India haven’t done much wrong in terms of strategy, but very little has been going right for them on the field
Karthik Krishnaswamy24-Nov-20254:11
Saba Karim: ‘Can’t make sense’ of Pant’s approach
A charge down the track, a slog. An edge to the keeper, a burned review. All this from a batter facing his eighth ball. All this with India 1-0 down in a two-Test series. At 105 for 4 in reply to South Africa’s 489. Right after they had lost three wickets for 10 runs.All this from the stand-in captain, Rishabh Pant.This moment seemed to encapsulate everything that has gone wrong for — and perhaps with — India in home Tests over the last year or so. This shot, in this situation, on a pitch that was still pretty good to bat on, against an attack with only three real strike bowlers.Why would anyone play this shot?This, though, wasn’t anyone. This was Rishabh Pant, serial taker of outrageous risks. Serial gamechanger when those risks come off. Serially stupid, stupid, stupid when they don’t.Related
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Was it necessary? No. This was a day-three pitch that was doing more than it did on days one and two, but it was still fairly true, and run-scoring was possible via regular methods. India had just lost a clump of wickets. Marco Jansen was looking dangerous, pounding the pitch and generating awkward lift, but if Pant could have seen off this spell, he would have had opportunities to go after bowlers far more go-afterable.Pant usually plays this way when the ball is doing a lot, and against deep attacks that won’t give him straightforward routes of run-scoring. He usually begins in relatively measured ways on flatter pitches and against shallower attacks.But does he, really? Pant began India’s recent tour of England with 134, 118, 25 and 65 in the first two Tests at Headingley and Edgbaston. These were flat pitches, and Pant made sedate starts by his standards. But in three of those four knocks, he charged out of his crease to fast bowlers off the first or second ball of his innings.Why does he do this? Only he can tell you. But he does it even when he plays long innings. He just happens to get away with it on those days, and perhaps doing this helps him shift bowlers away from their plans.Pant’s Guwahati dismissal perfectly encapsulated India’s issues, because it sat so uncomfortably in the space between an error of judgment and an in-the-moment decision that could have produced another outcome on another day.On this day, every outcome went against India. Simon Harmer has bowled beautifully on this tour, but in addition to the wickets he’s taken with his craft, he’s taken three with long-hops: Dhruv Jurel in Kolkata, and Yashasvi Jaiswal and B Sai Sudharsan on Monday. Jaiswal was on 58 and looking ominous when that Harmer ball stopped on him, and Sai Sudharsan had looked promising until he happened to pull Harmer within range of a diving Ryan Rickelton.All this went into the boiling cauldron of India’s misery either side of tea, as they went from 95 for 1 to 122 for 7 over 68 balls from hell.These balls from hell weren’t necessarily hellish, like the one from Jansen that Jurel tried to pull from way outside off stump. It’s difficult to judge the soundness of a shot in this era, because batters routinely pull off the outrageous, and transfer skills from one format to another. And India had begun the day needing not just to bat long but also score big.Perhaps Jurel and Pant played the shots they did because Jansen was causing problems with his awkward bounce. This is a bowler with such a high release point that he can get the ball up to shoulder height from a foot fuller than a bowler of average height.But the bounce wasn’t always predictable and batters seldom had time to adjust. Nitish Kumar Reddy gloved one in the direction of gully, where there was no fielder, and again some brilliant fielding, this time from Aiden Markram at second slip, converted a half-chance into a wicket.Ravindra Jadeja did pretty much everything he could to hide his bat from the path of another nasty short one, only for the ball to ricochet off his shoulder and onto the edge of his bat.Rishabh Pant made 7 off 8 balls in his first innings as Test captain•Associated PressNothing went right for India over those 68 balls from hell. And everything looked worse after that because Washington Sundar and Kuldeep Yadav put on 72 in 208 balls for the eighth wicket. After Harmer broke that partnership, Jansen took the last two wickets with the second new ball and finished with 6 for 48, one of the great performances by a visiting fast bowler in India.”So, after that spell [either side of tea], it felt like the ball was a bit softer,” Jansen said. “So the ball was [still] getting up, but it didn’t have that zip. And then as soon as we took the new ball, the bounce was still there, but because it was a new ball, it was skidding quite nicely. In that spell when I took those three wickets … it felt like the ball still had the bounce and the pace.”These were conditions that gave Jansen windows of wicket-taking opportunity, and he used his physical gifts and switched angles constantly to magnify the batters’ discomfort. It felt as though Jansen was extracting uneven bounce on occasion, but Washington dismissed this idea.”It wasn’t uneven at all,” he said. “He is obviously the tallest going around and he gets that bit of sharp bounce off a short-of-good length. We have played such bowlers quite a lot. Just on another day, we would have batted the same deliveries a lot better and it would have seemed like a very different scenario.”On this day, India were doomed to this scenario. Sixty-eight balls from hell that encapsulated a year from hell in home Tests, putting a magnifying glass on every decision they have taken in that period.At such times, it’s important to remember that magnifying glasses can have a distorting effect. In the midst of this collapse, for instance, it was easy to look at India’s line-up and conclude they had picked too few specialist batters and too many allrounders, and were batting all of them in the wrong slots.But this XI was close to the strongest one India could have picked, with one contentious selection in Reddy, whose presence in the squad at home will surely be reviewed after this series. India aren’t wrong to think he has immense potential as a seam-bowling allrounder, and that the best way for him to grow is by playing more games. That growth, however, cannot happen during a Test series. As has happened this season, India will end up batting him behind their other allrounders and hardly using his bowling, because that’s what you do in international cricket: pick the strongest option for a situation.After batting at No. 3 in Kolkata, Washington Sundar came in at No. 8 in Guwahati•AFP/Getty ImagesReddy apart, there was merit to all of India’s selections and batting-order decisions. Washington can bat at No. 3, as he showed in Kolkata, but he did so because India left out their regular No. 3, Sai Sudharsan. With Sai Sudharsan back, it would have been equally reasonable for either him or Washington to bat at No. 3; India’s choice didn’t become a bad one just because they happened to have a bad day.Jurel, meanwhile, has forced himself into the XI as a batter by going on an incredible run of red-ball form for India and India A. He’s shown every sign of that form during this series; he’s just happened to get out early, and twice on a treacherous Kolkata pitch. It’s is hardly any sort of sample size to judge a player from.That India have had multi-skilled players — Jurel, Jadeja and Washington — occupying slots in the top six traditionally reserved for specialists is because of a quirk of historical circumstance. Few teams have had so many spin-bowling allrounders — Axar Patel is the other — of Test quality at the same time.All these selections have coincided with a transition away from a batting group that achieved massive successes both home and away. This set of selectors and coaches has believed these allrounders to be good enough with the bat to get into the squad, and often the XI, ahead of specialist options, and there’s enough evidence to suggest there’s merit to this view.There isn’t much, at a broad level, that India have done particularly wrong strategically over this hellish year of home Tests. They have been criticised for rolling out square turners, but this Test in Guwahati has shown that their reason for doing so — the fear of the toss playing an undue role on flatter pitches — isn’t unsound.And they have lost toss after toss to strong oppositions: in Pune and Mumbai to New Zealand, in Kolkata and Guwahati to South Africa, on square turners and this traditional pitch. They played with 10 men against 11 for virtually all of the Kolkata Test.India have lost long-serving senior players, and they’ve been lucky that the replacements have by and large looked the part in Test cricket, but the gap in experience has certainly shown at various points. The gap between Washington and R Ashwin as offspinners, for instance, came to the fore on this flat Guwahati pitch: for all his accuracy and ability to generate drift and bounce, the younger man has some way to go in terms of being able to vary his pace and trajectory for a given surface.These things are natural, but they get magnified when a team is about to lose its second home Test series in a year’s time. Remember, though, to keep the distorting effect of the magnifying glass in mind, whether you’re training it on Monday’s 68 balls from hell or India’s year from hell.