The heavy Adelaide Test defeat has again exposed a batting line-up that dominates but can also slump without a fight
Adelaide: In three of the four innings India have completed on this tour of Australia, the top-scorer has been Nitish Reddy. That shouldn’t be right but it is.
In their last 10 innings, India have scored less than 200 six times with a low of 46. That shouldn’t be right but it is.
Since the home series against New Zealand in 2021, India’s top seven have been averaging 27.94 in SENA (South Africa, England, New Zealand, Australia) countries. That shouldn’t be right but it is.
Yet, Rohit Sharma isn’t worried about the batting. That shouldn’t be right but it is.
“I wouldn’t say worry,” said the India captain on Sunday when he was asked about the downturn in India’s batting form. “I mean, if you take the last five or six Test matches, of course, we didn’t bat well enough. We accept that. And we agree, when we play in India, we are trying to play on very difficult conditions.
“And that is what we wanted. It’s not by anyone else’s choice. It was our choice. And we knew that the big scoring or the highest or high-scoring games are not going to happen and that is something that has been the case over the last four or five years and we accept that. But whenever we travel abroad you know the conditions are there to score runs, we have scored runs as well… like you saw in the first game we got a lot of runs.”
The troubling question then is whether India’s batters are only good to score runs in favourable conditions. When the going gets tough, can India’s batters step up for their team? The collapse is becoming a familiar taste of defeat.
Good conditions
When India opted to bat in the first innings in Adelaide, the consensus was that they were coming out to bat in the best possible conditions. But they got bowled out for 180 — a total that Rohit considered 30-40 runs short of where they wanted to be. It pushed the team into a corner right away, and thereafter there was no coming back. This, though, wasn’t a one-off. How often have we seen the top order mess up in recent times, only to be rescued by the bowling or the lower order?
The averages are dropping consistently and it has reached a point where predicting the output of the team is becoming very difficult. They oscillate between two extremes — either very good as they were in Perth or very poor as they were in Adelaide. There is no middle ground.
“I am not going to look too much into this game and start worrying about little things,” said Rohit. “But every batter who is out there or who is playing for this team wants to get runs and wants to get big runs. And get the team to a good place. It’s just that sometimes it happens where you are trying everything you can from your side (but) it just doesn’t happen.”
The team is putting in the hard yards in the nets and that is apparent if you see them go through their routines. But if it isn’t getting them the desired results, then something must change. Can they do it mid-tour? Can they find the answers they seek?
“I can see guys are putting a lot of effort in their plans in what they want to do… there’s been a lot of conversation around that within the group and that is something I will be looking into. How are we planning? How are we talking within ourselves? And what are our plans, mindset while playing a Test match. Guys getting out, that happens everywhere, not just in India. Every team gets out. The guys go through a bad form. And all of those things happen a lot.”
Gavaskar criticism
However, former India skipper Sunil Gavaskar wasn’t pleased with India’s efforts at all.
“You can’t be sitting in your hotel rooms because you have come here to play cricket. You don’t have to practice the whole day, but don’t waste the two days. You would’ve been here playing a Test if it went for five days,” said Gavaskar on Star Sports. It is a different matter that the Indian team was indeed out in the nets after the match ended. Virat Kohli was there earlier in the day as well, which Gavaskar acknowledged.
Perhaps the nature of the game itself has changed, the techniques have changed, the style has changed, as has the entire idea of Test cricket. Matches don’t last five days anymore, and if they don’t, then one of the possible outcomes, the draw, becomes redundant. But that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t rage against the dying of the light.
The fight to keep Test cricket alive is also a fight to show that there is a different way to play the game. You can play like a Rahul Dravid or a Cheteshwar Pujara and still find success. India may not have them or their like anymore but there are still lessons that can be learned from how they went about things.
As things stand, the defeat at Adelaide has left India with more questions than answers. Some of the questions are familiar ones that has troubled the team for a while, and if by the end of the tour they can’t find the answers, there will be some repercussions.
For now, the battle lines are drawn and Rohit desperately needs his batters to show that they are as good as he thinks they are. That shouldn’t be right but it is.
