India is back home and the beleaguered batsmen will finally heave a sigh of relief. No more outlandish movement for the fast bowlers, no pace or crazy bounce. The batsmen will look forward to getting stuck in and scoring some big runs. If Virat Kohli is feeling motivated enough, we might even see a few records fall in the series. The spinners will run through the opposition. The fast bowlers will get plenty of rest. All of that is expected.
But if the Indian team management is thinking long term, the series should not have typical home conditions. Instead, keeping one eye on the Australia tour, they need to go out of their way and ask for pitches with bounce and pace. There are two major reasons to do this:
1. These are the conditions that they are likely to encounter in Australia. Ravi Shastri has asked for an additional tour game before the series in Australia and while that is a good move, more practice in similar conditions will only help India’s preparations. Because, let’s be frank – the series against West Indies has no context. It does not matter.
2. More importantly, these are conditions that will allow India to judge the true class of the replacement openers (Prithvi Shaw and Mayank Agarwal). There is no point in taking them all the way to Australia only to find that the bounce and pace worry them no end. If there is a way of finding how well they cope with these alien conditions, then shouldn’t the management try it out now.
The Indian team should trust themselves to beat West Indies regardless of the conditions and even without their two best pacemen — Jasprit Bumrah and Bhuvneshwar Kumar.
If not against West Indies, then who?
Since 2012, the West Indies have beaten only New Zealand, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe in a Test series. They defeated New Zealand in 2012 and not again after that and before that you have to go back to 2008-09 to find a series where they beat England at home to win the Wisden Trophy. So essentially in a decade, the only sides West Indies have beaten in Test cricket are Bangladesh (4 times), Zimbabwe (2), New Zealand and England.
No disrespect to the West Indies side but they haven’t played quality Test cricket for a while now and India would not fear them at any level. So even as India get ready to face them in ‘home’ conditions, one wonders whether we really need the ‘home’ conditions when the need of the hour is something very different.
India captain Virat Kohli has often said that India wants to embrace being in difficult conditions. And sometimes that means challenging yourself to take the difficult route. In spin-friendly conditions, India will dominate. They have better spinners and their batsmen are more used to the conditions.
But change this around and produce tracks with bounce and pace for the series and we’ll suddenly see the situation morph into one that the team can use as an opportunity to learn more about their batting technique and measures that they can take to succeed.
During the series against Sri Lanka ahead of the South Africa tour, the team management had asked for green tops due to a paucity of time. But is there any harm in doing that for this series as well?
Need to walk the talk
The Test in Kolkata gave us all a glimpse of how much Indian batsmen struggle against seam and swing. The skies were grey, the pitch was green and the Indians were all at sea against Suranga Lakmal’s swing bowling. They then dismissed it, called it an aberration of sorts but in hindsight, we all know it wasn’t.
“Obviously,” KL Rahul had said after the game, “it’s very clear that we’re preparing for the next two years that we’re going to travel abroad and play a lot of cricket overseas, and we are going to find wickets like this, and it is going to be challenging for all of us, so we wanted to prepare in that way.”
There is talk that the Indian management has already asked for pitches with pace and bounce but it will all boil down now to curators seeing the bigger picture too.
Australia’s batting may be at its weakest given that Steve Smith and David Warner will still be missing due to the ban when India go there later in the year. But its bowling has a touch of quality about it. Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon are world-class performers.
As we saw in England and in South Africa, India’s bowling has adapted and even flourished in these conditions but the onus will be on the batsmen to support them. For India to win, there has to be more to the batting than Kohli and pitches with bounce and pace during the series against West Indies will at least help India separate the wheat from the chaff.