A different curveball for Rohit | Cricket

For all the platitudes India have earned as an indomitable force at home, how they failed to pre-empt their usual vanquishers—left-arm spin and a variant of the sweep shot—at Hyderabad is nothing short of perplexing. On the first day, England looked out of depth, out of ideas and probably a bowler short.

And yet by the final day, on a surface that had blamelessly slowed down without compromising on turn, the same England looked more in sync for victory. This, despite India carving a 190-run lead, and then reducing England to 163/5 in the second innings. How did it go all downhill from there?

Ravindra Jadeja and Axar Patel going off the boil together is rare. But this is also an England side buoyed by a mindset that made it attack 54% of the balls bowled to them—highest for any team in India since records were first made available in 2006. Thing is, Rohit Sharma believes his bowlers didn’t err.

“When you finish the day, you analyse—what went well, what didn’t go well, and things like that. We went back and saw things; we spoke about (them) and I thought the bowlers executed the plan really well,” Sharma had said. If this is interpreted as letting England realise a sustainable way of dealing with India’s spinners, isn’t the onus on Sharma to try something different?

Here’s Sharma elaborating on it from a batter’s perspective at Nagpur (against Australia) last year, after scoring his maiden hundred as captain: “You can’t let the bowler bowl six balls on the spot. You have got to try and do something different, and that something different can be your way of doing it, whether it’s stepping down the ground, sweeping, reverse sweeping, going over the top…”

As a bowling captain however, Sharma’s decisions felt rather self-defeating. It almost seemed he was relying too much on his spinners’ home track record instead of asking them to bowl wider lines and putting the onus back on England to leave the crease, his field settings ending up facilitating those sweeps and reverse sweeps that delivered hope to England.

Sharma is barely into his third year of captaincy, but more significantly this is a format that has embraced him only as recently as in 2019. With that backdrop, defeat in the World Test Championship final, at Centurion, bookended by losses at Indore (to Australia) last year and now at Hyderabad, are bound to prompt a few murmurs. That both home defeats—nine wickets at Indore, 28 runs here—came against teams led by highly instinctive captains like Steve Smith and Ben Stokes also dig up the question if Sharma is prone to playing catch-up.

He at least had Virat Kohli during the 2023 home series against Australia. Without Kohli to begin with, and now Jadeja and KL Rahul ruled out, bigger conundrums await Sharma at Visakhapatnam even before the first ball is bowled.

Kuldeep Yadav becomes a frontrunner for that third spinner slot though it will significantly weaken India’s batting. Sarfaraz Khan joining the squad ahead of this Test is a sign India may want to blood him, but there could be a temptation to accommodate Rajat Patidar and drop Siraj who bowled all of 11 overs in the first Test.

All this of course hinges on the idea of promoting Shreyas Iyer to No 4 and hoping it would work because it’s been six Tests now, he hasn’t hit a fifty. More disconcerting was the manner of his second-innings dismissal, pushing at Joe Root’s off-break with hard hands when India were desperately in need of a partnership. A misfiring Shubman Gill at the top, a lacklustre Iyer in the middle with probably one or two debutants—piecing together this batting line-up becomes all the more challenging now. Sharma is also in charge of this, probably more personally than he has ever been in the past.

That this job description is diagonally opposite to what Sharma saddled himself with in white ball cricket shouldn’t be lost upon him. Quick starts won’t matter in this format as much as consolidation and a big innings, which is becoming paramount in the grander scheme of equaling this Test series. This means channelling his focus into spending more time at the crease, displaying more surefootedness against a spin attack that is still inexperienced despite their Hyderabad high, and hoping to employ the same tactic when England take stance. Powerless with the bat, bereft of ideas while bowling, this doesn’t feel like India at home. To change that, Sharma needs to take the reins of this series in every possible way he is capable of.

All-spin attack for England?

Meanwhile, England head coach Brendon McCullum has not ruled out the possibility of his team playing four spinners in Visakhapatnam.

“[Bashir], again like Tom Hartley, has little first-class experience but we thought his skill could help us in here,” said McCullum on SENZ Radio. The guys gave him a huge cheer and he witnessed the Test win. He also comes into calculations for the next Test match. If the wickets continue to spin as much as what we saw in the first Test as the series goes on, look, we won’t be afraid to play all spinners, or a balance of what we’ve got.”