Market Mix - Indian Cricket's Annus Horribilis 2.0

Will Last Year's Tragedies Play Out As Farce In 2025 For Indian Cricket? 

2025 is a fecund year for sports lovers, with World Championships scheduled in table tennis (Doha, May), badminton (August, Paris), athletics (September, Tokyo) where Neeraj Chopra defends his world title, and shooting (November, Egypt) — all disciplines where India has medal hopes.

And then there is chess, where in various tournaments throughout the year, the top players will look to rack up wins and points to qualify for the Challengers, which will determine who gets to face reigning world champion D Gukesh in the world title bout next year. There is also the FIDE Chess World Cup and the Women's World Cup, in both of which the impressive array of Indian stars is expected to perform prodigiously.

In cricket, there is the ICC Champions Trophy (February-March, in Pakistan and the UAE), which affords an opportunity for the Indian team to seek salve for the psychic wounds following successive Test series defeats at the hands of New Zealand and Australia in the span of just three months. 

More crucially, India hosts the ICC Women's ODI World Cup in August — for captain Harmanpreet Kaur, now 35, the final opportunity to cement a legacy that she and her team kickstarted with eye-catching performances in the 2017 edition of the tournament.

There is much to look forward to and to write about — but this first edition of Playbook in the new year looks back at what has been Indian cricket's annus horribilis.

This period, when Indian Test cricket hit rock bottom, threw up three issues worth discussing, since all three will ramify, to the detriment of the team, in the next World Test Championship cycle. In no particular order, then:

Star Culture: Nothing new to see here — the Indian cricket team has always seen a clear division between its stars and the supporting cast of journeymen players, with the former getting preferential treatment at the expense of the latter. 

The problem, however, came into stark relief during the period in review because the stars weren't performing, and this non-performance was the single quantifiable reason for India's run of defeats.

In three Tests (six innings) against New Zealand, captain Rohit Sharma managed a grand total of 91 runs at an average of 15.2 runs per innings while Kohli accumulated 93 runs at 15.5 — numbers that would have put boldface question marks against their continued tenure, but didn't. 

The two carried their poor form to Australia, where Sharma in three Tests and five innings managed 31 runs at an average of 6.2 runs per innings, while Kohli scored 190 in nine innings at an average of 23.7. (Those numbers are even worse when you consider that Kohli scored a century in Perth, coming in against a tired attack and after the openers had put on a mammoth partnership. This means that in eight innings in Australia Kohli scored a mere 90 runs).

Everyone is entitled to a dip in form, is the rationale offered — an argument that ignores stark reality. Take the example of Kohli: in a five-year period beginning 2020, the Indian number four averages 30.7 across 39 Tests, with just three centuries in 69 innings; even that average is beefed up by three not-outs).

In the 2023-2025 World Test Championship cycle from which India has just been knocked out, Kohli ranks 24th among the list of top run-scorers, with just 751 runs across 14 Tests and 25 innings at an average of 32.6. Sharma ranks 18th — but that is only because he has played three more Tests; across 17 Tests and 31 innings, he aggregates 864 runs at an average of a mere 28.8 per innings.

In Kohli's case, it was not merely the extended run of indifferent form and poor returns with the bat — equally crucial was the manner of his dismissals. In Australia, he was out six times in eight innings fishing in the channel outside off — so much so, that Aussie quick Scott Boland told the media what the Australians had planned against the Indian number four, and then went out and got the wicket precisely as he had described.

The repetitive manner of his dismissals suggests that it is not a question of form as much as it is of declining faculties.

Success depends on how quickly a batsman picks up length and line -- and when the eyesight begins to go even fractionally, the result is that the player is late picking line and length, and that induces the kind of error Kohli is increasingly prone to. 

Whatever the cause, his returns, and that of Sharma, over an extended period, do not justify the continued selection of the two "stars", and yet they are the first names pencilled into the team sheet. This cues the second point worth making:

Lopsided Team Selection: Bluntly put, the Australian team that defeated India 3-1 and wrested the Border Gavaskar Trophy after a gap of 11 years was the weakest batting side the country has fielded in recent memory. Three of its top four were woefully below par and delivered only sporadically while the fourth — Usman Khawaja's opening partner — was experimental, with first Nathan McSweeney and then Sam Konstas being tried out in that role. 

The key difference lay in the composition of the bowling — Australia fielded four frontline bowlers and one all-rounder. India fielded just two seasoned frontline bowlers in Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj, one-third seamer alternating between debutants Harshit Rana and Akash Deep (with Prasidh Krishna in the last Test), and three all-rounders in Washington Sundar, Ravindra Jadeja and Nitish Kumar Reddy -- a selection that left room for only four specialist batsmen, two of whom were out of form stars.

Therein lay the difference — despite a shaky batting lineup, Australia's four bowlers were picked for their ability to take wickets and they lived up to their job description, bowling in partnerships and ensuring that the pressure was never released at either end. 

In nine completed Test innings, Australia bowled India out for under 200 in six (India managed to bowl Australia out under 200 only twice). Parse the numbers and the results are sorrier: the top four Indian wickets yielded under 100 runs in six of nine completed innings.

That the Indian batting was shaky was no secret — everyone, including the selectors and coach, was aware of the reality. The solution the team management went with was to pick bowlers for their batting, and not for their ability to take wickets. Packing the side with "all-rounders" was done, we were repeatedly told, to "strengthen the batting" — which is akin to treating the lungs of a patient admitted to hospital with cardiac issues.

This cost India in two ways: the batting wasn't noticeably strengthened (note the earlier point about being bowled out under 200 in six of nine completed innings) and the bowling was immeasurably weakened.

To underline the latter point, consider the case of Jasprit Bumrah — who, after performing prodigies in the first four Test matches, finally broke down in the crucial fifth Test in Sydney, which India had to win to retain the trophy. 

His absence through a back spasm cost us the fifth Test, runs conventional wisdom. Really? India in Sydney, without Bumrah, still had five — count them, five — bowlers in Siraj, Krishna, Reddy, Jadeja and Sundar. Of these, Reddy bowled a mere nine overs across two innings; Jadeja bowled three; Sundar bowled one. (By way of contrast, the unfit Bumrah bowled 10 overs in just one innings in that game).

Clearly, the three all-rounders did not contribute with the ball. Did they strengthen the batting in Sydney? Reddy aggregated four runs in two innings; Jadeja 39 in two knocks; Sundar 26 in two innings, for an aggregate of 69 runs by three batsmen for six dismissals.

In Sydney, for instance, it was evident that the pitch was green, hard, and bouncy. The logical pick would have been one additional quick rather than two spinners (who, as it turned out, bowled a grand total of just four overs in the entire game); such a selection was even more urgent because the management knew, going in, that Bumrah was exhausted after his exertions in the fourth Test at Melbourne. 

Absent that extra quick, India in the second innings, when defending a small target of 162, was forced to bowl Siraj and Krishna for 24 of the 27 overs Australia took to hunt down the target; after sharp first spells, both quicks ran out of gas and the home side ran away with the game.

Post-series analysis made much of Bumrah's workload. Statistics tell a story: Bumrah, in nine innings, bowled 151.2 overs for his 39 wickets. Against that, Aussie skipper Pat Cummins bowled 167.2 overs in ten innings for his 32 wickets. The difference? For Australia, Mitchell Starc bowled 153.2 overs, two more than Bumrah; third quick Scott Boland, who only played three Tests, bowled 101.4 overs, and lone spinner Nathan Lyon bowled 122.4 overs. In other words, the four frontline bowlers shared the workload.

Workload is analyzed not merely by the number of overs bowled by an individual, but by the support, or lack of it, at the other. India's three all-rounders bowled a combined total of 144 overs in 10 innings, seven overs less than Bumrah bowled in nine innings on his lonesome.

If such lop-sided selection was a one-time aberration, it could be ignored as just one of those things. But for the duration of this WTC cycle, Team India has struggled with the knowledge that its batting is under par and that the two stars are underperforming. This has resulted in misguided attempts to lengthen -- though not necessarily strengthen -- the batting lineup, and that in turn means India's attack is Bumrah and then daylight. You don't win Test matches that way.

In the next championship cycle, India will play 18 Tests, beginning with five away Tests against England beginning June. All indications are that India will carry its batting and bowling infirmities into the upcoming WTC cycle -- and that cues up the third, and last, point worth making:

Dyspepsia In The Dressing Room: The last time off-field issues made it to front page headlines was back in June 2017, when then captain Virat Kohli and a cabal of stars forced coach Anil Kumble to resign after just a year in office. Kohli cited irreconcilable differences, and said Kumble's style of discipline was "intimidating". In other words, a no-nonsense coach was anathema to India's pampered stars.

The tenures of Kumble's successors, Ravi Shastri and Rahul Dravid, were marked not merely by success but by an absence of public squabbles. The tour of Australia signalled the end of that quiet period and brought endemic issues back into the public spotlight.

It began with the resignation of Ravichandran Ashwin, who at the time was ranked the number five bowler in Test cricket behind Bumrah, Cummins, Kagiso Rabada and Josh Hazelwood. For all that he attempted to put a polite face on it, it is an open secret -- as I wrote in the previous edition of this column -- that Ashwin felt unwanted, even slighted, by the coach and the team management, and that there was no clear communication about his future. And it is not just Ashwin -- reliable reports out of Australia indicate that the fringe players in the squad had spoken to reporters, asking if they had any indication from the captain or coach about their prospects. 

It all came to a head before the fifth Test in Sydney. First, a series of planted stories suggested that coach Gautam Gambhir had, after India's collapse in the fourth Test in Melbourne, read the riot act in the dressing room. The stories were intended to undercut possible questioning of a tenure marked by successive failures and to show that the coach was fully in control.

On the eve of the fifth Test it was Gambhir, not captain Rohit Sharma, who addressed the pre-match media conference and claimed, in bizarre fashion, that a decision on whether Sharma would play or not depended on the pitch. 

Since when is the captain's position dependent on the nature of the wicket?

In a tit-for-tat move, Rohit Sharma spoke to two anchors during the lunch hour on day two of the Sydney Test -- an interaction carefully crafted to drive home the message that he had "stepped down" voluntarily owing to his own bad form and that neither the coach nor the pitch had anything to do with the decision.

Sharma, in that interaction, also took a dig at his teammates when he said that too many batsmen were out of form and not producing runs. 

The key, though, lies in Sharma's closing line: "I am not going anywhere," he said, indicating that he is not ready to quit the captaincy, and his position in the Test and one-day side, any time soon.

The India team to tour England for the five-Test series will be picked in early June. Chances are, both Sharma and Kohli will be in the squad. The arguments that will be advanced are predictable: In Sharma's case, "We need his experience", and in Kohli's case, "He is too good a batsman to remain out of form" — an argument that ignores that Kohli's lean patch has extended over four seasons now.

There is no red ball cricket between now and then for either player to return to a measure of form, which means that India will begin the next championship cycle with out-of-form stars, with supporting players uncertain of their place in the side, with an under-par batting lineup, with dissensions in the dressing room, and with a team carrying the same baggage that saw them knocked out of the final of this World Test Championship.

My best guess is that history will repeat. Having played out as tragedy in this championship cycle, it will play out as farce in the next.

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