his choice of the pitch. A lottery deck reduces the gap between two teams. It makes average spinners like Mitchell Santner and Simon Harmer look world-class.
Gambhir was a fantastic player of spin in his time. That skill-set of countering the turning ball on turners is more or less gone. Indian cricket no longer produces a Gavaskar, a Tendulkar, a Dravid, a Laxman or even a Gambhir. It’s one of the downsides of modern-day cricket, where, as Kevin Pietersen has said, reverse-sweeps and switch-hits are en vogue. It feels like India’s head coach is overestimating his team’s ability to play spin on the Bunsens.
India having six left-handers in their batting line-up in Kolkata also worked to their disadvantage. Harmer, an off-spinner, could turn the ball sharply away from them. Of his eight wickets in the match, six were southpaws. It is learnt that bringing back Sai Sudharsan is a firm possibility in Guwahati, but that doesn’t solve the left-handers overload problem in the batting line-up.
As RevSportz reported, Gill is doubtful for the second Test and his participation will depend on how he recovers in the next few days. The pragmatic call for the Ajit Agarkar-led selection committee and the team management would be to add Ruturaj Gaikwad or Sarfaraz Khan to the squad. The former is in excellent form in the ongoing Ranji Trophy season. He has also scored a century and a half-century against South Africa A, albeit in the 50-over format.
As for Sarfaraz, he is a domestic cricket thoroughbred. He plays spin very well.
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