On the face of it, the three-match ODI series against New Zealand that starts here in Vadodara on Sunday doesn’t have much relevance. T20 cricket is the flavour of the month with a World Cup around the corner and the next 50-over showpiece is almost two years away.
It’s not that the teams are taking the series lightly. Professional athletes don’t do that. Even during India’s optional training session on the match eve, Shubman Gill, Rohit Sharma, Ravindra Jadeja, Rishabh Pant, Shreyas Iyer, KL Rahul and Mohammed Siraj were present. Pant played an audacious reverse-pull at the nets before being hit while taking throwdowns that forced him to receive treatment. He gingerly walked off the field, but apparently it wasn’t serious.
Amid the proliferation of white-ball cricket and the Ro-Ko mania, however, the BCCI hearteningly hasn’t put Tests on the back burner. Two home series whitewashes in a little over a 12-month period – the latest being against South Africa – haven’t gone down well with anyone connected to Indian cricket.
In Guwahati, after the Proteas completed the clean-sweep, Gautam Gambhir, the head coach, had spoken about the need for “prioritising” Test cricket, criticising the planning part. On Saturday, on the eve of the ODI series opener, Shubman Gill, too, stressed upon the planning part and the turnaround time before a Test series.
“One of the suggestions (to the BCCI) that I was very keen on is, if you would see in the last two Test series that we played, we didn’t have that much time to prepare,” the skipper told reporters. “It’s not easy playing in India and playing another match in a different country on the fourth day, especially when you are travelling on long tours.”
Gill went beyond the outcome of the Test series against South Africa. “And yes, I feel even if we would have won the series against South Africa, it still wouldn’t have made that much of a difference because we know we need to prepare well to be able to win Test matches all over the world,” he observed. “And preparation for me is really big and I didn’t think that we had that much time to prepare when we came back from Australia. I think it’s important to at least have some bit of preparation.”
Incidentally, the BCCI top brass had a meeting with VVS Laxman, former India batting great and current head of cricket at the Centre of Excellence, on Friday. After the meeting, BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia posted on his X (formerly Twitter) handle: “Had a fruitful meeting with VVS Laxman, Head of BCCI’s Centre of Excellence, in the presence of BCCI office bearers today at Mumbai. Reviewed current activities and charted the roadmap for the Centre’s future course, aimed at further strengthening India’s cricketing talent pipeline.
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