By Admin 
For every visiting side bar none, India has loomed as the Final Frontier — as the eloquent Stave Waugh put it — for a long time. Even when they ruled the world with an iron fist, most teams with the exception of West Indies, irrepressible and unmatched, found India impossible to conquer. Nations went years, sometimes even decades, without so much as sniffing a victory on Indian soil, beaten as much in the mind before they even set foot on these shores as on the park, where India’s cricketers made the most of gremlins in the opposition camp, their own familiarity with demanding conditions and their unquestioned skills to cut a swathe through all comers.
A dominance that started in the early 1990s when, under Mohammad Azharuddin and spearheaded by Anil Kumble, India brooked no stopping spilled over to the next two decades. There were occasional blips, as there are bound to be – series losses to South Africa in 2000, Australia in 2004 and England in 2012 – but they were so few and far between that when they did transpire, they registered remarkably highly on the shock scale.
England’s come-from-behind 2-1 triumph in 2012 was a wake-up call of sorts, though it must be remembered that under Alastair Cook, the visitors had a formidable all-round unit. The captain himself, Jonathan Trott, the prickly but inimitable Kevin Pietersen, the classy Ian Bell and Joe Root, on his first tour with the senior side, constituted a terrific batting line-up, while James Anderson produced telling bursts of reverse swing to admirably support spin twins Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar.
India themselves were in the early stages of transition, having lost Rahul Dravid and V.V.S. Laxman to Test cricket just a few months previously. Sachin Tendulkar was still around, as were Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir and Mahendra Singh Dhoni, tasked with overseeing the process of taking India into the future, but Cheteshwar Pujara and Virat Kohli were still relatively new and Ravindra Jadeja made his debut only in the final Test of that series, in Rajkot.
India were ripe for the taking then, and England didn’t disappoint, riding on the magnificence of Pietersen and the quality of Swann and Panesar to overturn a 0-1 deficit with style and panache. That was in December 2012; no one knew that it would take 143 months for someone else to reprise the heroics of England and humble India in their backyard.
Kiwis take wings
That privilege went to New Zealand, unassuming and unfancied, last November. Tom Latham’s men arrived low on confidence after being beaten 2-0 in successive Tests in Galle just weeks previously. Between the Sri Lanka defeat and the first of three Tests against India in Bengaluru, there was a captaincy switch with Tom Latham replacing Tim Southee. Worse, their best batter of all time, Kane Williamson, would not be starting the series – as it panned out, he didn’t play any of the three Tests – and they had the weight of history pressing down on them.
New Zealand’s last victory on India soil had come in November 1988, under John Wright, who later was to become India’s first overseas coach. Inspired by off-spinner John Bracewell’s eight-wicket match haul, they surged to a 136-run win at the Wankhede Stadium in Bombay (as it was then called). When they landed in India in October last year, ambitious as they are, they would have hoped for one victory, at the most. In the end, they landed three successive sucker punches on the trot, the last two on turners in Pune and Mumbai, even though the hosts had the services of Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and R. Ashwin, all now retired from the five-day game.
That was in Gambhir’s second Test series in charge – the first was a 2-0 drubbing of Bangladesh at home; now into his fourth such assignment at home alone, he has overseen a 4-4 win-loss record in our land. India have gone from invincible to vulnerable, forcing the smart alecks to tom-tom that they are a better travelling side than in their own patch, a wisecrack hard to dismiss given that they have lost as many matches in India in the last 13 months as they did in the preceding 11 and a half years.
Contrasting fortunes
Gambhir’s got a stellar record as white-ball coach; under his tutelage, India clinched the 50-over Champions Trophy and the T20 Asia Cup, both in Dubai, in March and September respectively, apart from giving an excellent account of themselves in bilateral skirmishes too. Despite the radical shake-ups, including an insistence on a left-right combination at the middle at most stages of a white-ball innings, he has managed to build exponentially on the gains accrued under the Rohit-Dravid management as preparations for the defence of the T20 World Cup take firm root.
But when it comes to Test cricket, India in the Gambhir era have been terribly undercooked. Their win-loss record in 18 Tests from September 2024, when the former India opener kicked off his stint in the red-ball format against Bangladesh in Chennai and Kanpur, is a modest 7-9, with two losses. Like Pujara mentioned the other day, transition can no longer be used as an excuse, not after having secured a 2-2 draw in England in the summer when India amassed 12 centuries in five Tests. As callous and dismissive as it might sound, Rohit and Kohli were hardly missed in England with Shubman Gill relishing his elevation to the captaincy with four centuries, K.L. Rahul and Yashasvi Jaiswal hitting twin hundreds at the top of the tree, Rishabh Pant weighing in with centuries in both innings in Leeds, and Ravindra Jadeja and Washington Sundar filling their boots while securing a stirring draw in Manchester.
Honours secured in England, India got down to business in earnest against West Indies last month, with comprehensive victories in Ahmedabad and Delhi. The first, within three days, was on a good cricket track that helped the seamers on day one and then played like a true Indian surface, with consistent turn and bounce, aided by a red-soil base. The second had to be earned the hard way, on a placid, unresponsive deck at the Arun Jaitley Stadium that went to sleep at some stage on day three and never woke up.
India had to stretch every sinew to make inroads into the West Indian batting, the all-round quality of their bowling carrying the day. As laboured as that victory was, it suggested that India had decided to make a clean break and veer away from the Bunsen burners that singed them badly against New Zealand. After all, the temptation to torture the Caribbeans on raging turners would have been massive; by shunning that urge and sticking to the old-school mode of approach, the message was they had learnt from the Kiwi misadventure and wouldn’t go down that path again.
But within four weeks of the Delhi Test came the Eden debacle against South Africa, the defending World Test Champions all right, but whose last Test win in India had come in 2010. Kolkata threw up a shocker, a pitch of such unpredictable bounce that at various stages, it bordered on the dangerous. The highest team tally in the match was 189, no one apart from Temba Bavuma made a half-century and India were shot out for 93 whilst chasing 124 in the fourth innings, none of which did any of the characters involved in this drama proud.
After the 30-run debacle, Gambhir fronted up and told the media that it was ‘exactly’ the kind of track the team management had requested. Maybe he didn’t want to throw the curator under the bus because no one would have asked for a surface where the top would come off on day two, nor would any curator wilfully lay out a brown carpet fading and fraying at the edges this early in the piece. But while Gambhir might have sprung to Sujan Mukherjee’s defence — much like batting coach Sitanshu Kotak made a spirited defence of his under-fire head coach on Thursday afternoon — the underlying message was the insistence on playing on a turner in the conviction that its spin bowling, and batting against spin, continue to be India’s greatest strengths.
The former proclamation might still be true but the latter most certainly not, so maybe it’s time for Gambhir to put the ‘we want turners’ line to bed and concentrate on making the most of the massive resources under his command through other means. Maybe he should take a leaf out of the book of his three immediate predecessors, Dravid, Ravi Shastri and Anil Kumble, during whose coaching tenure India hardly played on a square turner. Pune in 2017 and Indore in 2023, both against Australia, were aberrations, while the pitch didn’t have more than a fringe part to play in the losses to England in Chennai in 2021 and Hyderabad last year. India backed themselves to make big runs on true surfaces, and even if the opposition did likewise in their first innings, knew they had the depth and class in both pace and spin to craft victories.
Batters’ travails
Their record in that period is evidence enough that their belief wasn’t based on a wing and a prayer. Many of India’s batters of this vintage don’t — maybe they can’t — trust their defence enough and therefore are unwilling/unable to bat out time. A half-dozen scoreless deliveries are enough to send them into a tizzy, which means a false stroke is never far away. Use of the feet to come down the track or go deep in the crease to manoeuvre the ball have gone out of circulation, and several of the batters might be privately cursing their fate at being ‘exposed’ on tracks ranging from the tricky to the diabolical.
After the second Test against South Africa from Saturday, India don’t play a WTC Test till August next year, and their next home assignment is only in January 2027. If they aspire to be in the WTC final that summer, Gambhir needs to see the writing on the wall and dispense with his fatal attraction towards spin. After all, you can‘t expect a different result each time when you keep making the same mistake.