Gautam Gambhir’s team buried India’s proud home record without a fight

Cricket

The 2-0 series loss to South Africa at home, after the 3-0 whitewash against New Zealand, exposes Indian team 's management confused state of mind and also lack of application by a batting unit that lacks Test temperament.

Beating India in India in Test cricket used to be a career goal, a dream for most overseas teams. The ‘final frontier’ as the Australian great Baggy Green-er Steve Waugh termed it. Even he never managed to breach the fortress. These days, that dream is selling free, along with flight tickets to India. First New Zealand with a 3-0 whitewash, without their talisman Kane Williamson, and now South Africa, without their lodestar Kagiso Rabada. And Gautam Gambhir has been the coach who has watched Rome burn on both occasions.

Seldom has a long-held dominant home record been surrendered so meekly. Even West Indies’s Test embers at home flickered briefly after the retirement of Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. Australia are still hanging on to theirs and hence India’s two triumphs there are treasured. South Africa too denied India even after AB de Villiers, Hashim Amla and Dale Steyn retired. Losing isn’t a crime, but India have given up the ghost, whimpering out without a fight. It says much that they started the final day of the Guwahati Test with the announcement that drawing is like winning. But lose they did in the second Test, like they did in the first, this time by a margin of 408 runs.

India’s thought process has been strikingly muddled. On what basis, especially after the debacles against New Zealand, did Gambhir think a scrambled omelet of a pitch at Eden Gardens with four spinners could work for him? A look at his own dressing room would have revealed the batsmen’s inability to cope.

The former coach Rahul Dravid used to obsess about the pitches. But he knew what tracks suited his team – that’s how India rebounded in the home Test series against England after the first Test loss, with as inexperienced a middle order as it’s now. Gambhir inexplicably hasn’t yet shown that he knows what pitch suits his boys. It’s as if he had a personal wish to try playing with four spinners on a Kolkata akhada and see what happens.

When Axar Patel, second best batsman of that Test after Temba Bavuma, nearly dragged India to a heist, Gambhir dropped him for the second Test to draft in Nitish Reddy. As has been detailed in this newspaper, Reddy’s potency with the ball has been severely depleted due to frequent injuries. And yet every time, he comes back without a solid run in domestic cricket.

That rule isn’t just for Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli to avoid rustiness, it’s a route for all these youngsters to learn their art too and get some miles in. The team management has been talking up Sai Sudharsan’s skills against spin that the selectors have observed in domestic cricket, and so what do they do? Drop him from the Kolkata Test.