The Dream Is Collapsing

Can You Hear The Music?

India, Australia, Ahmedabad, 2023. No, not that game. The other one, the Test match eight months prior.

Narendra Modi and Australian PM Anthony Albanese took a ride around the stadium on a giant sandal, the game was a snoozefest, but the background score of the lead-up is worth listening to again.

This was the fourth and final Test of the series, with India leading 2-1. In the previous game, at Indore, two rookie spinners twisted the experienced Indian batters into knots and won the match for Australia. In Delhi the week before that, India found themselves seven down for 139, until Axar Patel and Ravichandran Ashwin salvaged their pride. Rewind a few more months to Mirpur, and Bangladesh had India gasping at 74-7.

So, after the Indore implosion, word went out to the curators at Ahmedabad to prepare the most docile pitch known to mankind. The series was at stake, and 2-1 would be a well-earned win. The curators delivered a surface so benign it made corporate cricket look thrilling. You could spread a picnic blanket on it, perhaps serve tea. Modi-Albanese’s ride and Modi being given a picture of himself at a stadium named after him were the most interesting things to happen in those five days.

By the last day, India were so bored that they gave the ball to Cheteshwar Pujara, and Australia were so bored that they didn’t bother hitting him. The illusion of a possible result had long evaporated. Eventually, the players shook hands and put everyone out of their misery. The score stayed 2-1 to India, Rohit Sharma lifted the trophy, Hallelujah.

But, what about the pitch? Was the Indian team management spooked silly by the two debutant spinners? Not entirely. They were spooked by Indore and Delhi and Mirpur. And they knew that these weren’t freakish accidents. Asking a pitch to be made a certain way is a completely legitimate practice, but this was a silent confession. 

It was the first thread coming loose from India’s cloak of invincibility in home conditions. Australia had just shown that India could be pushed to the wall. 

And it was a bit of a rude shock. India have historically been one of the strongest home teams in men’s Test cricket. Sample this: over the last fifty years, India have played 72 series at home, winning 49 and losing only 9 - numbers that speak of both their dominance and the suffocation visiting teams felt in these conditions. 

In the last decade, they have taken this domination to a new plane. This Australia series was the 16th consecutive home series win for India - a streak that started in 2013. They would win two more. It is, by some distance, the longest stretch of home dominance in history.

They’d welcomed them all: Australia, New Zealand, England thrice each; South Africa twice. Strong teams, proud teams, reduced to wondering if matches would last beyond the fourth afternoon. In 2019, Faf du Plessis, South Africa’s iron-willed captain, brought his deputy to the toss like a puppy bringing a soft toy to the vet. “India bat first,” he’d said one evening, his voice carrying the weariness of the beaten, “score 500ish, declare in the dark, take a couple of wickets, and we're already so far behind.”

This run of eighteen consecutive series wins deserves a place on Test cricket’s podium, maybe only below the West Indies going unbeaten, everywhere, between 1980 and 1995. And that West Indies team was probably the greatest ever to have played Test cricket. Our backs straighten when we speak of them. Six players from that team have knighthoods.

All good streaks meet abrupt ends. Defeat, unfortunately, never comes with the comfort of a lullaby.

When the West Indies’ unbeaten streak finally ended against Australia in 1995, at home no less, the team that had to oversee the transfer of cricket’s power baton did not have the kings from the golden era. Viv Richards, Malcolm Marshall, and Desmond Haynes were the last ones out of the door, and they had long retired. Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh were around, well in their peaks, but they were young when the old guard gave way. Brian Lara had just become Brian Lara. So, in a way, it was easier to digest the fall. 

Which is not something one can say about India’s 0-3 walloping at the hands of New Zealand last month.

Credit: NDTV

New Zealand, who hadn’t won a Test match in India since 1988, dismantled a team that had Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, and Jasprit Bumrah. And dismantled, how. They undid India in seaming conditions at Bangalore, fairly even conditions at Pune, and a biting turner in Mumbai. Three venues, three languages, three lessons in humility.

In six completed batting innings, India crossed 300 only once. There was a 46 all out, a 156 all out, and a 121 all out. The bowlers fought, but you can’t win a war with half an army. Even so, by the final Test, Ashwin and Jadeja, who should know how to work every tuft of grass on these grounds, were getting outbowled and outthought by one spinner who doesn’t play half of his team’s Tests, another spinner who doesn’t play any red-ball cricket, and one part-time spinner who bowls in goggles, is actually a batter, and picked up wicketkeeping and spin-bowling just so to keep himself occupied at net sessions.

New Zealand showed that India can not just be beaten at home, they can be thrashed. When you make a habit of flying so high that you can kiss the clouds and hum with the birds, the taste of dirt is particularly bitter.

Is this the death knell for a great cricket team, the fall of a kingdom, so to speak? As of the publication of this essay, no, but in another ten months, the answer may be different.

In 2024 alone, India beat a good England side 4-1 at home, drew a series on treacherous South African tracks, and took apart Bangladesh 2-0. Even in Bangalore, after being knocked over for 46 in the first innings, India somehow found themselves in a position where they had the New Zealand captain sweating bullets.

This is a good team. They aren’t loose or casual like a couple of senior journalists have suggested in a completely predictable reaction to a bad result. The fall hurts because they reached staggering heights, the kind impossible without exceptional skill and high levels of professionalism.

But there is no doubt that this result is a bullet to the gut, and the horizon doesn’t look like the soft orange sunset of a Clint Eastwood western.

India’s next 10 Tests are in Australia and England, starting late-November. Rohit Sharma is apparently missing the first, maybe even a couple, for the birth of his child; Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sarfaraz Khan, and Dhruv Jurel will be on their Australian baptism; Virat Kohli averages a lowly 31 in Test cricket over the last five years; and Mohammed Shami will be watching from home.

Oh, and by the way, KL Rahul and Abhimanyu Easwaran, the two potential fill-ins for Rohit, warmed up for the series by playing a couple of games against Australia-A this week. Their scores - 4, 10, 7, 12, 0, 17 - look like binary code to communicate ‘helpless’.

Both looked so out of place against the moving Kookaburra ball, it was a bit alarming to watch. The once-flourishing India-A programme, which served up international quality cricketers on a plate, gave us heroes that won Test matches in Australia, is now in a state of torpor, like an old generator that is reignited only sporadically. And the repercussions are going to show when India search for solutions in foreign lands.

Then there is that one other thing. I tried calling up the national storage facility for some sugar to coat this with, but they called short.

Virat and Jadeja are 36, Rohit is 37, and Ashwin 38. This is the core, the group that has to lead the way in a gruelling away season. The 36 of today looks very, very different from the 36 of, say, even five or ten years back. Virat and Jadeja can run a single in about as much time as it takes you to say ‘toothpaste’, Rohit is still sharp at first slip and mid-on, and Ashwin can bowl from sunrise to sunset.

But, at Test cricket's razor edge, it’s not about the visible decline - it’s about those invisible milliseconds lost in reading length, those few missing revolutions on the off-break. Natural progression, they call it. But when a season yields 133 runs in 10 innings, when your 500-wicket wizard gets outbowled by part-timers on home soil, nature feels decisively cruel.

“Class may be permanent and form temporary, as the oft-quoted cliché goes — but the fact is that form is what puts runs on the board on the day” - Prem Panicker, in his excellent piece here.

We’ve seen these colours before. Coincidentally, the last time India won a World Cup, they took a similar journey in the months after: four Tests in England followed by four in Australia. They returned with a scorecard of 0-4, 0-4. In that tour to England, India did not win a single game across all three formats.

Those tours were to become the final acts of Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman’s Test careers. By another year, Virender Sehwag was gone too. By one more, Zaheer Khan.

You’ve got to feel for the selectors. When cricketers of this calibre decline, it is near impossible to know when exactly to have the tough conversation. Pull the trigger too early and you’ve shoved out a genius, pull it too late and you’ve let a passenger occupy a seat for too long.

This is still without considering the public outcry if somebody inside the BCCI HQ even suggests that stars like Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma might need a longer pause in front of the mirror. Indian cricket’s awkwardness with fading superstars is a tale as old as time itself. Sachin Tendulkar and Kapil Dev extended their careers well after their best-by dates, and no one dared question them.

That said, most selectors are also ex-international cricketers. Ajit Agarkar, the current chief selector of the men’s team, has shared dressing rooms with Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting, Rahul Dravid, and Anil Kumble. He knows what greatness looks like, that it doesn’t fade like ordinary light.

The selectors will be betting on the final embers of that greatness, and the thousands of hours of muscle memory, to carry the team through what is almost certainly going to be a tough period. It is not an unreasonable expectation.

But it is one grounded on hope. Unless backed by evidence, hope, against Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins, and Josh Hazlewood, is as useful as a bat made of thermocol.

The last two tours to Australia coincided with the peak of this great team. This one has a different colour, a different sound. The background score to India’s arrival at Perth will be a dronish din, the growl you hear when everything above 150 Hz is cut off from a long, pulsing bass note. It is the kind of sound you associate with darkness, maybe a cemetery.

The team will be fine again. The next generation may not be fully ready right now, but they will be, soon enough. In the meantime, fasten your seatbelts and close your tray tables. There is a lot of turbulence ahead.